Since the early nineteenth century, when Johann Nikolaus Forkel published his biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, the image of the composer that has overwhelmingly dominated both the scholarly discourse and the popular imagination has been one of an isolated musical genius. Over the past decade or so, however, this view has begun to change, owing to an explosion of new research into Bach's contemporaries – the composers and musicians with whom he was personally acquainted and whose music he admired. A number of factors have driven this work, including the recovery from Eastern Europe of treasures such as the archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, and the systematic cataloguing and digitization of whole repertories of eighteenth-century court music (such as the recent ‘Schrank II’ project based in Dresden). Together with pioneering studies of individuals such as Graupner, Telemann, Zelenka and Pisendel, and investigations into the contents of Bach's own personal library, we are beginning to build a new and vital picture of Bach's world. From this, he emerges not as an isolated genius, but as an exceptional part of a diverse and extraordinarily prolific community of musicians working in towns and courts across Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Perhaps understandably, this revisionist attitude has not proved entirely welcome, and continues to provoke hostility and resistance from many in Bach scholarship. Indeed, the present volume styles itself as ‘provocative’ for offering such a strong counternarrative to the traditional view. It is the ninth in the American Bach Society's ongoing series Bach Perspectives (a tenth has since been published). Previous volumes have concentrated on such diverse subjects as Bach's oratorios, his relationship to the Breitkopf publishing house and the eighteenth-century music trade, and Bach in America. This diversity of subjects is one of the series’s great strengths, and one that is certainly evident in the present volume.
The opening essay, by Wolfgang Hirschmann, is subtitled ‘Individuality and Variety in the Works of Bach and His German Contemporaries’, but it is really focused on the music of one famous contemporary, Georg Philipp Telemann. This is no accident: as Hirschmann comments, several writers, notably Philipp Spitta, have used Telemann ‘as a negative foil for Bach, someone who threw the master's work into high relief’ (6). The piece thus stands as a direct historiographical challenge to both the ‘lone genius’ narrative and, more specifically, the denigration of Telemann's music in comparison with Bach's. It begins by laying out the background to this narrative, using lengthy quotations from the musicologist Martin Geck to represent the traditional idealist view. Hirschmann devotes significant space in this section to discussing Geck's rather curious analogy between Bach and a German folktale (one result of this extended digression is the subheading ‘Bach the Hedgehog’, which is not one I would have expected to encounter). Hirschmann engages with this parable in a sound revisionist spirit, concluding that ‘a primary goal of the historian must be to analyse the richness of different webs of significance that coexisted . . . In this relatively neutral approach, Bach is part of these webs, but no more than that’ (9).
The rest of the chapter uses several examples from Telemann's vast repertory to show how some of his ‘most interesting and distinctive features belong to stylistic realms Bach never entered’ (9). These examples concern either the complete avoidance of, or differing approaches to, contrapuntal textures, particularly regarding the synthesis of modern idioms (galant style, harmonic complexity) with conventional polyphony and more archaic styles (stile antico). The analyses perhaps reveal more about Telemann that they do about Bach, particularly given that Hirschmann fails to supply any examples by the latter; details about exactly how Telemann's mixing of archaic and modern elements differs from Bach's would have strengthened the argument. None the less, as a challenge to misguided perceptions that Telemann was an uninteresting composer who did not innovate, it succeeds well.
Steven Zohn's chapter continues this theme, presenting an interesting discussion of one of the most important Telemann rediscoveries of recent years, the VI Ouvertures à 4 ou 6. This set of instrumental suites, missing since the end of the Second World War, reappeared in 2008 when a copy of the original 1736 print was identified in Moscow. Zohn draws an effective parallel between a Meissen porcelain figure from the 1740s, showing a shepherd and shepherdess, and the Telemann suites: both deliberately juxtapose urban and pastoral idioms (29). He examines in some detail the pastoral dance types represented in the suites, the Gaillarde, Villanelle and Napolitaine among others, and shows that the inclusion of these movements is typical of Telemann's works from the 1720s onward. These observations are supported by a helpful table of compositions. But crucially, he notes, it is in these suites that Telemann's use of the pastoral style is most extensive, and the tensions created as a result of juxtapositions – of the courtly and serious with the rustic and comic – most striking (44–45). Zohn further argues that the set of suites is significant not only as one of the last of its kind, but also for its mediation between an antique late seventeenth-century Lulliste style and a modern 1730s galant idiom. As for the relationship to Bach, he makes logical comparisons between the encyclopedic, retrospective nature of the Telemann suites and the first part of the Clavier-Übung (bwv825–830), showing that they share many rhetorical features. Zohn's lucid and multi-layered analysis makes his chapter a joy to read, and his findings are significant for both Telemann scholarship and our understanding of the development of the late baroque suite more broadly.
