The rise of urban public concert life in the eighteenth century remains a touchstone of music-historical enquiry, and many accounts continue to rely, implicitly and explicitly, on the related decline of church musical life as an explanation. What, then, would it look like, as a kind of test case, to trace a city's public concert life through the church rather than apart from it? Which city might best meet the conditions for this test? In which period might this story unfold? Leipzig after Bach, Jeffrey Sposato replies. Indeed, with a narrow purview across a long period of time, the book's genre approaches that of a scientific experiment. Anyone wishing for a broad overview of Leipzig's musical culture should not hold their breath: Sposato concentrates exclusively on the relationships between two churches (St Thomas and St Nicholas) and a concert venue (the Gewandhaus), honing in on the positions of Thomaskantor and the city Kapellmeister.

The bulk of the book is taken up with reporting on the duties of these positions, detailing the routine liturgical orders and musical events for which Thomaskantor and Kapellmeister are responsible. Sposato thus illuminates a largely neglected corner of musical life. Many of his key sources have not enjoyed consideration in English-language scholarship. And, in taking this perspective, Sposato promises a significant historiographical intervention. In large thanks to Bach zealots like Philipp Spitta, the story of the era ‘after Bach’ – especially in Leipzig – has traditionally been one of church music's decline: through the formation of the musical canon, sacred music was allegedly cloistered in the private spheres of religious practice. By contrast, Leipzig after Bach advocates that religion be considered a major transformative force on musical life through – and well past – the eighteenth century.

In that regard, Leipzig after Bach is a significant contribution to music scholarship, fixing a sustained gaze upon religious and theological change as an agent in public musical life. Yet ultimately this approach does not produce anything much different from the traditional narrative. One need only look to chapter titles two and three: respectively, ‘Church and the Rise of Concert Music, 1743–1785’ and ‘Hiller, Schicht, and the Crises of Church and State 1785–1823’. The rise of concert music and the decline of church influence is recapitulated, this time through looking at musical programming and church attendance. Illuminating, none the less, are the mutually productive relationships between concert and liturgy, especially in the areas of musical genre, that Sposato recounts.

The Introduction sets Leipzig apart from other urban music centres – there was both a demand for musical entertainment from the city's trade fairs and a lack of patronage to support any public concert venue until the opening of the Gewandhaus in 1781. The first chapter, ‘Leipzig, Saxony, and Lutheran Orthodoxy’, establishes the city's confessional context. From Luther's time until the nineteenth century, Leipzig had an exceptionally steadfast liturgical tradition. Sposato argues that the reasons for this liturgical stability go beyond simple pride in the Protestant legacy. With Saxony as the cradle of the Reformation yet under Catholic political rule (beginning in 1697 with King Friedrich August I's conversion), Lutheran orthodoxy became a kind of theological middle ground between a Lutheran population and a Catholic king: thus strong Lutheranism came about as a result of Saxony's Catholic electorates, and not in spite of them. (To Sposato, ‘theology’ means ecclesiology, and the study of the tenets informing liturgical structure and ‘churchliness’ (26).)

The second chapter traces the influence churches had on concert programming through much of the eighteenth century. Through an examination of recently discovered documents such as text booklets from church services, Sposato shows that ‘a distinct shift in service music priorities took place in the 1730s that led to a newfound interest in cultivating Latin mass settings that slowly grew over the course of the mid-eighteenth century’ (97). The 1720s, the years in which Bach generated a new cantata every week, were previously thought to have stocked Bach's liturgical repertoire for the following decades. Meticulously reconstructing the main service (Hauptgottesdienst) from liturgical documents and the diary of a St Thomas sexton, Sposato reveals that Bach had in fact established ‘a new balance between cantata settings and concerted masses’ in the 1730s (102). The concerted mass gave more flexibility to the vespers and seasons of the Lutheran calendar, making service music less de tempore and more ‘temporally universal’ (114). Johann Friedrich Doles (Thomaskantor 1756–1789) relied heavily on psalmic and psalm-like texts that could be implemented across the Lutheran feasts and high holidays, while setting them to ‘approachable’ (homophonic) music for easier comprehensibility (120). Johann Adam Hiller (Kapellmeister 1763–1785) then modelled his ‘secular’ concerts on Doles's simplified liturgy, demonstrated in the programmes of the early Concert Spirituel.

The third chapter, covering the appointments of Hiller (Thomaskantor 1789–1804) and Johann Gottfried Schicht (Thomaskantor 1810–1823), shows a reverse influence, from concert hall to church. Sposato explains that to rectify declining church attendance (which he charts through original church communion statistics), Schicht advertised church music in popular newspapers like the Leipziger Tageblatt. The strategy positioned the church service as a fundamentally musical event, marketing its liturgy in the manner of the Gewandhaus (Schicht's previous employer). Another innovation was distributing movements of large sacred works across several weeks of service (sometimes across several churches) to entice the congregation to return. Moreover, in a remarkable development, and one which comes through only subtly in this narrative, some new liturgical repertoire performed under Schicht also aligned with works recently published for the musical market (226). One wonders to what extent Schicht might have even collaborated with publishers like Breitkopf and Härtel for these programmatic coincidences.

The final chapter covers well-trodden musicological ground with Thomaskantor Moritz Hauptmann and Kapellmeister Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who ‘ushered in a new era in musical programming, both in the concert hall and in the churches’ (231). It is well known that Mendelssohn was in high demand, with institutions in London, Berlin and Leipzig vying for his musical leadership. However, Sposato tells this story from the perspective of Leipzig's institutions. Mendelssohn's new reign over the Gewandhaus, starting in 1835, featured more ‘serious’ musical pieces and more chamber works, lieder and other previously domestic genres to appeal to all manner of listeners. While still acknowledging some differences between church and concert hall, Mendelssohn endeavoured to propagate canonical music – the Austro-German composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel and Gluck – across sacred and secular performance venues alike (257). When the Thomaskantor position opened up, Mendelssohn pushed city officials to elect Hauptmann, an ‘illogical choice’ who lacked experience and professional ties to Leipzig's music scene, but who possessed a musical taste similar to Mendelssohn's (268). This furthered Mendelssohn's ‘idea of influencing the course of music for an entire city’ (241).

