J. S. Bach, the Musician-Poet
For For musicians and readers of French who want Schweitzer's first study of Bach; most English readers will want the larger German book in Newman's translation instead.
Schweitzer's first book on Bach, written in French at the suggestion of his teacher Charles-Marie Widor, who supplied the preface, and published by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in 1905 with the collaboration of Hubert Gillot. Its argument is in the title: Bach was a poet and painter in sound, whose music illustrates the words and images of the texts he set, and the cantatas and chorale preludes can only be performed rightly when that pictorial language is understood. The book was some 455 pages; when Schweitzer came to prepare a German edition he did not translate it but wrote a new and much longer book, J. S. Bach (1908), which is catalogued here as a separate work.