Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music

by Isabella van Elferen

Overview

Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich Schütz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred.

Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Schütz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810861367
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/23/2008
Series:	Contextual Bach Studies , #2
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.53(w) x 9.46(h) x 1.11(d)

About the Author

Isabella van Elferen is assistant professor of Music and New Media at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies of Utrecht University. She is the editor of Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day (2007).

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ix

Series Editor's Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: Mystical Love in German Baroque Poetry and Music-Theme and Method xvii

1 Petrarchism 1

Petrarch's Canzoniere 1

Italian Petrarchism 4

European Reception of Petrarchan Traditions 17

Definition and Function of Petrarchism 19

2 Petrarchan Poetry and the Madrigal in Seventeenth-Century Germany 25

Text, Music, and Musica Poetica in the German Madrigal 33

Didactic Functions of Petrarchism and the Madrigal 40

Conclusions 60

3 Affective Expression in Poetry and Music 71

Intensification of Poetic and Musical Expression 78

Affective Expression in Devotional Genres: The Passion Meditation 92

Intensification of the Language of Love 109

4 Affect and Discourse of Love 119

The Affect of Love in Poetics, Music Theory, Theology, and Moral Philosophy 119

The Ambivalence of Baroque Love Discourse 129

Perspective 143

5 Mystical Love in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Lutheran Poetry and Theology 151

Luteran Mystical Poetry: Fusion of Sacred and Secular Love Idioms 151

Bridal Mysticism 160

Passion Mysticism 175

Communion Mysticism 192

Mystical Desire for Death 208

Petrarchism and Mysticism in Lutheran Devotion 214

6 Spiritual and Mystical Love in Seventeen-Century Vocal Music 225

The Texts 230

Settings of the Song of Songs 231

Mystical Love for Jesus 237

Passion Devotion 249

Mystical Desire for Death 258

From Madrigal Style to Musical Mysticism 263

7 Mystical Love in Johann Sebastian Bach's Vocal Works 273

Bridal Mysticism 274

Love and Mysticism in Bach's St. Matthew Passion 287

Communion Mysticism 295

Mystical Desire for Death304

Petrarchan Discourse in Bach's Musical Representation of Mysticism 308

Summary and Perspectives: From Laura to the Heavenly Bridegroom 319

Appendix Compositions Discussed in the Text 329

Bibliography 331

Index 345

About the Author 357