Baroque Piety: Religion Society and Music in Leipzig 1650-1750

Drawing upon a rich array of sources from archives in Leipzig, Dresden and Halle, Tanya Kevorkian illuminates culture in Leipzig before and during J.S. Bach's time in the city. Working with these sources, she has been able to reconstruct the contexts of Baroque and Pietist cultures at key periods in their development much more specifically than has been done previously. Kevorkian shows that high Baroque culture emerged through a combination of traditional frameworks and practices, and an infusion of change that set in after 1680. Among other forms of change, new secular arenas appeared, influencing church music and provoking reactions from Pietists, who developed alternative meeting, networking and liturgical styles. The book focuses on the everyday practices and active roles of audiences in public religious life. It examines music performance and reception from the perspectives of both 'ordinary' people and elites. Church services are studied in detail, providing a broad sense of how people behaved and listened to the music. Kevorkian also reconstructs the world of patronage and power of city councillors and clerics as they interacted with other Leipzig inhabitants, thereby illuminating the working environment of J.S. Bach, Telemann and other musicians. In addition, Kevorkian reconstructs the social history of Pietists in Leipzig from 1688 to the 1730s. Contents: Introduction; Part I Congregants' Everyday Practices: The experience of the service; Seating the religious public: church pews and society. Part II The Producers: The clergy, the city council, and Leipzig inhabitants; Elites in and beyond Leipzig: the Dresden court and the consistories; Leipzig's cantors: status, politics and the adiaphora. Part III The Pietist Alternative: Sociability and religious protest: the collegia pietatatis of 1689-1690; The Pietist shadow network. Part IV The Construction Boom and Beyond: Social change and religious life; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.