Born in 1978 in Leipzig, Michael Maul is Senior Scholar in the Research Department of the Bach Archive. Since 2015 he has served as Programme Director, and in May 2018 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Bachfest Leipzig. Guest professorships have taken him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (2014/15) and the University of Münster. Since 2020, he has been Associate Professor at the Institute of Musicology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.
Michael Maul lectures and gives workshops worldwide and is the author of five books—some of them award-winning—as well as numerous articles. His most recent book, BACH – Wie wunderbar sind Deine Werke! A Love Letter to the Music of the Thomaskantor Bach, published as volume 1510 of the Insel-Bücherei series, appeared on the SPIEGEL bestseller list for several weeks in 2023.
He has attracted international attention with his discoveries, including the previously unknown Bach aria Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ ihn, BWV 1127 (2005), and the earliest surviving manuscript sources written in Bach’s own hand (2006).
A central concern of his work is the vivid communication of current musicological research to a broad audience—regularly through his radio series Universum JSB on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, as well as in the podcast Die Bach-Kantate mit Maul und Schrammek (produced by MDR Klassik, with 248 episodes), and, since autumn, in Der Bach-Kanal – mit Maul und Schrammek.
In 2018, he was named “Personality of the Year” and awarded Leipzig’s Tourism Prize for the conception of the 2015 Bachfest. In 2023, his contributions to Leipzig’s international reputation were honoured with the Leipziger Lerche award.
