Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century by Andrew Talle (review)

Andrew Talle’s new volume is a book about people: some of these people are professional musicians and some barely amateurs, but all of them engage with music making in one way or another. From the point of view of music history, all of these people might be considered “minor figures”, but the historical scene that these minor figures inhabit, eighteenth-century Germany, makes their daily musical experiences important both in providing a lively context for the study of Bach and other Meister, and for better understanding a complicated and fascinating culture of the past. In short, Talle’s work is an important study in social history.

Chapter 1 presents evidence for the growing popularity of keyboard music, and gives a helpful introduction to the term ‘galant’ and to its various manifestations in eighteenth-century Germany. Then begins a series of ten portraits (sometimes double portraits), each trying to make an important point about how music operated or how it was perceived. Chapter 2, for example, deals with the various ways in which people considered musical instruments. Importantly, Talle takes the perspective not of performers or composers but rather that of a clavichord builder who probably saw himself as a mechanic rather than an artist; and that of one of his clients—a tax collector who saw the clavichord as a symbol of social status. Very interesting analyses of data are presented along the way, from the builder’s clientele (pp. 34–38) to a list of materials used for building a clavichord, including the geographical origins of those materials (p. 41).

Chapter 3 enters the domestic sphere and analyses the lives of young women, especially of the bourgeoisie and the nobility, who learned to play the keyboard, usually until they got married. The chapter analyses the social situation of an individual. The focus here is on a young girl from a wealthy bourgeois family, Christiane Sibÿlla Bose, who studied with the organist Johann Gottlieb Görner. The Boses lived across the street from the Thomaskirche. We know that Christiane was on friendly terms with Anna Magdalena Bach, and that Görner was Johann Sebastian Bach’s younger colleague in that church. As is often the case in social history, it takes a leap of imagination to reconstruct aspects of character, gestures, landscape, and soundscape around the historical figures. Thus, one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the book describes the noises Bose would have heard beneath her window (p. 59)—it is a historiographical minefield but it is well executed.

Chapter 4 analyses James Boswell’s attempt to court Caroline Henriette Kircheisen, the role music played in that attempt, and the role it played more generally in romantic negotiations in that period. Chapter 5 continues the same line of enquiry, but this time focusing not on a bourgeois girl but on the members of the nobility. The main source for the chapter is the repertoire played by two sisters, the young Countesses zu Epstein, as recorded in manuscript, copied primarily by their teacher. The methodology here is more traditional: the author closely examines the makeup of the countesses’ manuscript, the technical requirements of the repertoire, and a few works written by the sisters themselves. His explanation why just one specific piece by Bach (the concluding movement of the B-flat major partita, BWV 825) appears in that manuscript is very persuasive and helps to show that the criteria for “analysis” of Bach’s music should sometimes be much more mundane than structure, proportion, and rhetoric.

In Chapter 6 the reader is invited to slide down the social scale to a couple whose main assets were intellectual—Johann Christoph Gottsched and his wife Luise (née Kulmus) Gottsched. The role of music, not only during their six years of courtship but also later in their married life, is beautifully described. For Bach scholars, the chapter offers some...