What are the skills currently required of an eighteenth-century music scholar? Where the century of Bach and Mozart once represented the pinnacle of the German philological enterprise, with its mandatory archive stints and scribal identifications, the new Anglo-American cultural-history agenda instead demands fluency in media studies, early modern optics or affect theory. In this environment of increasingly variegated expertise, deciphering primary source materials on different, more or less music-related topics has become at once more necessary and more niche as a pursuit. Although the process is aided by the increasing availability of such texts in digital repositories, most of these original treatises can remain difficult to access, owing to language barriers, presentation in old typefaces, convoluted writing styles and abstruse references. Joyce L. Irwin's translation of two eighteenth-century German Lutheran music treatises does a great service, therefore, in facilitating students’ engagement with a particular set of ideas and debates in their original formulation. The volume is published in the series Contextual Bach Studies (edited by Robin Leaver), but anyone interested in early eighteenth-century German musical and more broadly intellectual life will find aspects of these writings illuminating.
The two modest-sized works tackled by Irwin are Johann Mattheson's Behauptung der himmlischen Musik of 1747 and the Deutliche Beweis-Gründe / Worauf der rechte Brauch der Music, beydes in den Kirchen / als ausser denselben / beruhet by Christoph Raupach, published with a preface by Mattheson in 1717. Why these two texts? As Irwin disarmingly admits in her Preface, she was attracted primarily by that enticing Lutheran vision of a glorious heavenly music that never ceases. Perhaps it could be said that the overall title of the book is somewhat misleading, since Raupach's treatise only deals with the idea of heavenly music in its final chapter. What Raupach's text does offer overall, however, is a useful and concise exposition of the orthodox Lutheran conception of music as it had consolidated over the course of the seventeenth century. Irwin's substantial Preface provides a helpful summary of some of the key texts and debates that fed into Raupach's classic presentation, which upholds the notion of music as both a gift of God and a force for believers’ bodily and spiritual well-being.
Mattheson's volume, Irwin notes, is interesting partly for adjusting our inherited image of him as a progressive writer in line with emerging Enlightenment ideals. His much-cited taxonomies of early eighteenth-century musical styles and genres seem to show him as an up-to-date thinker in tune with the latest artistic fashions, quick to ridicule his contemporary Bach for his outmoded manner of text-setting. Mattheson's fascination with the music of this world was underpinned, however, by a deep concern for the bigger questions about faith and the afterlife as they were debated in the increasingly sceptical climate of his time. His thoroughly conservative stance, Irwin's Preface suggests, puts Mattheson fundamentally at odds with the rational mindset of the Enlightenment. Yet while it is true that Mattheson's defence of the idea of heavenly music insists on a mode of scriptural reasoning grounded in the Bible as a source of undisputed truth, he is ready to engage with a range of detailed scientific points concerning the actual conditions of life in the New Jerusalem: establishing whether there would be air, for instance, and of what sort; or whether the bread, butter and cake consumed by the angels was made of real, material stuff. If Mattheson ends up resorting to biblical proof for his answers, he clearly considered this an entirely ‘rational’ procedure. The ‘purified reason’ invoked in the title of his first chapter was certainly not of the Kantian sort, and he was obviously afraid of the consequences of those ‘long strides towards godlessness’ (81) that the more radical empiricists of his time were taking. At certain points he resorts to outright pleading, for instance when declaring that even if authority could and should be questioned, surely at least Luther's and King David's testimony might go unchallenged. But what Mattheson's arguments – reasonable or not – show most compellingly, perhaps, is that ‘reason’ in mid-eighteenth-century German discourse was still a shifting, multivalent category, difficult to capture under a general label of ‘Enlightenment’. Perhaps, then, instead of attesting to a surprising disjunction in Mattheson's thought, his position should urge us to refine and adjust our understanding of what this early German Enlightenment moment entailed in its many variegated formulations – in line, for instance, with Stefanie Buchenau's nuanced rethinking of aesthetic theories in the period (The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)).
