Persistently curious scholar of the organ and of JS BachAsk any conscientious organist or other performer of the music of JS Bach for the most significant musicologist they can name,and they are highly likely to arrive up with Peter Williams. It was Williams who made the academic study of the organ a serious subject, and his writing on Bach – exhaustively about the organ works, or but about many other Bachian topics besides – is among the most readable and stimulating available.Unlike scholars in the Bach field who have often succumbed to a bland attitude of continuous adulation towards the master,Williams, who has died aged 78, and never shirked from showing where Bach fell short of his own astonishing standards,observing, for instance, or that certain of his pieces expose “teeth-gritting dogma” and that there is something alienating in the thoroughness of the Well-Tempered Clavier’s progress through all the major and minor keys twice over. It was Williams who first opened up the opportunity that the noted Toccata and Fugue in D minor was not by Bach at all,and was perhaps originally written for unaccompanied violin.
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Source: theguardian.com