J. S. Bach and the German Motet by Daniel R. MelamedReview by: John ButtJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 211-217Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832070 .

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Reviews 211

(the first-person text passages and quotations from the Song of Songs in the Eucharistic motet O quam suavis est Domine); how she provided a fo- rum for the musical talents of her sister nuns (the long melismas in thirds at the end of Surgamus omnes that bespeak a sheer joy in singing); how she might have responded to episcopal preaching (the preponderance of dia- logue works and the use of alleluias at the end of mournful texts to reflect the Christian optimism that Federigo Borromeo espoused); and how cer- tain pieces seem geared to the public display so important to the convent's and city's prestige (the impressive scoring and lively concertato style of the Vespers psalms). One of the most striking examples of Kendrick's keen insight comes in his analysis of Cozzolani's setting of Beatus vir (pp. 341- 44). Psalm settings, by their very nature, are often more stylized and less expressive than motets. This setting is, however, the only one in the seventeenth-century Milanese repertory to bear the rubric "in forma di dialogo." The reworked text, with its "forced interrogatives" and double refrain, is set in such a way as to suggest that Cozzolani intended it "as a tribute to a virtuous, joyous, generous, and deceased man," perhaps even the beloved Federigo Borromeo.

The book concludes with a series of appendixes, including transcriptions of seventy-four documents; a list of Milanese convents with data regarding size, order, and liturgy; the prefaces and contents of thirty-eight printed volumes with dedications to Milanese nuns; a catalogue of the works of Milanese nun composers; a reconstruction of Vespers at Santa Radegonda; and transcriptions of two complete works, a duet by Cozzolani and a solo by Badalla.

If the figures of Cozzolani and Federigo Borromeo seem to dominate this review, it is because the finest passages in this excellent book concern them. In the spirit of Milan's holy women, though, to whom food was such an important symbol, these are but two courses in a sumptuous feast. In bringing to light the compositions and musical activities of Milanese nuns, Kendrick has also furnished a detailed perspective on a city that has, until now, figured little in histories of music in the Baroque. Celestial Sirens is an essential addition to the library of any historian with an interest in the sa- cred music of Seicento Italy.

COLLEEN REARDON

J. S. Bach and the German Motet by Daniel R. Melamed. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1995. xvi, 229 pp.

Daniel Melamed observes that Bach's motets have hitherto stood in "splen- did isolation" from the German motet tradition. His aim in J. S. Bach and the German Motet is to redress the balance, demonstrating the richness of

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the motet genre and style in Bach's environment and showing how Bach's own compositions belong within - rather than outside - this tradition. Al-

though the author does not provide a much-needed analytical and stylistic study of Bach's motets, his contribution to our knowledge of Bach's cre- ative process is considerable. The information on the context, definition, and connotations of the motet is also welcome and, with Melamed's study of the AltbachischesArchiv, 1 we learn much about Bach's attitude toward the music of his predecessors and his apparent role as guardian of his family's achievement.

The book begins with a survey of the concept and term motet, followed

by a consideration of Bach's own motets and motet style in his other con- certed compositions. Although Melamed states at the outset that the pieces of the Altbachisches Archiv "[give] us a glimpse at the kind of music with which [Bach] grew up" (p. 3), he defers discussion of these and related works to the end of the book, so that we learn of Bach's closest known contact with seventeenth-century motets after, rather than before, the

study of his own compositions. Doubtless Melamed chose to do so because he can find no evidence that Bach knew these pieces before his later years (i.e., until after he had composed his own motets). Nevertheless, this re- veals a somewhat frustrating side to his approach: he is reluctant to exam- ine any issue for which no documentary evidence survives. Although one of his main objectives is to demonstrate Bach's indebtedness to his prede- cessors and the generic context, it seems as if he wishes to shift to the reader the responsibility--and risk-of connecting the archive to Bach's compo- sitional development.

The tendency to deal only with incontestable evidence results in some strange balances elsewhere in the study. For instance, when there are sources to discuss and evaluate, Melamed gives considerable attention to works that have often been pushed to the very margins of the authentic Bach canon, yet he offers surprisingly little insight into well-known prob- lems such as the authenticity and provenance of Lobet den Herrn (BWV 230). Although he notes the recent discovery of a pre-1800 source (p. 37), the general absence of source material appears to preclude discussion of the many issues surrounding this piece.

