Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T09:31:52.559Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Art and Science: or Bach as an Expositor of the Bible

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W. R. Ward
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For a long time before dramatic recent events it has been clear that the German Democratic Republic has been in die position, embarrassing to a Marxist system, of having nothing generally marketable left except (to use the jargon) ‘superstructure’. The Luther celebrations conveniendy bolstered the implicit claim of the GDR to embody Saxony’s long-delayed revenge upon Prussia; still more conveniendy, they paid handsomely. Even the Francke celebrations probably paid their way, ruinous though his Orphan House has been allowed to become. When I was in Halle, a hard-pressed government had removed the statue of Handel (originally paid for in part by English subscriptions) for head-to-foot embellishment in gold leaf, and a Handel Festival office in the town was manned throughout the year. Bach is still more crucial, both to the republic’s need to pay its way and to the competition with the Federal Republic for the possession of the national tradition. There is no counterpart in Britain to the strength of the Passion-music tradition in East Germany. The celebrations which reach their peak in Easter Week at St Thomas’s, Leipzig, are like a cross between Wembley and Wimbledon here, the difference being that the black market in tickets is organized by the State for its own benefit. If Bach research in East Germany, based either on musicology or the Church, has remained an industry of overwhelming amplitude and technical complexity, the State has had its own Bach-research collective located in Leipzig, dedicated among other things to establishing the relation between Bach and the Enlightenment, that first chapter in the Marxist history of human liberation. Now that a good proportion of the population of the GDR seems bent on liberation by leaving the republic or sinking it, the moment seems ripe to take note for non-specialist readers of some of what has been achieved there in recent years.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 28: The Church and the Arts , 1992 , pp. 343 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Leaver, Robin A., Bachs theologische Bibliothek. Eine kritische Bibliographie (Neuhausen and Stuttgart, 1983)Google Scholar.

2 Bach-Dokumente, 4 vols (Leipzig and Kassel, 1963-79), 1, p. 19.

3 For this biographical material see the brief study by the doyen of Bach research, Walter Blankenburg, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, in M. Greschat, ed., Orthodoxie und Pietismus-Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, 7 (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 301, 304-5.

4 Bach-Dokumente, 1, p. 67.

5 Ibid., 1, p. 53.

6 There is a colour reproduction of this window in Martin Petzoldt and Joachim Petri, Johann Sebastian Bach. Ehre sei dir Gott gesungen ([East] Berlin and Göttingen, 1988), pp. 168-70.

7 This list has been most recently reprinted in Pietismus und Neuzeit, 12 (1986), pp. 180-1.

8 On all this see Johannes Wallmann, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und die “Geistlichen Bücher” seiner Bibliothek’, Pietismus und Neuzeit, 12 (1986), pp. 162-81.

9 Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter, ed. L. Geiger (Leipzig, n.d. [1902]), 2, p. 468.

10 Axmacher, Elke, ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heyland sterben’. Untersuchungen zum Wanàel des Passions-verstãndnisses im frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Neuhausen and Stuttgart, 1984), ‘Die Deutung der Passion Jesu im Text der Matthaus-Passion von J. S. Bach’, Luther, 56 (1985), pp. 49–69 Google Scholar, ‘Ein Quellenfund zum Text der Matthäus-Passion’, Bach-Jahrhuch, 64 (1978), pp. 49-69, ‘Bachs Kantaten in auslegungsgeschichtlicher Sicht’, Martin Petzoldt, ed., Bach als Ausleger der Bibel. Theologische und musikwissenschaftliche Studien zum Werk Johann Sebastian Bachs ([East] Berlin and Götingen, 1985), pp. 15-32.

11 On the above see Axmacher, ‘Bachs Kantaten’, pp. 15-16.

12 See G. Ebeling’s article ‘Hermeneutik’, in RGG, 3, cols 249-50.

13 Werthemann, Helene, Die Bedeutung der alttestamentlichen Historien in Johann Sebastian Bachs Kantaten (Basle, 1959), pp. 1–5.Google Scholar

14 Blume, Friedrich, Syntagma Musicologicum II, ed. A Abert, A. and Rulinke, M. (Kassel, Basle, Tours, and London, 1973), p. 192.Google Scholar

15 Axmacher, ‘Bachs Kantaten’, pp. 17-23. Cf. Winfried Zeller, ‘Tradition und Exegese. Johann Sebastian Bach und Martin Schillings Lied, “Herzlich lieb hab ich dir, o Herr”’, in Petzoldt, Bach als Ausleger, pp. 151-76.

16 Petzoldt, M., ‘Christian Wiese d. A und Christoph Wolle—zwrei Leipziger Beichtvater Bachs, Vertreter zweier auslegungsgeschichtlicher Abschritte der ausgehenden lutherischen Orthodoxie’, in Petzoldt, ed., Bach als Ausleger, pp. 109–29.Google Scholar

17 Quoted in Walter Blankenburg, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und die Aufklärung’ in Walter Blankenburg, ed., Johann Sebastian Back= Wege der Forschung, 170 (Darmstadt, 1970), pp. 100-10, at p. 103 [repr. from Bach Gedenkschaft (Freiburg im Breisgau and Zurich, 1950), pp. 25-34]. For a brief introduction to the thorough-bass see the article ‘Figured bass’, in Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 8th edn (London, 1950), pp. 317-18.

18 Axmacher, ‘Aus liebe will mein Heyland sterben’, pp. 149,152-61,204-8.

19 For a non-Marxist argument to the same effect see Ulrich Siegele, ‘Bachs Ort in Orthodoxie und Aufklärung’, Musik und Kirche, 51 (1981), pp. 3-14.

20 As Werner Neumann harshly put it in a public discussion, the innumerable dedications and addresses of homage to princes and nobility by Bach and his contemporaries would be odd garb for an anti-feudal, anti-absolutist emancipation movement. Johann Sebastian Bach una die Aufklärung ed. for the Forschungskollektiv ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’ by Reinhard Szeskus (Leipzig, 1982), p. 131.

21 Ibid., 4, pp. 8-9.

22 Blankenburg, Walter, ‘Die Bach-forschung seit etwa 1965’, Acta Musicologica, 55 (1983), pp. 39–40 Google Scholar. Cf. his ‘Aufklärungsauslegung der Bibel in Leipzig zur Zeit Bachs. Zu Johann Christoph Gottscheds Homiletik’, in Petzoldt, ed., Bach als Ausleger, pp. 97-108.

23 ‘And he called [the well] Sheba: therefore the name of the city is Beer-sheba unto this day.’

24 The texts are usefully assembled and commented on in Petzold and Petri, Johann Sebastian Bach, pp. 18-21, 44-7, 8-11, 86-8, 104-7, 120-3, 136-8.