Born and educated in Germany, Christoph Wolff studied organ and historical keyboard instruments, musicology, and art history at the Universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and the Music Academy of Freiburg, receiving a performance diploma in 1963 and a PhD in 1966. Wolff taught the history of music at Erlangen, Toronto, Princeton, and Columbia Universities before joining the Harvard faculty, in 1976, as Professor of Music. He has published major studies on Mozart as well as Johann Sebastian Bach, and he rediscovered the vast archives of the Berlin Sing-Akademie in Kiev, which are the basis of his research into music and early bourgeois culture in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Berlin. His books include Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (1991), Mozart’s Requiem (1994), The New Bach Reader (1998), and Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2001) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Wolff was awarded the Royal Academy of Music/Kohn Foundation Bach Prize in 2006.

Photo: Mike Minehan