Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass.

Peters, Mark A.

Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass. Edited by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xxix, 314 p. ISBN 9781107007901 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781107453555 (ebook), $79.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliographic references, indexes.

In reflecting on the state of research on Johann Sebastian Bach's B-Minor Mass in 1985, the tercentenary year of Bach's birth, Hans-Joachim Schulze dubbed the work the "perpetual touchstone for Bach research" (in Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Peter Williams [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 311-20). That Schulze's characterization of the B-Minor Mass is no less true now than it was in 1985 is demonstrated by an impressive new collection of essays published as Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass and edited by Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver, and Jan Smaczny. The fourteen essays, by Bach scholars across Europe and the United States, engage the B-Minor Mass from the perspectives of historical and cultural contexts, analysis, source study, and reception, providing new insights into one of the best-known and best-loved of Bach's works.

As explained in the preface, the volume grew out of the symposium "Understanding Bach's B-minor Mass" held at Queens University Belfast in November 2007. The essays in Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass were selected from those presented at the symposium and were revised for publication in 2013. The essays engage past research on the B-Minor Mass while contributing significantly to the body of scholarship on the work. In addition, the volume is carefully edited both for content and readability, and is a valuable contribution for scholars and also for performers or audience members looking for insights into the Mass.

Any volume that engages with Bach's B-Minor Mass must do so within the vast body of research on the work. In addition to a wealth of articles and essays, recent monographs dedicated to the B-Minor Mass include John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George B. Stauffer, Bach, The Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Christoph Wolff. Johann Sebastian Bach: Messe in h-Moll (Kassel: Barenreiter, 2009). Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass not only engages such scholarship throughout its chapters, but also particularly frames our understanding of the Mass within its history of performance, scholarship, and reception in its two opening essays. Christoph Wolff's "Past, present and future perspectives on Bach's B-minor Mass" (chapter 1) provides a lucid and accessible introduction to the Mass, its history, and the research questions surrounding it, while Robin A. Leaver's "Bach's Mass: 'Catholic' or 'Lutheran'?" (chapter 2) provides an excellent introduction to the Mass from the perspective of historical theology.

Chapters 3 and 4 likewise complement each other, providing readers with a context for understanding Bach's 1733 Missa (the Kyrie and Gloria of what would become the B-Minor Mass) within the wider framework of Mass settings in eighteenth-century Germany and particularly at the Dresden court. Janice B. Stockigt's "Bach's Missa BWV 232I in the context of Catholic Mass settings in Dresden, 1729-1733" (chapter 3) focuses on musical style, framing Bach's compositional choices in relation to other Missa settings extant at the Dresden court. Szymon Paczkowski's "The role and significance of the polonaise in the 'Quoniam' of the B-minor Mass" (chapter 4) complements Stockigt's essay well by exploring the cultural, political, and musical context for the Missa in Dresden. In fact, the chapter's title is misleading and does not do it justice, for while Paczkowski does address the polonaise in the "Quoniam," his goals for the chapter are much broader. As he states in his introduction, "this essay intends to show that the politics and culture of eighteenth-century Dresden provide a useful context for opening up to fresh enquiry some of Bach's creative intentions in the B-minor Mass" (p. 54), and Paczkowski achieves this goal admirably. Within this broader context, Paczkowski elucidates Bach's use of the polonaise in the "Quoniam" of the B-Minor Mass, demonstrating that Bach was consistent with Dresden practice in employing the polonaise for a text referring to Christ as King, while also honoring the Saxon elector Friedrich August II through this musical gesture. Paczkowski provides abundant evidence that the polonaise was considered at the Polish-Saxon court "as a 'royal dance,' symbolizing sovereign power in secular and religious contexts alike" (p. 82). Part I concludes with Michael Maul's consideration of the possibility that Bach's completion of the B-Minor Mass was related to the Musicalische Congregation in Vienna through a connection between the composer and Count Johann Adam von Questenberg.

Part II of Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass includes three analytical chapters focusing on structure and proportion. Ulrich Siegele's "Some observations on the formal design of Bach's B-minor Mass" (chapter 6) explores proportions in the work in terms of number of measures and time of performance with a consideration also of key structures, while Ruth Tatlow's "Parallel proportions, numerical structures and Harmonie in Bach's autograph score" (chapter 8) employs her theory of proportional parallelism to consider Bach's structuring both of sections within the work and of the Mass as a whole. On the basis of this analysis, Tatlow argues that Bach did indeed consider the work a unified whole, "creating a unity across the whole while keeping the four parts as discrete entities" (p. 162). Melvin P. Unger's "Chiastic reflection in the B-minor Mass: lament's paradoxical mirror" (chapter 7) likewise addresses issues of structure, focusing on the role and symbolism of the Crucifixus as the basis for understanding the theological implications of Bach's structuring of the Mass.

Part III, "Sources," opens with one of the volume's most important essays, Uwe Wolf's "Many problems, various solutions: editing Bach's B-minor Mass" (chapter 9). Wolf provides an excellent introduction to the challenges facing an editor seeking to determine the definitive score of the Mass, as well as a valuable overview of the work's publication history. Wolf describes the principal problems the sources present and ways these problems have been addressed in four important editions published since the mid-twentieth century: those edited by Friedrich Smend (Neue Bach-Ausgabe, 1954), Christoph Wolff (C. F. Peters, 1997), Joshua Rifkin (Breitkopf & Hartel, 2006), and the author, Uwe Wolf (revised Neue Bach-Ausgabe, 2010). Wolf carefully and fairly characterizes the editorial approach of each edition and compares the choices made in difficult passages by the various editors. This chapter is important not only for its introduction to the source situation for the B-Minor Mass, but also for an orientation of how to consider these four important editions of the work.

In chapter 10, Tatiana Shabalina introduces an important copy of the Mass that is held in die Manuscript Department of the Research Music Library of the Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory and appears to have been copied from a Frankfurt manuscript of ca. 1825-26 (D-F, Music- und Theaterabteilung, Mus. Hs. 145). Of particular interest here is not only the source stemma Shabalina establishes, but also her conclusion that the B-Minor Mass was likely known in Russia as early as the mid-nineteenth century.

The final four chapters of Exploring Bach's B-MinorMass present interesting new perspectives on the work's reception history: Ulrich Leisinger on the Viennese reception of the B-Minor Mass with particular focus on Haydn's copy of the Mass and the work's influence on Mozart's Mass in C Minor (chapter 11); Anselm Hartinger on Felix Mendelssohn's score of the B-Minor Mass and his constant efforts to establish the most faithful reading of the work he could both for scholarship and performance (chapter 12); Katharine Pardee on the reception of the B-Minor Mass in nineteenth-century England, with particular focus on how this reception related to that of other Bach compositions, especially the St. Matthew Passion (chapter 13); and Jan Smaczny on the reception of the Mass in Prague in the 1860s, with particular focus on the influence of Bach's music on the young Dvorak (chapter 14).

Exploring Bach's B-Minor Mass is commendable for its scope and clarity, for the ways in which it engages and builds upon prior research on the Mass, and for the new insights it reveals into our understanding of the B-Minor Mass. Leaver, Tomita, and Smaczny have provided us with a significant new body of scholarship on this "perpetual touchstone for Bach research."

MARK A. PETERS

Trinity Christian College