Until recently, research into the relationship between Johann Sebastian Bach and Lutheranism was dominated by theological interpretations of his music. Scholars including Eric Chafe, Robin Leaver and Renate Steiger have argued that Bach was no ‘mere musician’ but was also steeped in Lutheran theology. Accordingly, they have interpreted Bach's vocal and instrumental output as being rich in symbols of Lutheran doctrine. Yet such studies are undermined by the impossibility of knowing exactly what Bach believed and the difficulty of attaching theological meanings to compositional features in his music such as tonal relationships or melodic motives.

Tanya Kevorkian offers a radically new approach, viewing Bach's Lutheran milieu in Leipzig through the eyes of a social historian. Her book interprets religion as a ‘public arena’ in which ‘social, cultural, and political changes were reproduced and contested’ (1). Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu's notion of ‘fields’, she regards religious life as a sphere of cultural production in which individuals competed to gain dominance (5). Drawing on her extensive research in the Leipzig archives, she traces the negotiations between the city's pastors, councillors and musicians that shaped the contents of church worship. She also reconstructs the varied ways in which members of the congregation experienced church services, especially elements such as the cantata and the sermon. Music forms only one strand of Kevorkian's interdisciplinary study, yet by considering Bach's work within the religious life of Leipzig, she offers a model of how music can be integrated within social history.

Besides her use of Bourdieu, Kevorkian's study tacitly draws inspiration from the work of French cultural theorists such as Michel de Certeau on the ‘practices of everyday life’. Indeed, Part I of the book is entitled ‘Congregants' Everyday Practices’. It examines the preoccupations and habits of congregations at the services at which Bach's cantatas were performed. Although Kevorkian has published most of this material before (see ‘The Reception of the Cantata during Leipzig Church Services’, Early Music 30/1 (2002), 26–45), this is still the part of the book that will be of greatest interest to musicologists. Kevorkian shows that the congregation did not behave as a uniform group, but as an array of individuals, acting in ways shaped by their status and gender. Although some members of the congregation listened attentively to the sermon and the cantata, there were also many distractions, such as people's arrival or departure, the passing-round of the collection bag or the sight of other congregants in lavish clothes. As places to mingle socially and to hear music, churches were somewhat similar to opera houses, a similarity already noted by eighteenth-century writers such as Johann Christoph Gottsched (Baroque Piety, 59). Indeed, Leipzigers may have regarded the church as a substitute for opera after the city's opera house closed in 1720 (39).

Kevorkian also analyses the social and occupational groups represented in the Leipzig congregations. Here her evidence consists of the records of the allocation of pews to individual parishioners. Most pews in the Thomaskirche and Nicolaikirche were held by property-owners who filled the churches during the morning services when Bach's cantatas would have been performed (63). Unpropertied Leipzigers attended afternoon services or worshipped at the city's lesser churches (64). Thus Bach's sacred music would not have reached all levels of Leipzig society. Hearing the church cantata was arguably the prerogative of the social elite, in much the same way as opera-going was restricted to those who had the money or status to obtain tickets.

Kevorkian's interest in everyday religious practices is also evident in Part III of her book, an investigation of Pietism in Leipzig. Pietism was the branch of Lutheranism that emphasized the believer's personal relationship with God and rejected the liturgical rituals and displays of status found in public Lutheran worship. Kevorkian shows how the Leipzig Pietists communicated via ‘innovative forms of sociability’ such as ‘collegia’ (informal private meetings) and letter-writing. As a radical alternative to public worship, the Pietist meetings were regarded by the ecclesiastical authorities as a threat to the social and moral order, and were disbanded in the spring of 1690. Kevorkian exposes this private religious world via two hitherto untapped repositories of archival material: the official interrogations of the Leipzig Pietists (Chapter 6), and the many surviving letters from Leipzig Pietists to the Halle preacher August Hermann Francke (Chapter 7). Neither chapter addresses musical matters, though her discussions could be easily extended to musical topics by any interested scholar. For instance, the Pietist distaste for worldly life (182–185) maps on to their well-known suspicion of operatic styles of church music. Moreover, her investigation of the Pietists' enthusiastic use of printing to communicate their ideas (185–191) could be a starting-point for research into the printed books of Pietist songs.

Part II of the book investigates those individuals who were ‘producers of public religious life’ – a broad category that encompasses the clergy, their patrons (the city councillors) and also musicians. Here Kevorkian broadens her focus to cover the Saxon ecclesiastical bureaucracy in Dresden, with a digression on the tensions surrounding Philipp Jacob Spener (court chaplain at Dresden, 1686–1691). Chapters 3 and 4, on the Leipzig clergy and the Dresden consistories, have little direct relevance to music; but again, numerous aspects of her discussion could be used as the basis for comparisons with musical life. For instance, the recruitment processes for pastors, including the evaluation of their trial sermons (94–95), have many similarities to the auditions held for cantors and organists, as Kevorkian herself later notes (128–129).

Chapter 5 returns to musical topics, discussing the Leipzig cantors and the positions they took in the ‘culture wars’ about the status of music. Drawing mainly on secondary literature and on printed sources of the early eighteenth century, this chapter does not offer the wealth of fresh insights found elsewhere in the book. But it is a useful summary of the ambiguous social status of musicians in the period, as well as of the critique of elaborate music by Pietists.

Being a work of social history, Kevorkian's book includes little discussion of the musical repertory of the period. She rarely refers to the texts or music of Bach's church compositions. But her comparisons of church-going and opera attendance in eighteenth-century Leipzig should stimulate a reassessment of Bach's sacred cantatas in terms of their allusions to secular and dramatic styles. Her description of the noisy, distracting environment of the church service may dissuade detailed theological readings of Bach's cantatas; instead, it should encourage analyses that emphasize the disparate ways in which individual listeners might have reacted to Bach's music. Hence her book is not only a sure-footed account of the religious sphere in which Bach worked, it should also stimulate new directions in research on eighteenth-century German music.