Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St Matthew Passion (review)

The 1829 revival of the St Matthew Passion has long been given a privileged place in accounts of nineteenth-century German music history. Yet the significance of the three Berlin performances in March and April of that year is far from clear. Performances of large-scale Baroque choral works were common enough, after all, by the late 1820s, and it was a matter of chance that Johann Nepomuk Schelbe and his Frankfurt Cäcilienverein were pipped at the post by Mendelssohn and the Berlin Singakademie. Indeed, it may seem that our continued privileging of the Berlin performances represents a continuation of contemporary spin: that the most influential aspect of the Berlin revival was the extraordinary press campaign that surrounded it, waged by Adolph Bernhard Marx in his Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.

Given the importance accorded to the 1829 revival, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been devoted to its aesthetic, cultural, and political foundations and significance. In many ways, Martin Geck's forty-year-old study of the revival (Die Wiederentdeckung der Matthäuspassion im 19. Jahrhundert: Die zeitgenössischen Dokumente und ihre ideengeschichtliche Deutung (Regensburg, 1967)) remains a model of its kind, combining extensive documentation of the performances of the work from 1829 to 1833 with detailed discussion of the musical forces, cuts, and reworkings employed. But, aside from a brief introductory sketch, Geck does not locate these performances within the broader history of the Bach revival, or examine the institutional and cultural factors that gave rise to them. Celia Applegate's monograph supplements rather than supersedes Geck's account, treating the 1829 revival as the culmination of trends in German culture, aesthetics and music criticism. Viewed in this way, the event takes on an even greater significance, functioning as 'a moment of consolidation, perhaps even of transformation, in collective life and for many listeners a moment of self-realization, which encompassed all that their philosophers and writers had been saying of the relationship between individuality, spirituality, nationality, and the aesthetic life' (p. 3). Regardless of the merits of this claim, the 1829 revival certainly provides a useful point of orientation from which to examine broader aspects of German musical thought, culture, and national identity. One benefit of this approach is that it impels Applegate to tackle aspects of music history-in particular the growth of music criticism and the culture of amateur performance-that have only recently begun to receive sustained attention.

Each of the first five chapters of the book takes a similar approach, beginning with a broad-based examination of a topic (Mendelssohn's early career; music aesthetics and national identity; music journalism and strategies of evaluation; amateurism and the cultivation of musical taste; historicism and religious music in the concert hall) and concluding by relating that topic to the 1829 revival. On the positive side, this structure enables Applegate to approach the revival from a variety of perspectives, as if viewing a sculpture from different angles. On the negative side, the event disappears from sight for much of the book, or is merely glimpsed from a distance (as in the discussion of Johann Mattheson and early eighteenth-century music aesthetics, pp. 47-51). Readers whose principal interest is in the revival itself will not only have to skip from chapter to chapter, but tolerate a large amount of repetition along the way. They will also be frustrated by inconsistencies: Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, for example, is formally introduced only on page 187, even though the reader will have encountered him on page 25 (and it is irritating that the title of his book Über Reinheit der Tonkunst is given in two different forms and two different translations).

If the book's structure leads to some oddities (it is not until p. 200 that Applegate gives a sketch of the Bach revival prior to 1829), there...