Both Raupach's and Mattheson's texts demonstrate, moreover, that these broader theological issues were not solely a matter of intellectual rumination, but informed musical practice and everyday religious life on numerous levels. We find Mattheson discussing the embarrassment felt by many about raising their voices to join in communal hymn singing, for instance, or the problematic practice of halting the performance of figural music for a year after the death of a ruler, or the issue of private and government funding to ensure the adequate provision of church music in this life. Raupach's retelling of various anecdotes concerning the miraculous powers of music, if taken seriously, provide further fascinating glimpses into specific contemporary beliefs and affairs. Other sections may perhaps turn out to be less rewarding for present-day readers, such as Mattheson's extended exposition (paragraphs 75–150) of the different terms used in the psalm texts for vocal or instrumental musicking: singing, praising, exulting, shouting with joy, lauding, proclaiming, thanksgiving and so on.
Some of these more arcane deliberations are hard enough to think through in the translated English version, without having to grapple with the twists and quirks of the original German prose. If Irwin's opening summary of Mattheson's treatise does not always come across as entirely cogent, this is hardly her fault, given the rather disorganized nature of a text that seems to become more rambling as it unfolds, taking haphazard stabs at different adversaries and counterarguments. Raupach's text is in many ways easier to absorb, but Mattheson's polemical introduction to the latter is perhaps the least readable portion of the whole book, replete with laboured wordplay and allusions: Diogenes’ lantern, a ‘Reventher's music’, Antaeus, the Titan who made human hearts from clay, the Dic cur hic (a proverb reminding people of their purpose in life) and so on. Irwin does an excellent job following up all the references, with full information (where available) provided in the endnotes. One could no doubt quibble with certain details of the translations: ‘Kirchenhimmel’ surely referred to a painted church vault rather than a ‘churchly heaven’ (78); ‘künstlich’ in opposition to ‘natürlich’ should probably be rendered as ‘artificial’ or ‘artful’, rather than ‘artistic’ (41); and a couple of the more convoluted German sentence constructions seem to be slightly misconstrued (for instance page 105, paragraph 68, first sentence). In certain places, original formulations could have been clarified by adopting a somewhat freer style of translation: ‘by the fruits of their notes’ might instead read ‘by the works they produce’ (talking about those musicians who hold to a mathematical, non-sensual understanding of music); ‘to blacken the name of the true first ice-breakers’ might be rendered more legibly as ‘to defame the first music theorists’ (104). The editor's opening promise that the bold-face emphases in the original texts would be retained is not consistently followed through. But overall, Irwin's assiduous efforts to bring this jagged idiom into readable English form can only be highly commended.
Three extraneous illustrations are included in the volume, showing a Revelation engraving by Lucas Cranach (129), the frontispiece to Hector Mithobius's Psalmodia Christiana of 1665 (92) and a table of Hebrew wind instruments from a 1690 publication by Wolfgang Caspar Printz (125). If their appearance without explanatory commentary might seem somewhat gratuitous, these images do hint enticingly at the wider web of contexts and references within which the two works were conceived. Reproductions of the two original title-pages might have constituted a welcome additional feature. Overall, Irwin's book raises the obvious question of which other such treatises, if any, would merit reissuing in English translation. Various similar publications have appeared recently, such as Casey Mongoven's edition of two works by Andreas Werckmeister (Andreas Werckmeister's Cribrum Musicum (1700) and Harmonologia Musica (1702): The Original German Treatises with Parallel, Annotated English Translations (Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2013)). Complete coverage of this body of literature will of course never be achievable, but in the context of debates about heavenly music, Christoph Frick's Music-Büchlein of 1631 comes to mind, which goes unmentioned by Irwin, but contains lots of surprisingly specific ideas about the polychoral, fugal, everlasting but ever-renewed musical inventions of the beyond. Raupach and Mattheson offer us only two specific perspectives, then, each shaped by their personal preoccupations and proclivities; and so one might still need to delve into other volumes of old German writing to attain a fuller grasp of the richness of the discourse in the period. Irwin's book, in this sense, can serve as a tantalizing gateway to the heady pleasures of Gothic script.
