Leipzig After Bach: Church and Concert Life in a German City

ISBN-13: 9780190616953 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 336 str.

Jeffrey S. Sposato

Opis

Leipzig, Germany, is best known as the city where renowned composer J. S. Bach worked. But the century after his death in 1750 was critically important as well. This book examines how music in Leipzig responded to repeated threats, including changing middle-class musical tastes and the chaos of the Napoleonic wars.

Recenzje

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna had their opera houses, which provided the focus for civic music-making. Leipzig was different, there was no opera house. Instead, in Bach's time, an active musical life overflowed from its churches into coffee houses and other locations, that was especially effective around the time of the Leipzig trade fairs, held three times each year. But by Mendelssohn's time the services in the churches began to sound like sacred concerts. In this significant study, much of it based on unpublished archival sources, Jeffrey S. Sposato skillfully charts the ebb and flow between religious and secular influences in the musical life of Leipzig from the time of Bach to the time of Mendelssohn, a period that until now has been imperfectly understood.

O autorze

Jeffrey S. Sposato is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Studies at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston. His book The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition (OUP, 2006) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2006 and a Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award finalist. His other publications include William Thomas McKinley: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood, 1995), as well as articles and reviews in 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, Choral Journal, Musical Quarterly, Ars Lyrica, Notes, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition), and several edited collections.