On 2 April, Christoph Wolff, professor emeritus at Harvard University and a prominent researcher of the music of Bach and Mozart, will be in Tallinn at the invitation of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT) and the Arvo Pärt Centre. At 3PM, he will give a public lecture “News about J. S. Bach’s Life and Works: Recent Advances in Bach Scholarship” in the Chamber Hall of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, followed by a discussion on Bach’s performance art, led by Maksim Štšura, lecturer in Lecturer in Piano and Instrumental Chamber Music.

Christoph Wolff (b. 1940), Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, is renowned as one of the foremost scholars of Bach and Mozart. He studied musicology and church music in Berlin, Freiburg, and Erlangen, earning a performance diploma in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966 with a dissertation on Bach’s late style. Throughout his career, he has taught in Erlangen, Toronto, New York, and Princeton. In 1976, he was appointed Professor of Music at Harvard University and has also been active at the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School in New York. From 2001 to 2013, he served as president and director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig and is an honorary member of numerous academic societies and universities.

Many of Wolff’s studies have received the highest honours in the field. He is the author of one of the most acclaimed Bach monographs, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into nine languages. His latest book, Bach’s Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (2020), further explores the composer’s legacy.