Sex, Death, and Minuets : Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks / David Yearsley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yearsley, David, Author.

Series:

New material histories of music.

Chicago scholarship online.

New Material Histories of Music

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bach, Anna Magdalena, 1701-1760--Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.

Bach, Anna Magdalena.

Bach, Anna Magdalena, 1701-1760--Criticism and interpretation.

Music--Germany--18th century--History and criticism.

Music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (361 pages).

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701-60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music-long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening-has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity. Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject-at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow-and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks' more idiosyncratic entries-like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality-against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion-for living and for dying.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND MUSICAL EXAMPLES

FIGURES

MUSICAL EXAMPLES

ABBREVIATIONS

PROLOGUE

Chapter One. Magdalena Mania

Chapter Two. Music for Weddings and Beddings

Chapter Three. Death Every Day: The 1725 Notebook and the Art of Dying

Chapter Four. Fragment and Fantasy: Anna Magdalena Bach at the Organ

Chapter Five. Bitter Bean and Loose Ließgen: On Coffee, Cantatas, and Unwed Daughters

Chapter Six. A Widow's Song

Coda. The Minuet Sings

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Appendix: Table of Contents of Anna Magdalena Bach's Notebooks

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226617848

022661784X

OCLC:

1107879492