Melamed opens with an illuminating discussion of the definitions of the term motet and its genre, revealing a complex conventional relationship be- tween text type, musical style, and status. In its most general sense, the term was applied to settings of German-language biblical and chorale texts lack- ing independent instruments (Melamed presents convincing evidence that Bach frequently doubled the vocal parts of his own and other composers'

1. A collection of works by older members of the Bach family that J. S. Bach himself seems to have assembled and owned in the latter years of his life. C. P. E. Bach inherited the col- lection, and his estate catalogue gives a useful list of its contents.

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motets with string and wind instruments). It is interesting to read that the genre had been cultivated particularly in Thuringia and Saxony, precisely the states in which Bach was to work. By Bach's time, however, the motet was evidently viewed as somewhat archaic and was often associated with and performed by lesser musical establishments. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that in Bach's environment, at any rate, even the best choirs regularly sang Latin motets, particularly from the Bodenschatz collection dating back to 1603 (p. 20). Perhaps Bach's interest in the genre was unusual, or perhaps the motet had a specific liturgical or exegetical function in Leipzig that no other genre could fulfill. Once again, Melamed gives this intriguing issue no further consideration, presumably because to do so would take us too far afield from the documents.

If Melamed seems overly cautious in speculating when there is no per- tinent evidence, he becomes a veritable master chef of bold hypotheses once armed with a few good sources. Most impressive here is his attempt to restore to the Bach canon the motet Ich lasse dich nicht (BWV Anh. 159),2 which, although preserved in a partial Bach autograph, has fre- quently been attributed to a cousin of Bach's father, Johann Christoph Bach. Melamed leaves no straw ungrasped in pushing the weight of the evidence toward Bach: for example, the copyist Krdiuter's notation of a time signature closely resembling the form Bach used might suggest that he was copying from Bach's composing score, and the similarity of the motet's opening with a gavotte from Lully's Armide (p. 58) might connect it with the Weimar years when Prince Johann Ernst traveled to Amsterdam to bring back the latest Italian and French music. Melamed's overall conclu- sions are indeed persuasive, and the discussion of authorship here brings to light some important issues. Given that many scholars have (perhaps too readily) accepted the work as Johann Christoph's (pp. 45-46) and that at least one now attributes it to the latter's brother, Johann Michael,3 we might ask how our perception of the piece changes if we believe it to be by Sebastian. Does it have to be by a single composer? The very ambiguity of the case - and perhaps Melamed strives for too great a degree of closure here-certainly buttresses his argument that Bach's motets should be un- derstood within the context of the local tradition.

Melamed is also concerned to modify the chronology of Bach's motets. He suggests that both Fiirchte dich nicht (BWV 228) and Ich lasse dich nicht belong to the Weimar years, thus challenging the customary assignment of

2. This is also covered by his article 'The Authorship of the Motet Ich lasse dich nicht (BWV Anh. 159)," this Journal 41 (1988): 491-526.

3. Melamed cites the argument by Joshua Rifkin, presented in an unpublished BBC broadcast script, that Ich lasse dich nicht shares much of its contrapuntal style and overall form with Johann Michael Bach's Nun hab ich Wberwunden (pp. 55-56). Melamed objects that formal features such as the fugal techniques and text type are different, although he does not address questions of overall style or quality.

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214 Journal of the American Musicological Society

all the motets to the Leipzig period. Moreover, he demonstrates that some of the Leipzig motets show signs of a long compositional history. Here he becomes a musicological detective of the Grand Postwar Bach Tradition, examining the minutiae of Bach's handwriting in Der Geist hilft (BWV 226) and suggesting, for instance, that the first movement may originally have been a duet for two sopranos (indeed, there are models in various cantatas, as he shows on pp. 70-71). Ironically, this hypothesis under- mines Melamed's remarks elsewhere in the book that scholars have been too eager to see the motets as largely influenced by the cantatas rather than by the motet genre and tradition.

