Leipzig after Bach: Church & Concert Life in a German City by Jeffrey S. Sposato

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leipzig after Bach: Church & Concert Life in a German City by Jeffrey S. Sposato R. Larry Todd (bio) Jeffrey S. Sposato. Leipzig after Bach: Church & Concert Life in a German City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). xix, 313 pp. The iconic image of J. S. Bach as the very epitome of musical Lutheranism has long been a fixture in music histories. But, as Jeffrey Sposato reminds us with impressive erudition in his new monograph, the strain of Lutheranism that Bach practiced during his tenure in Leipzig did not completely accord with how the new faith was practiced in other Reformation centers that had taken root in German realms in the sixteenth century. For in large part, Leipzig remained a "beacon of conservative Lutheran thought" that retained "all aspects of Catholic liturgy and tradition" not "in direct conflict with Reformation theology" (12–13). Though the Enlightenment and its rationalist philosophies would influence Protestant Germany writ large in the eighteenth century, in Leipzig the Hauptgottesdienst essentially remained unchanged since its establishment in the city's churches on Pentecost Sunday in 1539. Paradoxically, if Dresden, capital of Saxony, was the seat of the region's political power, where Saxon electors and kings professed the Catholic faith, Leipzig, which lacked a court presence and instead projected its influence as a major mercantile center through its trade fairs, adhered to Lutheranism. Thus, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose region, his religion) established by the Peace of Augsburg (1555) did not obtain throughout Saxony, where Leipzig became a center of Lutheranism while Dresden remained Catholic. But in order for this "compromise" to work, Leipzig by and large continued to observe a Lutheran orthodoxy that at once retained several ties to Catholic liturgy and resisted newer, heterodox Protestant directions that tested that orthodoxy. Chief among these were pietism and the outbreak of Enlightenment thought. As Sposato argues, pietism, notwithstanding its stimulation of hymn composition and Bible study, did not have a significant impact on Leipzig church services; similarly, Enlightenment rationalism, as propounded by Johann Christoph Gottsched, who taught at the University, did not affect the course of church worship until later in the eighteenth century. So despite the tectonic spiritual disruptions caused by the Reformation, Leipzig maintained ties to the reigning Catholicism practiced in Dresden only some seventy-five miles to the southeast. What these political realities had meant for Luther was that "despite his significant theological differences with the Roman church, when it came to constructing a [End Page 308] liturgy, he attacked the Catholic Ordo Missae with a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer" (61). And Leipzig, in part because of its proximity to Dresden, remained a bulwark of orthodox Lutheranism that kept "the most visible Catholic traditions intact," altering "only those aspects of the mass that directly contradict[ed] Lutheran precepts" (62). As well trodden as this history has been by generations of scholars, much of their research has centered, understandably enough, on the career of Bach, and in particular on his Leipzig years as Thomaskantor (1723–1750). Considerably less attention has been focused on the musical life of the city in the century after Bach, leading up to Mendelssohn's celebrated tenure as the civic music director (1835–1847). In three probing, extended chapters that make up the bulk of the volume, Sposato treats three relationships, centered on the positions of Thomaskantor and city Kapellmeister, that document the musical life of the city, but have largely evaded a thorough accounting: Johann Friedrich Doles and Johann Adam Hiller, Hiller and Johann Gottfried Schicht, and Moritz Hauptmann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. One of the author's signal accomplishments in this volume is to weave a rich narrative history of this period, and to explicate the traditions of the musical culture that connected Bach's legacy to Mendelssohn. And another, equally significant contribution is to trace the symbiotic relationship between musical life in the church and concert hall, and to show how Seneca the Younger's maxim chosen by Hiller for the Gewandhaus Concerts in 1781—"res severa est gaudium verum" ("a serious matter is a true joy," Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, 23)—continued to inform Leipzig musical life down through the...