Description

In Bach against Modernity, author Michael Marissen contests the common perception that J.S. Bach is a modern figure and instead suggests that, by eighteenth-century standards, Bach and his music in fact reflected and forcefully promoted a premodern world and life view. He provides overlooked or misunderstood evidence of Bach’s private engagement with religious and social issues that the composer also addressed in his public vocal compositions, and exposes intellectual and ethical problems with prevalent anachronistic views of Bach.

CONTENTS

Preface
Credits
Part I – Constraints of History on Interpretation
1. Bach Against Modernity
2. Bach’s Handwritten Entries in his Bible
Part II – Brief Commentaries
3. Fractal Gavottes and the Ephemeral World in Bach’s Cantata 64
4. Time and Eternities in Bach’s Cantata 23
5. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and a Blessed End
6. Bach and Art and Mammon
Part III – Texts
7. Historically Informed Renderings of the Librettos from Bach’s Cantatas (co-author, Daniel R. Melamed)
Part IV – Jews and Judaism
8. On the Jews and their So-Called Lies in the Fourth Gospel and Bach’s St. John Passion
9. Bach and Sons in the Jewish Salon Culture of 19th-Century Berlin
Part V – Theological Character of Secular Instrumental Music
10. Bach’s Sacred Brandenburg Concertos
11. The Serious Nature of the Quodlibet in Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Works Cited
Index of Bach’s Works
Index of Names and Subjects