With regard to "Sondern der Geist selbst," the second movement of BWV 226, he observes that the imitative entries of the subject are written in a consistently neater hand than the other material, suggesting that the piece was perhaps copied from a model for a smaller number of voices (pp. 73-80). From my knowledge of the case and others like it, I remain unconvinced. I would suggest, on the contrary, that there is every reason to view this as fresh composition: the calligraphic writing applies only to the imitative entries in their linear succession, and all (not merely some) of the accompanying material is in the composing hand. As Melamed admits, Robert Marshall has observed that Bach commonly wrote out the state- ments of subjects and answers before writing the rest,4 and, although some- what more marked than the norm, the contrast of script hardly points to the revision of an existing composition. The handwriting of the successive entries could be neater precisely because Bach merely had to copy or transpose them, rather than compose them afresh. Furthermore, though Melamed infers that the original model had fewer than eight voices - by the time all the voices have entered there are only five real parts -his argument is somewhat weakened by the case of the fugue in the eight-part Singet dem Herrn (BWV 225), in which there are only four fugal voices (and no one has suggested that Bach may have adapted this from a model with fewer voices.)

Melamed's final point about Der Geist hilft concerns the concluding cho- rale, which is found only in the performing parts; the autograph score merely contains the direction "Choral seqt." He wonders why Bach himself copied the final chorale into at least three of the vocal parts, "a task that could easily have been left to even the most inexperienced copyist" (p. 84). One of his hypotheses seems eminently probable: Bach copied it from an- other source and probably from another key. He further suggests that- given the lack of instrumental parts to the chorale-Bach performed this chorale separately, perhaps at the graveside of the Thomasschule rector, Johann Heinrich Ernesti (at whose funeral the motet was performed in

4. Robert Marshall, The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach: A Study oftheAutograph Scores of the Vocal Works, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 1:133ff

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1729), and that it is thus "not part of the work" (p. 85). I disagree with this latter conclusion on a number of points: in Bach's Leipzig cantatas the chorale was quite often chosen (by the clergy perhaps) some time after the bulk of the composition had been completed, so that Bach had to enter it later in the score and a different copyist had to add it to the parts.5 In fact, the final decision about the chorale sometimes came so late in the process that Bach himself was forced to enter it in the performing parts (because the copyists were no longer available? because he could do it quickly, per- haps even just before the service?). Bach's involvement in chorale copying is evident, for instance, in Cantatas 3, 12, 13, 28, 32, 87, and 108, to draw a handful of examples almost at random.6 Bach's remark "Choral seqt." at the end of Der Geist hilft surely suggests that he intended a chorale at this point, and its omission from the instrumental parts does not necessarily prove anything; this is the only motet for which instrumental parts survive, and we therefore cannot be sure of Bach's practice for the accompaniment of chorales. Moreover, the chorale may simply have been chosen too late to be copied into the instrumental parts.

Since Melamed consistently tries to demonstrate that this motet is com- piled from diverse models (and it is, in any case, a relatively contingent "occasional" piece), the issue of whether the chorale is "part of the work" seems oddly abstract. Surely the point is rather that Bach never conceived a piece like this as an ideal finished work (something which again supports Melamed's contention that Bach's motets should not be viewed in isolation from the common practices of his age).

Melamed's method of argument for the origins of Jesu, meine Freude (BWV 227) is somewhat different from that concerning Der Geist hilft, given the absence of autograph material. Nevertheless, his mission is again to show that the piece was compiled rather than composed in a single pro- cess, its symmetrical, "finished" appearance notwithstanding (pp. 85-89). Most of the evidence he presents, such as the mixture of four- and five-part writing and the variants in the chorale melody, is very convincing; more- over, it suggests that some movements originated before the Leipzig years. The hypotheses regarding the possible instrumental origin of the ninth movement are interesting (and I might also point out the similarity of the opening of the bass line to that of the third movement of the sonata com- plex BWV 1021, 1022, and 1038). Melamed concludes that "in its char- acter as an assembled work, it more resembles the Credo of the Mass in B minor ... than it does the Passions BWV 244 and 245 to which it is often compared" (p. 89). One might ask why knowledge of the origins neces- sarily affects the "character" of the work; furthermore, recent scholarship

5. Ibid., 66-68. 6. For a reproduction of a part from Cantata 108, see my Bach Interpretation: Articulation

Marks in Primary Sources ofJ. S. Bach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 85.

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implies that the compositional process of the Matthew Passion itself was rather more protracted than its unified appearance might suggest.7 Inas- much as Bach tends to draw his material from diverse styles (often to an unusual degree), it should not seem surprising that he sometimes drew on diverse works of his own composition. This point is amply substantiated by Melamed's study ofJauchzet dem Herrn (BWV Anh. 160), a motet in which Bach mixed his own composition with material from other com- posers (pp. 89-96).

