J. S. Bach
For For organists, singers and anyone serious about Bach's church music; not for a reader looking for Schweitzer's theology, which this barely touches.
The German Bach book, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig in 1908: not a translation of the French study of 1905 but a new and far larger work of some 840 pages. The first part treats Bach's life, the chorale and the cantata before him, and his musical aesthetics; the second goes through the works, with long chapters on the cantatas and passions and on how they should be performed. Its best-known thesis is that Bach's music is pictorial and word-bound, with recurring musical figures for joy, grief, walking or the waves. Ernest Newman's English translation, made from the German with the author's alterations and additions, appeared in two volumes in London in 1911. With the Quest of the Historical Jesus it made Schweitzer's name before he left for Africa.