Reviewed by: Bach’s Famous Choir: The Saint Thomas School in Leipzig, 1212–1804 by Michael Maul Mark Nabholz Bach’s Famous Choir: The Saint Thomas School in Leipzig, 1212–1804. By Michael Maul. Translated by Richard Howe. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2018. [xviii, 394 p. ISBN 9781783271696 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9781787444362 (e-book), $24.99.] Appendixes, endnotes, bibliography, indexes. There is no shortage of well-known sources that delve into Johann Sebastian Bach’s famed tenure as cantor at Leipzig’s St. Thomas School. But we must pass the halfway point in Bach’s Famous Choir before that inescapable name appears as more than a passing reference, because, despite the book’s title, this is the school’s story, and the school was over five centuries old by the time Bach arrived as cantor in 1723. Using previously neglected sources, including many long believed to be lost, Michael Maul’s meticulous research releases an avalanche of detail that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the larger narratives, but from a myriad of data points he skillfully constructs a three-dimensional picture of life at the St. Thomas School over a span of nearly six centuries. His research launched by a question concerning Bach (“Why would any leader of a famous court orchestra want to resign a position working with professional musicians in order to take a job with a municipal boy’s school and the ‘dusty robes’ of a cantor?” [p. 1]), Maul traces the transformation of the school from its local monastic beginnings to its sometimes tenuous perpetuity as the exemplary music school renowned throughout the German-speaking lands, the gradual transfer of the school’s oversight from church to civic authorities, and the impact of the Lutheran reforms on its role in the life of the city. And yet he manages to do so in a way that transforms the dry accounts in many of his sources into an [End Page 62] unmistakably human story with living, breathing personalities. While Maul’s painstaking research convolutes through a tangle of minutia—such as the payment for meals served to boarding students; the salaries of the cantor, junior faculty, and tutors along with the inevitable pay-equity conflicts; the negotiations regarding distribution of income generated from street singing and funeral music; and the recurring debate over who held the final authority on boarding-school admission decisions— he manages to present in Bach’s Famous Choir a coherent and lively chronology of the pre- and post-Bach cantors at a level of detail never before attempted in a single volume. His writing style is engaging and even at times entertaining, as is readily apparent in his account of Cantor Johann Hermann Schein running afoul of the magistrates in Dresden for an unacceptably ostentatious musical display at the wedding of the Leipzig Mayor’s son (pp. 44–46). As a result of this careful chronicling, themes emerge that have immediate currency. The account of the drastic reduction in funding for the school and its music because of the city’s crippling debt, brought on by “extravagant outlays in all directions, rampant nepotism and cronyism, and borrowing to finance many of its undertakings,” reads like the headlines in this morning’s paper (p. 50). It is enlightening and strangely heartening to learn that Johann Kuhnau, who served as cantor from 1701 to 1722, faced funding issues during his tenure, similar to those that church and educational musicians face today, when the town council ended funding of instrumentalists and sought to know how to obtain their services at no cost (p. 115). In retrospect, one of the most significant takeaways from my reading is the number of extraordinary musicians who were contemporaries of the famous names but now are entirely forgotten. It is our loss, for instance, that we know so little of Sebastian Knupfer, who became cantor in 1657 at age twenty-three and whose funeral invitation in 1676 characterized him as a musician “the likes of whom had never before been seen in Leipzig and presumably will never be seen again” (p. 118). Or Johann Rosenmüller (1617– 1684), in whom his patron, Heinrich Schütz, placed such firm confidence that he not only...