Christoph Johannes Wolff

Christoph Wolff is a music historian and Adams University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University. His primary research interests extend to the music from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, especially to Bach and Mozart studies. Publications include Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (1991), Mozart’s Requiem (1994), The New Bach Reader (1998), Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (1999; ed. with R. Brinkmann), Music of My Future. The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio (2001; ed. with R. Brinkmann), The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook (2012; with M. Zepf), and Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune. Serving the Emperor, 1788–1791(2012). His book Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000), which has been translated into eleven languages, was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and received the 2001 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society in recognition of the most distinguished book in musicology published during the previous year. His most recent book is Bach’s Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (2020). Professor Wolff taught at the University of Erlangen (1963–68), the University of Toronto (1968-70), Columbia (1970–76) and Princeton Universities (1973 and 1975) before joining the Harvard faculty in 1976. At Harvard he was Chair of the Department of Music (1980–88, 1990–91), Acting Director of the University Library (1991–92), Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1992–2000), and Curator of the Isham Memorial Library (1976–2012). He was on the Graduate Faculty of the Juilliard School (2010–2018) and served as President and Director of the Bach-Archiv Leipzig (2001–13) and President of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (2004–13). An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Saxon Academy of Sciences at Leipzig, and the Akademie für Mozart-Forschung in Salzburg (which he chaired 1996–2006), he holds honorary professorships at the University of Freiburg and the National Music Academy ‘Mykola Lysenko’ in Lviv (Ukraine). A recipient of several honorary degrees, he was awarded the Dent Medal of the International Musicological Society (1978) the Humboldt Research Prize (1996), the Bach Prize of the Royal Academy of Music (2006) and the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig (2021), and he holds honorary memberships in the American Musicological Society, the German and American Bach Societies, and the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg; in 2015 he was elected to the Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. He currently serves on the Board of the Packard Humanities Institute, Los Altos, CA.