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ANDREW TALLE , ED. J. S. BACH AND HIS GERMAN CONTEMPORARIES Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2013 pp. x + 151, isbn 978 0 252 03813 6
Reviews: Books
Since the early nineteenth century, when Johann Nikolaus Forkel published his biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, the image of the composer that has overwhelmingly dominated both the scholarly discourse and the popular imagination has been one of an isolated musical genius. Over the past decade or so, however, this view has begun to change, owing to an explosion of new research into Bach's contemporaries - the composers and musicians with whom he was personally acquainted and whose music he admired. A number of factors have driven this work, including the recovery from Eastern Europe of treasures such as the archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, and the systematic cataloguing and digitization of whole repertories of eighteenth-century court music (such as the recent 'Schrank II' project based in Dresden). Together with pioneering studies of individuals such as Graupner, Telemann, Zelenka and Pisendel, and investigations into the contents of Bach's own personal library, we are beginning to build a new and vital picture of Bach's world. From this, he emerges not as an isolated genius, but as an exceptional part of a diverse and extraordinarily prolific community of musicians working in towns and courts across Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Perhaps understandably, this revisionist attitude has not proved entirely welcome, and continues to provoke hostility and resistance from many in Bach scholarship. Indeed, the present volume styles itself as 'provocative' for offering such a strong counternarrative to the traditional view. It is the ninth in the American Bach Society's ongoing series Bach Perspectives (a tenth has since been published). Previous volumes have concentrated on such diverse subjects as Bach's oratorios, his relationship to the Breitkopf publishing house and the eighteenth-century music trade, and Bach in America. This diversity of subjects is one of the series's great strengths, and one that is certainly evident in the present volume.
The opening essay, by Wolfgang Hirschmann, is subtitled 'Individuality and Variety in the Works of Bach and His German Contemporaries', but it is really focused on the music of one famous contemporary, Georg Philipp Telemann. This...