Andrew Talle's ‘Bach, Graupner, and the Rest of Their Contented Contemporaries’ follows in the tradition of comparing cantata settings by Bach and other German composers working at the same time. Talle discusses Bach's and Graupner's settings of Georg Christian Lehms's text Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (hence the playful ‘contented’ in his title, although there is no discussion of ‘the rest’ of Bach's and Graupner's contemporaries, repose-related or otherwise). The Bach version (bwv170) is of course well known, but Graupner's beautiful setting (gwv1147/11), for solo soprano, has only recently been published and recorded (see my review of L'arpa festante's recording (Carus 83.337, 2015) in Eighteenth-Century Music 13/2). Talle provides a detailed movement-by-movement comparison of the two works, and he helpfully presents the text in three versions: the original German and both literal and idiomatic English translations. The main differences between Bach's and Graupner's approaches to setting this text are clearly outlined, with straightforward but detailed comparisons of phrase structure, harmonic progressions, key relationships and orchestration. Consistently, Talle finds Bach's setting to be far longer and more elaborate (each movement is almost twice as long as Graupner's), falling into line with the conclusions of scholars such as Noack and Spitta that Bach sought to push boundaries. He argues that Bach, more than his contemporaries, ‘sought to move beyond the specific texts he set, relying heavily upon the wordless rhetoric of instrumental music to make their emotions palpable. As a result, his cantatas have proved better able to sever their denominational tethers’ (75). I take no issue with this conclusion, but Talle's implications throughout the essay that Bach's setting is musically superior do sometimes serve to marginalize Graupner's own ingenuity, which is rather a shame.
Alison J. Dunlop takes us further afield to the Habsburg Empire in a lavish introduction to the life and works of Gottlieb Muffat (1690–1770), regarded as the leading composer of keyboard music in Vienna from the time of J. S. Bach. Dunlop's chapter synthesizes key findings from her extensive research on this neglected composer, as presented in her monograph The Life and Works of Gottlieb Muffat (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2013, reviewed in Eighteenth-Century Music 12/1) and attested to here by the copious footnotes (almost two hundred) that accompany the main text. As she explains, there is a stark contrast between the fame of Muffat's music – Handel borrowed extensively from his compositions – and the fact that very little indeed is known about his life; there is no known surviving personal correspondence or contemporary biography of him (77). So it is all the more extraordinary that Dunlop has managed to unearth such a wealth of information from the archives about Muffat's family, musical education, travels and employment – and this is even before she begins her discussion of the genesis and transmission of his music. She also draws meaningful conclusions from other evidence, such as the manuscripts associated with Muffat's teacher, Fux, and his circle (which included Zelenka), showing the types of repertory Muffat would be likely to have studied. Two appendices, a Muffat family genealogy and list of manuscript sources and works, round out the chapter.
Unlike the other essays in this volume, this one features very little discussion of Bach, which some readers might take issue with. Dunlop does state that, in addition to evaluating Muffat's life and work, her essay aims to ‘allow comparisons to be drawn with musicians working at the same time [as Muffat] outside Habsburg domains, including J. S. Bach’ (77). The fact that this is just an invitation to the reader for further inquiry is no deficiency, in my view; Dunlop's research more than stands on its own as a remarkable piece of scholarship. It serves as a fine example of the pioneering source-based research that should be welcomed by, and will doubtless inform the future work of, Bach specialists. It also reminds us once again how keenly Dunlop's absence will be felt in the world of eighteenth-century musicology.
Of all the essays in this volume, it was the last, by Michael Maul, that most caught my attention. Entitled ‘Bach versus Scheibe: Hitherto Unknown Battlegrounds in a Famous Conflict’, it is a reworked English-language version of the same author's article ‘Johann Adolph Scheibes Bach-Kritik: Hintergründe und Schauplätze einer musikalischen Kontroverse’, published in the Bach-Jahrbuch in 2010. Maul's article provides a fresh perspective on the well-known piece of criticism published by Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–1776) in 1737, in which he ‘[describes] the experience of a fictional musician with twelve living composers’ (120). Amongst these twelve, of course, was J. S. Bach, but aside from two others – Hasse and Graun – the rest of the musicians discussed in Scheibe's Sendeschreiben (epistle) had hitherto remained unidentified. In 2010, however, a first edition of Scheibe's letter was discovered in the library of Jena University, with handwritten annotations that revealed the identities of these musicians, a discovery that, as Maul shows, ‘not only sheds welcome light on several of Bach's contemporaries, it also reveals previously unknown dimensions of the battle between Scheibe and Bach himself’ (121).
Maul examines afresh each section of Scheibe's document, interspersing generous quotations with new details and analysis. He reveals a wealth of new information about the musicians and composers with whom Bach would have been acquainted, and the political battles between them. Just one example concerns Leipzig's three primary organists at the time: Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, Johann Schneider and Johann Gottlieb Görner. We now know that there were tensions between Gerlach, described by Scheibe as an ‘ignorant, inept’ organist, and Schneider, his ‘perennial enemy’; it had previously been thought that the two had got on quite harmoniously. Furthermore, the identification of a ‘well-known church music director . . . [completely possessed by] arrogance and crudeness’ as Görner points to some personal vindictiveness on Scheibe's part; his application for organist at the Nikolaikirche was apparently sabotaged by Görner around 1729 (127). It is wonderful to have an English-language version of this paper at last, and it forms a fitting conclusion to the volume.
As with all publications in this series, the volume is handsomely produced, with clear and spacious typesetting; the musical examples and the three black-and-white images (in Zohn's paper) are given a generous amount of room. A comprehensive index rounds out the volume.
This book will be of great value to anyone working in late baroque scholarship, not just those specializing in Bach. Indeed, my only wish is that it were longer: there was much scope to move beyond Telemann and Graupner and incorporate a greater diversity of research of the kind Dunlop presents (a chapter on Zelenka, for example, would have been welcome). But perhaps its relatively slim size sets a challenge for future research: to ensure that Bach scholarship continues to embrace and interact with the wider world of eighteenth-century music, much as Johann Sebastian himself certainly did.
