Probing Bach's world

Although the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is well known, his outlook and social environment are harder to document. He rarely aired his opinions in letters, seemingly preferring to express himself in music rather than words. As Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach said, 'with his many activities he scarcely had time for the most necessary correspondence, and accordingly did not indulge in lengthy written exchanges.' Yet there are many primary sources documenting Bach's milieu, in particular the social and religious climate in Leipzig where he spent the last 27 years of his career. Only recently have musicologists begun to explore such sources: Christoph Wolff, for instance, examined Bach's links with Leipzig academics in J. S. Bach: the learned musician (New York, 2000).

The intellectual world of early 18th-century Leipzig is the focus of a book of nine essays edited by Carol K. Baron, Bach's changing world: voices in the community. The book begins with an overview (Baron's two chapters), moves to case-studies (on such topics as moral weeklies in Leipzig or the patronage of church music), and concludes with translations of two 18th-century texts on church music: Johann Kuhnau's preface to his 1709–10 collection of cantata texts and Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel's Zufällige Gedancken von der Kirchenmusic (1721). Two of the case-studies have been previously published elsewhere. Ulrich Siegele's chapter, 'Bach's situation in the cultural politics of contemporary Leipzig', is an abridged translation of three articles that appeared in the Bach-Jahrbuch of 1983, 1984 and 1986; the gist of Siegele's argument has already been translated into English as chapter 2 of The Cambridge companion to Bach, ed. John Butt (1997). Tanya Kevorkian's chapter, 'The reception of the cantata during Leipzig church services', is a reprint of an article from EM, xxx (2002), pp.26–44, although the original place of publication is not acknowledged in this book.

Baron's two chapters survey the 'tumultuous' philosophical and religious changes in German lands during Bach's lifetime. Her overview is largely based on secondary sources and textbooks (some dating back to the 1940s), but it should still help musicologists broaden their reading and critical perspectives. She shows how early Enlightenment thinkers such as Christian Weise and Christian Thomasius took adventurous intellectual positions, bordering on the heretical or subversive. Religious life in Leipzig was surprisingly heterodox, with Pietists, mystics and rationalists alongside orthodox Lutherans. It can be hard, though, to show how these philosophical and religious debates affected music. One suggestion by Baron is that the rapture of 18th-century mysticism is expressed in the 'vivid' and 'palpable' joyfulness of Bach's music (pp.72–3).

The challenge of linking intellectual history with musical works is evident in two of the case-studies. John Cleve's essay on 'Family values and dysfunctional families: home life in the moral weeklies and comedies of Bach's Leipzig' offers a lively account of the writings of Johann Christoph Gottsched and his wife Luise, but does not refer to music or musicians except for a brief look at social make-up on p.91. More successful in linking literary and musical history is Katherine R. Goodman's study 'From salon to Kaffeekranz: gender wars and the Coffee cantata in Bach's Leipzig'. She traces debates about women's role in cultural life (focusing on Christiane Mariane von Ziegler, one of the librettists for Bach's cantatas, and on Luise Gottsched) and relates these to Bach's 'Coffee' cantata, with its comic debate over whether women should be allowed to drink coffee.

The chapters by Ulrich Siegele and Tanya Kevorkian turn from literary history to Leipzig's...