Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohns Revival of the St. Matthew Passion [Hardcover]

Celia Applegate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2005

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is universally acknowledged to be one of the world’s supreme musical masterpieces, yet in the years after Bach’s death it was forgotten by all but a small number of his pupils and admirers. The public rediscovered it in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the work before a glittering audience of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Prussian royals, and civic notables. The concert soon became the stuff of legend, sparking a revival of interest in and performance of Bach that has continued to this day. Mendelssohn’s performance gave rise to the notion that recovering and performing Bach’s music was somehow "national work." In 1865 Wagner would claim that Bach embodied "the history of the German spirit’s inmost life." That the man most responsible for the revival of a masterwork of German Protestant culture was himself a converted Jew struck contemporaries as less remarkable than it does us today—a statement that embraces both the great achievements and the disasters of 150 years of German history.

In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans’ collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were "the people of music." Applegate assesses the impact on music’s cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Celia Applegate is Associate Professor of History at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Music and German National Identity and A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (November 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080144389X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801443893
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,211,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars immensely important, July 15, 2006

By 

Brendan Fay "Germanist" (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohns Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Hardcover)

This is an extremely imoportant book and one, moreover, that had to be written. Applegate's diagnoses of the aesthetic, religious and cultural undercurrents which served to promote the 1829 performance of arguably the most important, not to say profound, piece of sacred music in the Western canon does much in the way of illuminating the role that most Protestant of pieces served in the nascent formation of a distinctly German national identity. Indispensable for students of German history as well as aesthetic and cultural historians interested in the role the arts, and above all music, played in early nineteenth-century Germany.