During his life Johann Sebastian Bach, baptized a Protestant, came into touch with a wide variety of religions and religious movements. Growing up in Eisenach, Ohrdruf and Lüneburg, the child Bach was brought up on the purest milk of Lutheran orthodoxy; during his year in Mühlhausen (1707/1708) he experienced serious tensions between Lutherans and Pietists; in Weimar (1708–1717) he was for nine years the employee of a proverbially Orthodox ruler; and immediately after this he served for seven years as Kapellmeister at the Calvinist court of Cöthen (1717–1723). During the last stage of his life, being Kantor at the St Thomas School in Protestant Leipzig and surrounded by famous Orthodox clergymen (1723–1750), he was subject to a Catholic ruler – for the Electorate of Saxony, the heartland of Martin Luther's reformation, had been reigned over by a Catholic from the moment when August the Strong converted (1697) in order to gain the crown of Poland. Bach even applied – by presenting a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria – for a court title from the Elector, and the ruler eventually granted him the title of Hof-Compositeur at this Catholic court. Besides composing innumerable Lutheran cantatas, the Thomaskantor also studied and performed dozens of pieces composed by Catholics. This included Pergolesi's immortal Stabat mater, which was given in Leipzig in a parody version using a German paraphrase of Psalm 51 as new text for the composition. At the very end of his life, the Lutheran Bach finished – for whatever reason – his Mass in B minor, a gigantic musical setting of the complete Ordinary of the Latin Mass, which was called by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel ‘the Great Catholic Mass’.
In short, Bach's life and works provide good reasons for the American Bach Society to have focused in its nineteenth biennial meeting on the topic ‘J. S. Bach and the Confessional Landscape of His Time’. The Department of Music at the University of Notre Dame was the perfect place for such an endeavour. Framed by three wonderful concerts – an organ recital by Craig Cramer, a concert by the ensemble Pomerium featuring motets from Palestrina to Bach, and finally a concert focusing on music from Bach's predecessor as Thomaskantor, Sebastian Knüpfer, played by the ensemble Concordia, conducted by Caleb Wenzel, with Bruce Dickey as special guest – the conference comprised fifteen papers given by four generations of scholars.
The distinguished historian Mark Noll (University of Notre Dame) gave a comprehensive keynote address, ‘Bach in Time: Then and Now’. He asked what would have happened if the influential English theologian and hymn writer John Wesley, during his visit to Leipzig around the ninth Sunday after Trinity in 1738 (as documented in his journal), had experienced a performance of one of the cantatas Bach composed for this Sunday. Considering the fact that Wesley had at this time turned to the Moravians, and later expressed in his essay ‘Thoughts on the Power of Music’ (1779) a strong conviction that counterpoint destroys the power and beauty of music, Noll concluded that such an experience would have shocked him. After noting examples of performances of Bach's music in the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (according to an eyewitness, Bach's ‘Canonische Veränderungen’, bwv769, were considered merely music for the eyes), and talking about composer and organist Samuel Wesley's role in the English Bach movement during the early nineteenth century, Noll suggested that the Moravians, no matter how they judged Bach's music, created a bridge for it to reach the New World. He concluded by emphasizing the power of music altogether to build bridges between religions and continents.
The first session of the meeting was devoted to Bach's cantatas. Derek Stauff (Hillsdale College) gave an impressive paper on ‘Religious Conflicts in the Cantatas of Bach and His Contemporaries’, providing a particular wealth of information regarding the many meanings of the word ‘elend’ (which would normally translate as ‘wretched’) in Bach's cantata librettos. Christine Blanken (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) asked – based on her recent discovery that Christoph Birkmann was one of the librettists for Bach's third Leipzig cantata cycle – if the weekly rhetorical colloquia held by Johann Abraham Birnbaum, Bach's defender in the Scheibe-Birnbaum debate, had influenced the style of Birkmann's cantata texts. She also presented a catalogue of Birnbaum's library, which sheds new light on his intellectual background and his relationship to the composer.
Bach's Latin church music was the subject of the second session. In a paper entitled ‘The Mercy of God in the Magnificats of J. S. Bach and His Contemporaries’ Mark Peters (Trinity College, Palos Heights) discussed several German and Latin Magnificat settings by Kuhnau, Melchior Hoffmann, Telemann, Graupner, Bach and others. He concentrated on elements such as form, counterpoint, affect, scoring, word painting, order of the movements, how the Latin text was divided into independent musical sections, and which of those sections received the greatest musical emphasis: it seems that Lutheran composers focused especially on ‘Et misericordia’ and ‘Suspecit Israel’. Daniel R. Melamed (Indiana University, Bloomington) compared two Sanctus settings by J. S. Bach's son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol. He came up with some fascinating insights into the form of these stile antico works, and convincingly suggested that both were demonstration pieces, written under Bach's supervision: there are strong connections between one of the settings and the cantus-firmus movement ‘Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär’ in bwv80, a cantata transmitted in a copy by Altnickol himself. The two movements were probably completed in the context of Altnickol's applications for organist posts in Niederwiesa, Dresden and Naumburg in the late 1740s.
The two papers of the third session took a closer look into Bach's environment during his Weimar period. My own contribution (Michael Maul, Bach-Archiv Leipzig) was focused on Andreas Aiblinger, the tenor singer of the Weimar court chapel. By examining and verifying a publication issued in Weimar in 1704 on the occasion of Aiblinger's conversion to Lutheranism, I showed that Aiblinger was a former Cistercian monk, who escaped in 1703 from the Abbey of Heiligenkreuz in the Wienerwald and – after a long odyssey through half of Europe – finally ended up as Bach's tenor in Weimar, where he made an astonishing career under the patronage of the strict Lutheran duke Wilhelm Ernst. Mary Greer (Cambridge, Massachusetts), President of the American Bach Society, offered a new hypothesis on ‘The Genesis of Bach's Eight-Voice Motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied’. On the basis of a long chain of evidence and the presumption that Duke Wilhelm Ernst was the former owner of Bach's copy of the Calov Bible commentary, Greer suggested that bwv225 had originally been commissioned by the Duke in 1717 for an annual service commemorating both his birthday (30 October) and the two hundredth anniversary of the Reformation (31 October) – a commission that Bach, according to Greer, only fulfilled in 1726.
