Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass

Cambridge University Press, 10/17/2013
EAN 9781107007901, ISBN10: 1107007909

Hardcover, 341 pages, 24.7 x 17.4 x 2 cm
Language: English

The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, it is considered by many to be the composer's greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium 'Understanding Bach's B-minor mass' at which scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field. In revised and updated form, they comprise a thorough and systematic study of Bach's Opus Ultimum, including a wide range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure and proportion, sources and editions, and the reception of the work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the light of important new developments in the study of the piece, this collection demonstrates the innovation and rigour for which Bach scholarship has become known.

Part I. Historical Background and Contexts
1. Past, present, and future – perspectives on Bach's B-minor Mass Christoph Wolff
2. Bach's Mass
'Catholic' or 'Lutheran'? Robin A. Leaver
3. Bach's Missa BWV 232I in the context of Catholic Mass settings in Dresden, 1729–1733 Janice B. Stockigt
4. The role and significance of the Polonaise in the 'Quoniam' of the B-minor Mass Szymon Paczkowski
5. 'The Great Catholic Mass'
Bach, Count Questenberg and the Musicalische congregation in Vienna Michael Maul
Part II. Structure and Proportion
6. Some observations on the formal design of Bach's B-minor Mass Ulrich Siegele
7. Chiastic reflection in the B-minor Mass
lament's paradoxical mirror Melvin P. Unger
8. Parallel proportions, numerical structures and harmonie in Bach's Autograph score Ruth Tatlow
Part III. Sources
9. Many problems, different solutions
editing Bach's B-minor Mass Uwe Wolf
10. Manuscript score No. 4500 in St Petersburg
a new source of the B-minor Mass Tatiana Shabalina
Part IV. Reception
11. Haydn's copy of the B-minor Mass and Mozart's Mass in C Minor
Viennese traditions of the B-minor Mass Ulrich Leisinger
12. A 'fairly correct copy of the mass'? Mendelssohn's score of the B-minor Mass as a document of the Romantics' view on matters of performance practice and source criticism Anselm Hartinger
13. The B-minor Mass in nineteenth-century England Katharine Pardee
14. Bach's B-minor Mass
an incarnation in Prague in the 1860s and its consequences Jan Smaczny
Appendix 1
Appendix 2.