In this book, Celia Applegate asks why the 1829 performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans' collective identity.
In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to German's collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were "the people of music." Applegate assesses the impact on music's cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself.
