Both biographers mention this almost in passing. Probably the gravest insult to this great genius in his lifetime was his being thrown in jail and given a dishonorable discharge for insisting on leaving his employment in Weimar in 1717. Neither displays much of a sense of the dramatic. Geck prefaces his account of Bach's life with an account of earlier works about Bach: Forkel, Spitta, Schweitzer.
Wolff begins with an account of an insult to Bach's status as a complete musician by one of his contemporaries. He even mentions, but does not define, one term he considers essential to the modern musicologist but which appeared only once in theoretical musical writing by Bach's time he checked! Geck's discussion of Bach's musical style will surely send the reader unfamiliar with baroque style to a musical dictionaries. Geck gives arguments from data in a manner more of interest to fellow scholars than the generally educated reader, and he perhaps assumes more knowledge on the part of the reader than does Wolff. Wolff's was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has much more information about Bach's pre-Leipzig travels and career I think he makes Bach come to life somewhat better than Geck's, which is written in more of an academic style. If your patience is more limited than that, I would recommend the Wolff over the Geck, in spite of Mazur's endorsement. If you take the time to read them both you can learn pretty much everything that is currently known about Bach's life. 3-273) and a discussion of the music, genre by genre. Geck's book is divided into a biographical half (pp. He intends to complete a second volume, strictly about Bach's music. Wolff's is a biography only, though sometimes he cannot help himself and writes about the music as music. These are both learned works, by distinguished German scholars.
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