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Mystical Love in the German Baroque
Theology, Poetry, Music
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Publisher:
2008
Summary
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 SchYtz, 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 SchYtz'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.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2008
ISBN-Print
978-0-8108-6136-7
ISBN-Online
978-0-8108-6221-0
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
357
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Abbreviations No access
Series Editor’s Foreword No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access
Chapter One: Petrarchism No access Pages 1 - 24
Chapter Two: Petrarchan Poetry and the Madrigal in Seventeenth-Century Germany No access Pages 25 - 70
Chapter Three: Affective Expression in Poetry and Music No access Pages 71 - 118
Chapter Four: Affect and Discourse of Love No access Pages 119 - 150
Chapter Five: Mystical Love in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Lutheran Poetry and Theology No access Pages 151 - 224
Chapter Six: Spiritual and Mystical Love in Seventeenth-Century Vocal Music No access Pages 225 - 272
Chapter Seven: Mystical Love in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Vocal Works No access Pages 273 - 318
Summary and Perspectives No access Pages 319 - 328
