The six concertos that Johann Sebastian Bach presented to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, in 1721 are among his most beloved works. First termed the "Brandenburg Concertos" by Philipp Spitta in his monumental nineteenth-century Bach biography, they have become household names. To many, they are the essence of Bach's music: irrepressibly upbeat, animatedly vibrant, and astonishingly contrapuntal. Together with Handel's Messiah and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, they represent the very heart of the Baroque repertory. In this new and lively account, leading musicologist George B. Stauffer takes the reader into the world of the Brandenburg Concertos. He begins by tracing the emergence of the instrumental concerto in Italy toward the end of the seventeenth century before describing Bach's compositional epiphany upon discovering the concertos of Antonio Vivaldi around 1713, an encounter that resulted in the Brandenburg project eight years later. Stauffer then delves into the music it
