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This Theological Commentary on Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion explains the historical context of Lutheran church music, and then explains the Biblical and poetic text, and its musical setting, line by line.

St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, \"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is one of his most popular pieces. This book is the first thorough study of this masterpiece in English. While giving a comprehensive overview of the Christmas Oratorio as a whole, the book focuses on the cultural and theological understanding of Christmas in Bach’s time and the compositional process that led Bach from the earliest concepts to the completed piece. Traditional Christmas rituals were abolished during the decades around 1700. Instead, Christian devotion focused increasingly on the metaphor of a birth of Christ in the human heart. The cultural and religious context of the oratorio provides the backdrop for a detailed analysis of the composition. Bach reused and parodied several movements that had originally been composed for secular cantatas. He thoroughly revised these movements and integrated them into the oratorio by adapting the music to new text. The book analyzes Bach’s composition score and sheds new light on the way Bach wrote the piece, how he shaped musical themes, and how he revised his initial ideas into the final composition.

Both the texts and music of Bach’s St Matthew and St John Passions portray the Jews in deeply negative ways, baying for the blood of Christ. While there are strong arguments against seeing these works as having any kind of positive influence on Jewish–Christian relations, there is also an argument for examining the different layers of texts – from the Gospels to contemporary Lutheran poetry – as well as diverse musical expression in both works in order to elicit and understand profound, universal themes of sin and repentance, confession and forgiveness, life and death. Public performances of the Passions need to be undertaken responsibly with detailed programme notes and talks that draw out the journey of the individual worshipper and tackle the difficult problems of the Gospel texts and the music.

Bach even applied – by presenting a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria – for a court title from the Elector, and the ruler eventually granted him the title of Hof-Compositeur at this Catholic court. Besides composing innumerable Lutheran cantatas, the Thomaskantor also studied and performed dozens of pieces composed by Catholics. [...]Bach's life and works provide good reasons for the American Bach Society to have focused in its nineteenth biennial meeting on the topic ‘J. S. Bach and the Confessional Landscape of His Time’. On the basis of a long chain of evidence and the presumption that Duke Wilhelm Ernst was the former owner of Bach's copy of the Calov Bible commentary, Greer suggested that bwv225 had originally been commissioned by the Duke in 1717 for an annual service commemorating both his birthday (30 October) and the two hundredth anniversary of the Reformation (31 October) – a commission that Bach, according to Greer, only fulfilled in 1726. On the basis of extensive archival studies and by following the careers of certain town musicians from Leipzig, Erfurt, Augsburg and Munich, Kevorkian was able to paint a representative picture of this – notoriously too little considered – musical profession, and came up with some interesting accounts of converts from Catholicism to Protestantism (and occasionally back to their religious roots).

This article examines the pedagogical challenges and value of using objectionable texts in the classroom by way of two case studies: Martin Luther’s writings on Jews and two works by J.S. Bach. The use of morally or otherwise offensive materials in the classroom has the potential to degrade the learning environment or even produce harm if not carefully managed. On the other hand, historically informed instructors can use difficult works to model good scholarly methodology and offer useful contexts for investigating of contemporary issues. Moral judgments about historical actors and events are inevitable, the authors argue, so the instructor’s responsibility is to seize the opportunity for constructive dialogue.

This Theological Commentary is the first full-length work in English to consider Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion in its entirety, both the words and the music. Bach's oratorio is a globally popular musical work, and a significant expression of Lutheran theology. The commentary explains the Biblical and poetic text, and its musical setting, line by line. Bach's Passion is shown to be the work of a master craftsman and trained theologian, in the collaborative and cultural milieu of eighteenth-century, Lutheran Leipzig. For the first time, this work makes much German scholarship available in English, including archival sources, and includes a new scholarly translation of the libretto. The musical and theological terms are explained, to enable an interdisciplinary understanding of the Passion's meaning and continued significance.

Martin Petzoldt (1946-2015), German Lutheran pastor (ordained in 1973), theology professor, liturgical scholar, university dean, historian and passionate promoter of the music of J.S. Bach, is briefly profiled. He wrote a paper, \"Bach as Cantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig, 1723-1750,\" which was originally the keynote address delivered in September 1997 in Chicago, of the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für theologische Bachforschung. The socio-political-religious mindsets of the 1960s and 1970s in Germany are discussed, and it is noted that the eastern and western portions of the country espoused secularist versus a largely religious Bach respectively. Petzoldt's research revealed that Bach was inticately involved with church life - more than Marxist musicology would admit. His political activism while on faculty at Leipzig University is also briefly explored.

Because his only surviving correspondence lies primarily in church and municipal ledgers, the great composer comes off as an \"aggressive businessman whining about maltreatment and underpayment,\" though in fact he lived a rich professional, social, and family life and earned considerable recognition. In more than a thousand compositions, Bach perfected the contrapuntal (or counterpoint) style, in which two or more independent but harmonically related melodic parts are played at the same time-a challenging proposition that music teachers sometimes describe to beginning students as akin to patting their heads and rubbing their stomachs at the same time.