Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass

This collection of essays presents a thorough and systematic study of Bach's B-minor Mass by leading scholars in the field.

Yo Tomita (Edited by), Robin A. Leaver (Edited by), Jan Smaczny (Edited by)

9781108749961, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 April 2020

344 pages, 28 b/w illus. 67 music examples
24.4 x 16.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.601 kg

'Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass is commendable for its scope and clarity, for the ways in which it engages and builds upon prior research on the Mass, and for the new insights it reveals into our understanding of the B-Minor Mass. Leaver, Tomita, and Smaczny have provided us with a significant new body of scholarship on this 'perpetual touchstone for Bach research'.' Mark A. Peters, Notes

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.

Subject Areas: Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Western "classical" music [AVGC]