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This chapter shows that Mendelssohn's repertoire for the organ was remarkably small; other than his own works, it was limited to a few of Bach's free organ works and several chorale preludes. There is no evidence that Mendelssohn had anything more than the most superficial knowledge of — or interest in — organ literature, except for Bach. Similarly, there is no record that he ever played a single organ work by any composer other than J. S. Bach or himself.

This chapter consists of a constructive (yet critical) conversation with two of the finest and most stimulating studies of Bach currently available, John Butt’s, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity and Karol Berger’s Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow. Both situate Bach in relation to the emergence of modernity. The chapter focuses on three main loci raised by these books: subjectivity and creativity, openness and order, and time and eternity, and on the ways these are embodied in Bach’s work. It is argued that Butt offers a far more theologically nuanced reading than Berger of Bach in his time, especially with regard to the time–eternity relation. Concluding comments are made about the implications of Bach’s output for the way the role of theology is conceived in today’s late modern context.

This chapter shows that Mendelssohn's achievements as an editor of Bach's organ music were both innovative and important. In collaboration with Marx he was the first to edit and publish some of Bach's most important free organ works, including what is unquestionably Bach's most famous work for the instrument, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565). Moreover, he was the first to publish the Orgelbüchlein — although he never referred to it as such — and to bring the bulk of Bach's “Great Eighteen” chorale preludes, as well as two partitas, before the public. In terms of his editorial thinking, Mendelssohn also deserves credit not only as a pioneer in presenting unembellished scores but also for the way in which he resolutely defended and justified his editorial stance.

This chapter considers some of the music that likely influenced Schumann's metrical style: that of contemporary pianist-composers, such as Moscheles and Hummel, which he studied and performed in his youth; that of Paganini, some of whose Caprices for Solo Violin Schumann transcribed for piano; the keyboard music of J. S. Bach, which Schumann analyzed and played in the early 1830s; and that of Beethoven and Schubert. Substantial analyses of the music of these composers demonstrate the importance of metrical conflict therein. The chapter concludes with analyses of some of Schumann's very early works, which reveal his gradual absorption of some of the metrical procedures of earlier composers.

From Johann Sebastian Bach’s output of choral music—motets, cantatas, oratorios, passions, and masses—come many masterpieces of the Western choral tradition. Instead of following the chronology of Bach’s life, the examination of these various genres serves as an outline for discussing this essential corpus of choral music. Extensive consideration is given to the B-minor Mass, the St. John Passion, and the St. Matthew Passion. An understanding of these larger works requires a thorough grounding in Bach’s cantatas, which become templates for the inner symmetry of his larger compositions.

Between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a cultivated relationship with the music of a favoured period in the distant national past was a pervasive aspect of high, and sometimes lower, musical culture in England. This chapter first sketches a general picture of that relationship before presenting some particular case studies. It addresses the following questions: to what extent does Tudorism in music refer to the revival of music itself, to what extent to its stylistic emulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English compositions? Was it a matter of appealing to the Tudors to set a political agenda for music? Tudorism in English music was many things but also one very definite thing — a conscious modelling of style or atmosphere in musical composition on that of a perceived golden age of national culture. It was in some respects part of the early music movement that Harry Haskell identified as beginning in 1829 with Mendelssohn's revival of J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, yet not the same thing insofar as that movement was about reviving discarded old music and Tudorism was about creating new music in an earlier image.

Historical discussion focuses on the lineage of the Bach family, compositions determined by circumstances of employment, the composition of Lutheran Masses, the possible rationale for composing a Catholic Mass, and the history of the B Minor Mass in terms of manuscripts, performances, and editions. Musical discussion focuses on parody technique, the assemblage of four disparate units of composition into the B Minor Mass, comparisons of stile antico and stile moderno characteristics of the Mass, and formal and musical structures of the Mass, with special attention to structural balance and mirror dispositions. Performance practices include singers and instrumentalists and their arrangements in performance, meter as it affects tempo, rhythmic alteration, and ornamentation.

‘Every room in which Bach is performed is transformed into a church.’ We do not know the context for this remark attributed to Mendelssohn (sometime before March 1835), but it reflects one significant thread in the nineteenth-century ‘emancipation of music’, namely the revival of the music of J.S. Bach, and his transformation from a largely forgotten Leipzig church musician into a dominant, canonic figure in European concert music. This chapter revisits some familiar aspects of Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s music, for example the seminal revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, and Mendelssohn’s spiritual trajectory from Judaism to Christianity, and then explores ways in which his own music tested boundaries between sacred music for performance in church versus the concert hall. One way in which Mendelssohn allied his music with the spiritual was through the use of imaginary, ‘free’ chorales—that is, newly composed, textless chorale melodies that he inserted into a number of his purely instrumental compositions as a means of underscoring his newly acquired Protestant faith. The chapter concludes by exploring the significance of this device for several other nineteenth-century composers who similarly invoked the divine and sacred in their concert music

Those seeking to understand Bach and his music in the context of his time face an apparently intractable situation: studying Bach's music in reference only to itself seems a logical impossibility. However, relating Bach to his German contemporaries will produce only misunderstandings. This chapter outlines some means for making the situation tractable by identifying the premises required for understanding Bach and his German contemporaries, rather than one or the other. It proposes taking a kind of ethnological perspective on Bach's music and the different cultural webs into which it has been incorporated in the past and in which it is embedded in the present.