The contrast sacred/secular was subject of the fourth paper session. Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville University) focused on the topic of town musicians and musical ‘tower men’ (Türmer) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany. On the basis of extensive archival studies and by following the careers of certain town musicians from Leipzig, Erfurt, Augsburg and Munich, Kevorkian was able to paint a representative picture of this – notoriously too little considered – musical profession, and came up with some interesting accounts of converts from Catholicism to Protestantism (and occasionally back to their religious roots). Gary Sampsell (Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University) introduced a hitherto rarely observed Mandora manuscript from the 1740s in the possession of the Leipzig Stadtbibliothek. His fruitful examination of the content and the context of the source yielded the result that the manuscript originated in or near Leipzig. Sampsell vividly demonstrated its value not only as a source of information for private music-making in Bach's town, but also as a rare pointer to how the widely performed popular songs from Sperontes's Singende Muse an der Pleiße were actually executed.
Joyce L. Irwin (Princeton) devoted her paper to the question ‘Dancing in Bach's Time: Sin or Legitimate Pleasure?’. She showed that according to contemporary documents, Calvinists and Pietists opposed dancing while Orthodox Lutherans defended it. She considered Bach's relationship to the pastime and his own dancing skills, and finally argued that dancing in early eighteenth-century Germany was executed in a rather moderate tempo, which raises the question of whether we tend to play the composer's dance-based music too fast.
Traute M. Marshall (West Newton, Massachusetts), who started the fifth session, focused on music at German courts, reconsidering the old question ‘Where did Bach hear the Celle court Kapelle?’. C. P. E. Bach reports in the obituary that his father, when a student in Lüneburg from 1700 to 1702, ‘had the opportunity to go and listen several times to a then famous kapelle kept by the duke of Celle’, where he became familiar with the modern French style (translation from The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff (New York: Norton, 1998), document no. 306). Marshall argued that neither Lüneburg nor Celle, the main residence of Duke Georg Wilhelm, were likely places for such an encounter. However, it is well documented that the Duke regularly spent up to three months per year in Ebstorf, a former Benedictine monastery about sixteen miles south of Lüneburg, in order to go hunting. According to Marshall, this is a location to which Bach might have had access, and where he actually could have heard the orchestra. Barbara Reul (Luther College, University of Regina), in her paper entitled ‘Unverwelklich grünende Palmen unsterblicher Tugenden – Funeral Music at the Court of Anhalt-Zerbst in the 1740s’, called attention to the numerous activities on the occasion of the death of Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst (1747), father of the future Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great. Referring to a huge primary-source volume preserved at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, which contains the printed texts and librettos of the speeches, sermons and musical performances given to commemorate the deceased, Reul asked to what extent the Zerbst Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Fasch, himself a practising Pietist, was involved in the musical activities mourning the death of an Orthodox Lutheran ruler.
Both Ellen Exner (New England Conservatory of Music) and Steven Zohn (Temple University) shed new light on relations between Bach and Telemann. Exner, to begin with, gave an illustrated presentation on godparenthood and the social meanings of baptism in eighteenth-century Germany. By taking a closer look into the relationship between J. S. Bach, Telemann and his godchild C. P. E. Bach, and the circumstances of the latter's baptism in March 1714, Exner came up with strong arguments suggesting that – contrary to older conclusions – Telemann was already in town when Bach decided to ask him to become godfather to Emanuel. Zohn devoted his contribution to the topic ‘Bach, Telemann, and the Tafelmusik Tradition’ – the latter a field that has not attracted much scholarly attention. By examining a wide variety of sources, musical and literary (such as visual artworks, treatises on courtly etiquette and travel diaries), Zohn provided a multifaceted picture of the meaning of ‘Tafelmusik’ and – as an important consequence – was able to explain how works such as Telemann's Tafelmusik might have functioned in a banquet setting.
The last two papers of the meeting dealt with aspects of form and meaning in Bach's music. Ruth Tatlow (Stockholm) spoke on ‘A Lutheran Theology of Proportions and Bach's Response’. Tracking Bach's use of proportional parallelism, Tatlow showed that despite the increasing secularization of Lutheran society in the 1700s, ancient beliefs about ‘creational proportions in music’ did not die out during Bach's lifetime. Moreover, she illustrated, with reference to the words of Werckmeister, Walther, Neuss and others, how widely held beliefs in God-given proportions and harmony could affect the daily choices and compositional practice of Lutheran musicians throughout the entire eighteenth century. Michael Marissen (Swarthmore College) treated ‘Religious Meaning and Bach Performance’, initially emphasizing that a historically informed performance practice of Bach's music also requires – at least in some cases – a reliable exploration of the music's probable religious meaning. This was demonstrated through some fascinating case studies. For instance, in the Augmentation Canon from Bach's Musical Offering, bwv1079, proportional dotting, as opposed to stylishly synchronized French over-dotting, would appear to make good sense of this music's otherwise puzzling marginal caption about worldly glory; and in Bach's St Matthew Passion, one-on-a-part vocal scoring could inspire a significant ‘hermeneutic plus’ for this oratorio's at-times-mystifying sacramental messages.