A side effect of all this detailed reporting, of course, is that some musical practices and organizations are snubbed. The University Church (Paulinerkirche) and the university itself have only brief cameos (24–26, 37–39, 134–137). Despite the hundred pages devoted to Johann Adam Hiller, the Breitkopf firm – Hiller's frequent collaborator, which, in a different telling, might be considered the true centre of Leipzig's ‘church and concert life’ – only merits the occasional mention (193, 226). There was also an opera house and a culture of theatre patronage in Leipzig throughout the late eighteenth century, at the Theater auf der Ranstädter Bastei, or ‘Altes Theater’ (established 1766). Recently, Adam Shoaff has shown that the Altes Theater, which never appears in Sposato's account, contributed to a modest but lively opera and theatre scene in the city (‘The Aesthetic Foundations of German Opera in Leipzig, 1766–1775’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2016)). This undermines Sposato's claim that ‘the Hauptgottesdienst had effectively moved into the public concert hall – a logical development for a city with no opera and no court, but with a thriving and dominant church music tradition’ (154).

Another side effect is that the narrative sometimes skimps on addressing historical change, reaching for small data points instead of attempting a larger-scale explanation. For instance, in order to attract attendees, Hiller's services included new contrafacta in Neapolitan operatic style. This significant liturgical concession was made possible simply, according to Sposato, because Hiller ‘excise[d] that clause from his agreement’ with the Town Council (177). Similarly, ‘Mendelssohn became a member of the first generation of composers who composed much . . . of their sacred music expressly for the concert hall’, because of ‘the new reality that existed for sacred music throughout Germany . . . in which streamlined and refocused church services no longer had the need or room for sacred works of even moderate length’ (260). The reader is left questioning why, or how, such change happened – why did Doles advocate ‘approachable church music’ over contrapuntal complexity? Why were masses able to be transferred easily to secular venues, and Neapolitan operatic style into liturgy? That Sposato prefers conscientiously reported details to overarching historical claims is evident in his earlier works as well, especially The Price of Assimilation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). But where interpretative caution in his first monograph brought clarity to the highly controversial ‘how Jewish was Mendelssohn’ question, here it produces a narrative that ends up sustaining more traditional portrayals of the relationship between religion and the public sphere, and of music as religious practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The many aesthetic and repertorial exchanges between the Gewandhaus and St Thomas Church that Sposato presents do not, ultimately, cast new light on musical secularization, but rather reinscribe a conventional telling.

A revealing case study in this regard is the book's treatment of Mendelssohn's Lobgesang. Highlighting the work's chorale interjections in a symphonic form, Sposato's reading endorses Charles Rosen's notion of ‘religious kitsch’ (The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)), where the orthodoxy is hollowed out of church music while still retaining an affective glow of the sacred – a solemnity as ‘before the face of God in his temple’, as Hiller would have it, but without the face, God or temple (172). Sposato writes that the ‘blending of sacred and symphonic is epitomized in Mendelssohn's Lobgesang’ (262). In seeing the piece this way, he follows many contemporary scholars who consider the Lobgesang a musical synthesis of the modern binary of sacred and secular: see, for instance, John Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Larry Todd, ‘On Mendelssohn's Sacred Music, Real and Imaginary’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. Peter Mercer-Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ryan Minor, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Benedict Taylor, ‘Religious Art and Art-Religion in Mendelssohn's “Lobgesang”’, in Mendelssohn, the Organ, and the Music of the Past, ed. Jürgen Thym (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014). ‘Sacred’ and ‘secular’, in Lobgesang's critical reception, appear as transhistorical concepts that either blend with or replace one another, almost like a kind of substance. It has yet to be confirmed that this modern binary of sacred/secular was around early enough to inform Mendelssohn's ‘symphony-cantata’.

Sposato arrives at this familiar conclusion via a trusted sociological approach that uses congregant head-counting and other quantitative comparisons between social locales deemed a priori ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, methods rehearsed in institutional secularization theories in the sociology of religion. The book therefore relies on the work of Thomas Luckmann, who was among the first to propose that Western religion became privatized through the state's differentiation of social institutions (The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967)). Privatization theory is the framework for musicology's narrative of public music-making, according to which religious programming (canonical anomalies like Handel's Messiah notwithstanding) is removed from the public sphere. For Sposato and others, Lobgesang is the exception that proves the rule, as it allegedly resists the privatization of religion. (The sociologist José Casanova has critiqued this ‘privatization theory’ in Public Religions in the Modern World, arguing that religion is also involved in a process of ‘deprivatization’ that impinges upon the public sphere, complicating sacred/secular labels applied to such cultural objects as musical repertory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).)

This is not to say that Sposato's method has been applied in vain. Rather, his study, which demonstrates the real influences between church music and public concert programming, paves the way for other, broader, studies that might centre religion in the history of music ‘after Bach’. Sposato's treatment of sacred and secular public musical programming in Leipzig shows not only how both traditions (e)merged in a uniquely German expression, but also how the terms ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ might themselves become aspects of musicological enquiry. Leipzig's concert life challenges the historian of eighteenth-century music to think differently about the secular – in the anthropologist Talal Asad's phrase, to trace the secular ‘through its shadows, as it were’ (Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 16). For that, we have Leipzig after Bach to thank.