On May 14, 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–76), a twenty-nine-year-old music theorist and composer in Hamburg, published a Sendschreiben (“letter”) describing the experience of a fictional musician with twelve living composers. Many readers were able to recognize one of the composers as Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann Abraham Birnbaum (1702–48), a professor of rhetoric at Leipzig University, took offense at Scheibe's rather critical remarks on Bach's style and published a vigorous defense. The resulting dispute, known as the Scheibe-Birnbaum affair, generated a number of publications over the next decade and has long been recognized as one of the most important documents regarding the reception of Bach's music before 1750. This chapter considers the Scheibe-Birnbaum affair and the hitherto unknown dimensions of the battle between Scheibe and Bach himself.

This chapter argues that Brown's account of classical music is shaped by distinctive theological interests: a concern to do justice to the presence of God in all areas of culture; a desire for dialogue that refuses fixed theological pre-understandings; an eagerness to respect the integrity of the arts; a keenness to regard Scripture as itself part of tradition. Music is seen as potentially ‘sacramental’. Begbie argues that the principal weakness of this account is its lack of theological specificity. Brown's construal of the Scripture-tradition relation is insufficiently rooted in the particularity of the incarnation. His aversion to theological instrumentalism is overplayed and itself relies on theological pre-judgments. The same can be said of his view of dialogue. With attention to the music of J. S. Bach, the author argues that greater theological specificity can advance Brown's desire to affirm God's active presence in the world at large.

“The Social History of Groove” follows the cultural transformations of a crucial genre of the 1600s: the chacona, which came to Europe from the New World by way of the Spanish conquistadors. A remarkably minimalist pattern, the rowdy chacona made its way into Italian high culture, then migrated to France, where it became the very pinnacle of aristocratic poise. The chapter concludes with the most famous product of its rather unlikely career, J. S. Bach's Ciaccona (the Chaconne) for unaccompanied violin.

Gottlieb Muffat (1690–1770) is considered the most successful composer of keyboard music of J. S. Bach's generation to have worked in Vienna. His reputation is based on (1) the corpus of extant works, which is significantly larger than those of his Viennese contemporaries, including his teacher J. J. Fux (ca.1660–1741); (2) the dissemination of Muffat's music during his lifetime; (3) his financial success; and (4) G. F. Handel's extensive borrowings from his music. Yet despite his eminence, little is known of Muffat's life. This chapter evaluates the influence of family background, cultural ties, and social spheres on Muffat's activities as a composer, and draws comparisons with musicians working at the same time outside Habsburg domains, including J. S. Bach.

Music scholars have long recognized the value of comparing settings of the same cantata texts by Bach and his German contemporaries. Examining the ways in which multiple musical minds chose to set the same words can throw the styles of each into sharp relief. This chapter presents a second pair of settings by Bach and Graupner that has received only occasional mention in the literature: Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (BWV 170 and GWV 1147/11). The premieres of the two settings took place fifteen years apart; Graupner's setting was first heard on July 12, 1711, in Darmstadt, and Bach's on July 28, 1726, in Leipzig. The chapter discusses the two settings of each of Vergnügte Ruh's five movements in turn. In every case, it presents the text in three versions: (1) the original German, following the orthography and punctuation of Lehms' 1711 text; (2) the author's English, word-for-word translation; and (3) the author's English translation, which mimics the poetic structure and rhyme of Lehms' original.

This chapter focuses on Shostakovich's inspiration in composing a cycle of preludes and fugues for piano—J. S. Bach. Especially in the first two preludes and fugues, but elsewhere in the cycle as well, allusions to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier occupy the foreground. The first sonority in Shostakovich's cycle—the initial tonic chord of the Prelude in C Major—reproduces the opening harmony and voicing of Bach's own C Major Prelude from Book I, while turning its arpeggiations into simultaneously sounding chords. The missing arpeggiations come in the next prelude, in A minor, hurled down as lightning bolts of streaming sixteenth notes, in the tradition of baroque Fortspinnung, an unbroken churning-out of material in a single contrapuntal line.

Chapter 5 examines how Schumann and Wagner veered toward each other stylistically in the years that followed Lohengrin and the Symphony no. 2, taking special note of the influence of Bach on both of them. Tristan und Isolde seems particularly indebted to late Schumann—including the Symphony no. 2—as well as to Bach, especially the ecstatic poetry of his Cantata 21. One particularly unexpected work provided Wagner with ideas for Tristan, namely the fourth of Schumann’s Bach fugues, which dates from October 1845—in fact, from the very week in which Wagner first visited Schumann. Although Wagner credited Liszt with introducing him to the wonders of Bach’s music, musical and biographical evidence points to Schumann’s role already in the mid-1840s.