Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius by Robert L. Marshall

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius by Robert L. Marshall Marshall Brown (bio) Robert L. Marshall. Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019). xxi, 330 pp. Robert L. Marshall’s Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius collects essays originally published since 1990, as a sequel to the 1989 collection The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which assembled essays from 1973 forward.1 In both books, some of the essays have brief added postscripts to bring them up to date, and the new essays are also lightly adapted to avoid anachronism and to incorporate cross-references. Marshall is surely well known to readers of this journal, and at least two of the essays from the earlier book, “Bach the Progressive” and “On Bach’s Universality,” are justifiably classics. There are no major departures in the new book, but there are some significant shifts in approach. Most of the essays in Marshall’s earlier book are philological, concerned (as the section titles have it) with evidence for Bach’s compositional process, with “Questions of Authenticity and Chronology,” and with performance practice. The earlier essays in the new book continue in that vein. Brief essays on the Wilhelm Friedrich Bach and Anna Magdalena Bach notebooks and on Mozart’s unfinished compositions review the evidence meticulously and draw modest conclusions, working toward serious reflection (e.g., “it appears that the creative act was always driven forward, step by step, along the unfolding form,” 251). While the notebook essay ends in hyperbole (“The historical value of the notebooks .. . can hardly be exaggerated,” 37), I welcome the impulse to employ the essayist’s encyclopedic knowledge toward some general reflections. Conversely, the longest essay, a survey of Bach’s keyboard music, is in the vein of the earlier volume’s survey of his music for flute, a set of learned and judicious annotations with only a brief final gesture toward a larger argument. Judicious learning has always been Marshall’s forte. Some triumphs here are: 1) a brief compromise with “my good friend [Joshua] [End Page 306] Rifkin” (115) on the size of Bach’s chorus (Marshall concedes that probably the choral movements were sometimes performed with Rifkin’s single voices, but surely also sometimes with larger groups); 2) a defense of the St. John Passion that leaves room for Jewish discomfort with the antisemitic Gospel text (Marshall himself is Jewish); 3) a welcoming review of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus on the occasion of the release of the film version (yes, the facts are distorted to accentuate Salieri’s presumed perspective, but it’s good entertainment and aroused substantial interest in Mozart); and especially 4) the book’s liveliest read, a wry survey of the scant information leading to critics’ innuendos about Johann Christian Bach’s sexuality. Earlier, Marshall dug into archives and scrutinized manuscripts. Bach and Mozart chiefly draws on book stacks, with an encyclopedic command of information old and new, unruffled by rare errors. Adorno did not coin the term Spätstil (149), but that hardly matters. Somewhat more consequential is the claim of affinity that “Bach, like Luther, was a native Thuringian” (54). Luther’s birthplace, Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld, is in the modern state of Sachsen-Anhalt, near the border of Thuringia but not in it, now or then, and while Luther was exiled to Eisenach in Thuringia for one crucial year, he lived chiefly in Wittenberg, in the heart of Saxony. And I don’t know of any warrant for the proposal in the Luther chapter that “one would like to think that for the formally gifted Johann Sebastian Bach [aufführen didn’t just mean perform but] also implied ‘to create’” (38). This last example is an instance of the book’s core mode, a somewhat loose weave of persuasive conjecture supported by endless information, not damaged by the very occasional out-of-place stitch. In a given paragraph—and there are many such—one may find: “if we are willing to lend any credence at all .. . and if we are willing to indulge a degree of plausible speculation in the absence...