Rethinking Bach ed. by Bettina Varwig

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rethinking Bach ed. by Bettina Varwig Markus Rathey (bio) Bettina Varwig, ed. Rethinking Bach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 414 pp. Responsible scholarship needs occasional course corrections, moments in time when leaders in the discipline come together to reevaluate methodologies, reassess long-held assumptions, and find new paths to approach their subject of study. These course corrections can be minor, but they can also amount to major paradigm shifts. The Oxford University Press series "Rethinking . . . " has provided a forum for new ideas in the study of major composers, and the volume on Johann Sebastian Bach, edited by Bettina Varwig, is a welcome addition to the series. It reflects a shift in Bach scholarship over the past decade that highlights the emotional qualities of Bach's works while downplaying the view of Bach as a mathematical composer. The inclusion of essays by fourteen authors (the number of Bach's name: B(2)+A(1)+C(3)+H(8)) might have been unintentional, but the fact that this reviewer noticed the significance of the number shows that Bach has been the subject of both valid and highly speculative methodologies in the past. Daniel R. Melamed's essay "Rethinking Bach Codes" provides an interesting and illuminating overview and demonstrates the historical and intellectual framework in which this scholarship emerged. He shows how most of the speculative theories are non-musical (such as the fascination with the number fourteen) and that they often provide a window for listeners into the foreign sonic and intellectual world of Bach's music. What Melamed's essay clearly shows is how modern listening conventions and difficulties lead to scholarly approaches that sometimes prove to be ahistorical or even wrong. A stronger focus on the listener and their perspective is also at the center of John Butt's brilliant essay on "Bach's Works and the Listener's Viewpoint." Using Bach's Christmas Oratorio as a case study, Butt shows how the emerging work concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has influenced the way modern listeners (and scholars) perceive a piece that consists of six seemingly independent cantatas. By mining the philosophical discourse of Bach's time (without suggesting that Bach had to be familiar with every single detail of it), [End Page 129] Butt provides a new understanding that culminates in the suggestion that "a Leibnizian would see a well-crafted piece of music as realizing something of God's reality in an infinite causal chain, connecting meanings and emotions in ways that a composer intuits in the mathematical relationships of notes in time" (264). While Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his philosophy have been referenced occasionally by Bach scholars, Butt's innovative approach offers a new path that students of Bach can take to understand his music within the intellectual landscape of his time. A proper understanding of Bach and his music has to be based on reliable editions of his works; and, just as in the theological and philosophical interpretations explored by Melamed and Butt, misconceptions and misreadings have sometimes obscured important details. Joshua Rifkin's essay, "Rethinking Editions: Mass, Missa, and Monument Culture," provides a fundamental reassessment of practices of editing Bach's works in the twenty-first century. It is a laudable strength of the book that it takes the idea of "Bach's time" from a broad and wholistic perspective. Bach's time is the philosophical discourse of the eighteenth century, it is the influence of contemporary theology on his works (as discussed in the essay by Jeremy Begbie), it is Bach's humor (brilliantly explored by David Yearsley), and it is also the material culture that surrounded Bach. Stephen Rose, whose work on the literary culture of Bach's time has shed new light on the status of the musician and his place in the literary imagination,1 makes a strong case in his essay that Bach's works are more than simply "products of his mind" (11). Rather, Rose shows that the material culture of Bach's time had a significant impact as well. In Leipzig, Bach lived in one of the primary trading hubs in Germany and he participated in and engaged with contemporary consumer culture. Rose rightly...