Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass

by Yo Tomita (editor), Robin A. Leaver (Editor), Jan Smaczny (Editor)

The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of the composer's life, it is considered by many to be Johann Sebastian Bach's greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium 'Understanding Bach's B-minor mass' in 2007 at which seventy scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field. In revised and updated form, they form a through and systematic study of Bach's Opus Ultimum, including a wide range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure and proportion, sources and editions, and the reception of the work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the light of important new developments in the study of the piece, this collection demonstrates the innovation and rigor for which Bach scholarship has become known.

341 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2013

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of fourteen papers from a 2007 symposium drawing together various recognized experts on Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. The papers are divided into the categories Historical Background and Contexts, Structure and Proportion, Sources, and Reception. The Reception papers are concerned with the initial performances of the Mass in the 19th century, and also reveal that the Mass was already known in manuscript in the late 18th century.

This book is mainly meant for a scholarly audience and is not any kind of accessible introduction to the Mass in B minor. For that, readers might want to obtain John Butt’s Bach: Mass in B Minor volume in the Cambridge Music Handbook series. However, I am happy that I read this collection, as apparently some strides have been made in tracing the chronology of the Mass’s writing and manuscript sources for it since the 1990s.