Customer Reviews

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

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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.