Volume 28, Number 15 · October 8, 1981
A Bachward Glance
By Joseph Kerman
Bach and the Dance of God
by Wilfrid Mellers
Oxford University Press, 324 pp., $39.95
Wilfrid Mellers is known in England as a composer, an educator of some importance, and a copious writer on music. He has written books on Music in Society, François Couperin and his milieu, American music, and the Beatles, among other topics. Now in his mid-sixties, he is producing as a sort of summa a two-volume study of Bach and Beethoven as religious composers. From Bach and the Dance of God it is clear that this composite study is not to be confined to musical works of an overtly sacred genre. The lingering medieval mind of Bach's Lutheran heritage, Mellers believes, equated or all but equated the sacred and the secular spheres, so that the entire body of Bach's music is, in the deepest sense, religious. If and how Mellers adapts this equation to Beethoven, in the second volume which has not yet appeared, it will be interesting to see.
Review, 3375 words
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