A01=David Yearsley
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Anna Magdalena Bach
Author_David Yearsley
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bachin
biography
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVC
Category=AVGC
Category=AVLA
christianity
classical music
composer
COP=United States
death
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
domesticity
eq_art-fashion-photography
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
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eroticism
fashion
female musician
femininity
gender
grief
history
illicit love
intimacy
Language_English
leipzig
loss
lutheran
marriage
minuet
money
mortality
mother
musical notebooks
nonfiction
organ
PA=Available
pain
passion
pedagogy
performance
piano
piety
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
religion
sex
sexuality
SN=New Material Histories of Music
softlaunch
spirituality
suffering
wedding
widow
Product details
- ISBN 9780226617701
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Apr 2019
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
David Yearsley is professor of music at Cornell University and the author of Bach's Feet: The Organ Pedals in European Culture and Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint.