Melamed's discussion of motet style in Bach's cantatas and Latin works provides a new perspective on Bach's concerted style: Bach seems to have reserved the motet style for biblical texts and chorales (or a combination of the two), suggesting that it had specific connotations for him; moreover, the chorales he set in motet style tend to be those from the oldest stage of the Lutheran repertory. In all, we gain a sense of Bach's own historical perspective; he often reserved the oldest, most traditional style for the orig- inal texts of both the Christian and Lutheran traditions. But perhaps Melamed sometimes identifies the motet style rather too readily: the "Et incarnatus est" of the Mass in B Minor is a case in point, where he suggests that "almost all of its essential material is in the vocal parts, with only an independent bass line and rhythmically regular non-thematic figuration in the violins" (p. 137). The fact that the first four bars of the vocal parts cannot stand alone is one problem; furthermore, the violin figuration is only "non-thematic" in that it shares nothing with the vocal parts. Surely the violins present the most important affective material of the piece, and in one sense the vocal parts could be regarded as inserted into a preexistent texture (one should also note the lack of the larger rhythmic values of the typical motet style and the absence of doubling instruments).

Melamed's point that "composers may ... have set biblical texts (espe- cially those that refer explicitly to the law) contrapuntally [not] because of purported parallels between counterpoint and biblical authority, but rather because they associated such texts with motet style" (p. 152), is a strong one. But we must bear in mind that Bach also knew at least one mass by Palestrina (he arranged and performed the Missa sine nomine) and that much of his motetlike writing may have had its genealogy in the mass, rather than the motet tradition (not that the two are that far apart in mu- sical style from Bach's perspective). Thus, to modify Melamed's argument somewhat, perhaps counterpoint was associated with biblical authority be- cause of its ancient heritage, and the motet was one of the principal con- temporary genres that kept the older style alive. Furthermore, a thorough study of the Bodenschatz motet collection, which Bach performed weekly,

7. For a summary of current knowledge regarding the composition of the Matthew Pas- sion, see Robin Leaver, 'The Mature Vocal Works," in The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 103-7.

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would perhaps give us a wider perspective on Bach's exposure to the stile antico and its relation to the intervening German motet tradition.

The study of the Altbachisches Archiv, the most comprehensive under- taken in recent years, is a much-needed addition to the Bach literature. Melamed finds no evidence that it came into Bach's possession before the late 1740s, but Bach clearly valued the pieces for their performance po- tential (largely evidenced through Bach's performing materials, see pp. 181-82) as well as for their archival status. One might add that this com-

pilation fits very well into the patterns of behavior that Bach exhibited to- ward his own music in his later years, preserving and perfecting material from his entire career. Perhaps he was compiling the archive as a measure of his own place within the family tradition. Does his performance of what

may have seemed extraordinarily archaic motets by his ancestors reflect his extreme opposition to the newer idioms? Perhaps so, but on the other hand, some of this music (such as Johann Christoph's Fzirchte dich nicht or Johann Michael's Auf! laflt uns den Herren loben) is surprisingly emotional and lyrical; possibly it had actually come back into fashion by the 1740s.

Melamed's study admirably sets the scene for many new perspectives on Bach and his environment, and presents with exemplary care much new factual detail. I spotted very few errors: a missing stroke for a ? time sig- nature on page 78, a grammatical anomaly at the end of page 122, and the odd reference to Bach's copy of Schmidt's Auf Gott hoffe ich as "the first vocal concerto Bach labeled 'Motetto' " (p. 28) when the much earlier in- stance of Cantata 71 is covered on the very next page. In all, Melamed has succeeded so well in demonstrating how Bach's motets lie within the tra- ditions and characteristics of the German motet that we may almost won- der why they were ever thought to stand out from their environment. His approach, though, is so centered around taxonomies and issues of identity that we gain little critical perspective on Bach's style or a sense of what makes him so important to us. However obvious, we do need to ask such questions at least as frequently as we reexamine the sources.

JOHN BUTT

Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts by Thomas S. Grey. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xix, 397 pp.

In his celebrated essay 'The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner"- first delivered as a lecture at the University of Munich in February 1933- Thomas Mann voiced strenuous objections to what he took to be Wagner's "theory," his call for an "amalgam of music, words, painting and ges- ture that claimed to be the one and only truth"; for Mann, "such a rigidly

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