Bach Studies: Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology by Robin A. Leaver (review)

Abstract

I n Bach Studies: Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology, Robin Leaver has collected and substantially revised many of his essays on Bach spanning the 1970s to the present, leaving us a compilation that forms something like a Fassung letzter Hand. The volume touches on most of the areas of Bach studies to which Leaver has contributed over the years. The subtitle Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology reflects this focus and also mirrors the book’s tripartite structure. The essays are a diverse lot, some addressing focused issues that make a quick overview impossible. In my estimation, they also do not represent the absolute best of Leaver’s scholarship on Bach, mostly because that work is either not in essay form or the original essays are still easily available elsewhere. Not included here are, among others, his essays specifically devoted to Bach’s theological library, his two chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Bach on Lutheranism and liturgy, dozens of entries in the Oxford Composer Companion devoted to Bach, and some of his recent work on Bach’s chorales. For obvious reasons, the volume also does not fully reveal Leaver’s many decades of labor as an editor for various publications on Bach, which also often contain his own essays. Yet here one often finds traces of all these writings, sometimes worked into his revisions. Leaver’s lifelong study of Martin