In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Hearing Bach’s Passions
  • Alan Howard
Hearing Bach’s Passions. By Daniel Melamed. pp. xi + 178. (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2005, £15.50. ISBN 0-19-516933-6.)

Hearing Bach's Passions attempts to condense the wealth of information and debate surrounding the sources, interpretation, and performance practice of the five settings of the Passion associated with ?J. S. Bach into less than 200 pages. The result is a comprehensive introduction not only to the issues confronting scholars and performers of Bach's music in the early twenty-first century, but also to the wider field of musicology and its potential contribution to the experience of modern audiences. Daniel R. Melamed's engaging prose is at once concise and informative, and the often complex, esoteric ideas he tackles are made to appear accessible and even familiar.

Indeed, this is one of the major achievements of a book with a deliberately general appeal, aimed at 'people who want to know more about Johann Sebastian Bach's Passion settings . . . and about what it means to listen to this music today' (p. vi). Scholars of Bach's music will find little here that stems from new research, since Melamed's principal aim is not to pursue new lines of enquiry but to make accessible to non-specialists some of the most important aspects of Bach scholarship of the last century and a half, including its latest debates. Thus the book eschews footnotes throughout in favour of a brief note of 'suggestions for further reading and listening' for each chapter, at the back of the book. There are no music examples either, though the suggested listening does provide a means of following the more detailed musical observations in the text, particularly in the discussion of the roles of singers in chapter 2.

Melamed's efforts to bring a large amount of specialist material together for a broader readership also lend the book something of the flavour of an anthology. Each of the chapters stands up well as an independent study, and indeed several draw heavily on his earlier writings, including an article in the New York Times, two extended programme notes, and two other articles ('The Double Chorus in? J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion BWV 244', JAMS 57 (2004), 3–50; and (with Reginald L. Sanders) 'Zum Text und Kontext der "Keiser" Markus Passion', Bach-Jahrbuch, 85 (1999), 35–50). Melamed's debt to recent scholarship, while explicitly acknowledged, adds to this sense of the compilation of material: the work of Joshua Rifkin (especially 'Bach's Chorus', in Andrew Parrott, The Essential Bach Choir (London, 2002), 189–208) looms large in the discussion of vocal forces (ch. 1), for example, while the chapter on the St Mark Passion BWV 247 draws heavily on the now well-known literature surrounding Bach's use of parody (summarized in Hans-Joachim Schulze, 'The Parody Process in Bach's Music: An Old Problem Reconsidered', Bach, 20 (1989), 7–21).

Underlying all of these, however, is a strong connecting theme that draws together the conclusions of each chapter, with its different concerns, into a single, remarkably coherent whole: if this is a book about Bach's Passions, it is no less a study of the concept of authenticity in music, both as it touches upon matters of performance and on musical scholarship in general. This is an issue that is particularly acute when dealing with Bach's contributions to the Passion music repertory, since the music forms so important a part of our modern performance traditions that we like to think that we know it intimately; that Bach's musical and interpretative intentions speak to us today with the immediacy that they had for the first congregations and audiences that heard this music. 'For all their familiarity', however, 'behind Bach's Passions are questions and problems caused largely by our distance from the works in time and context' (p. vi). In his Introduction, Melamed goes on to flesh out this paradox by explaining some of the most familiar criticisms of claims to 'authenticity' made on the part of performers and musicologists. Even if we could accurately recreate the sound of Bach's...

pdf

Share