Book dossier

Mystical love in the German Baroque

by Isabella van Elferen

"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 seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century cantatas by Heinrich Schiltz, 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 should instead be viewed as intensifications of the sacred." "Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or untranslated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Schiltz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history considers the love poetry of Petrarch and its effect on the madrigal in Germany, European reception of petrarchan imagery and tradition, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, focusing on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological concepts."--Jacket.