Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn by Matthew Dirst (review)

A number of scholars in recent years have begun to examine, in much more detail, the reception of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music between the composer’s death in 1750 and the Sing-Akademie performance of the St. Matthew Passion under Felix Mendelssohn’s direction in 1829. Although it is commonly posited that an admiration for Bach’s works never fully died out, especially among composers such as Mozart and Beethoven, little specific research has been done in this area until recently.

Matthew Dirst’s Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn is a welcome addition to the literature on this topic, not only providing a detailed account of key developments in the reception of Bach’s keyboard works (especially Well-Tempered Clavier), but also connecting these developments to broader cultural trends. Furthermore, Dirst demonstrates how such trends in the reception of Bach’s keyboard works helped lead to an openness to Bach’s works in general among the cultural elites of both Germany and England, thus preparing the way for the subsequent Bach “revival” of the mid-nineteenth century.

Dirst has formatted the volume in such a way as to lead the reader into a deeper consideration of Bach’s keyboard legacy through a series of key questions:

Why were these works crucial to Bach’s historical legacy? What impact did they have on their respective genres? What lessons did they convey to composers and to other students of the art? Who played this music and why? How did successive generations and different national communities interpret and perform it?

(p. xii)

Rather than providing an overview of the answers to such questions in an introduction, Dirst instead jumps right into the topic and its significance in chapter 1, “Why the keyboard works?” Readers seeking a more traditional introduction may want to first read the “Epilogue,” which presents an excellent summary of the book’s contents as well as its main arguments and conclusions.

Dirst does not present a comprehensive account of the reception of Bach’s keyboard works from 1750 to 1829, but rather engages six case studies that each provide a different perspective on this topic. (In addition, the book actually treats a slightly longer time period, from Bach’s death in 1750 to the establishment of the Bach-Gesellschaft in 1850.) While it is clearly connected as a single monograph and reads well as such, Engaging Bach has the added advantage that each chapter also stands well on its own and can be read independently of the others. Given this format, the book as a whole or individual chapters of it are well suited to classroom use at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

For example, chapter 3, “What Mozart learned from Bach,” provides an excellent study of compositional influence, which could be made use of both to study this particular case of influence and to engage the topic of influence more broadly in conjunction with examples from other time periods (Beethoven and Brahms, for example, or Wagner and Debussy). Dirst frames the chapter within the broad context of the study of compositional influence and closely engages the issues related to this topic through the study of the perceived influence of Bach on Mozart. Through a careful study of documentary and compositional evidence, Dirst clearly defines for the first time just what it is that Mozart’s compositional style owes to Bach.

Engaging Bach is well written and easy to read, with clearly-fashioned arguments. Dirst combines careful and well-documented research with insightful music analysis and good use of music examples. Furthermore, in treating the legacy of Bach’s keyboard works from 1750 to 1850, Dirst addresses many topics often mentioned in passing—such as the continuous regard in which Well-Tempered Clavier was held even after the composer’s death, Mozart’s relationship...