"Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," Cantata No. 80, by Johann Sebastian Bach, was composed in Leipzig, Germany for Reformation Day and was first performed between 1727 and 1731. It is based on the famous chorale of Martin Luther, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," or "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." German and English text.

Karl Haas, creator and host of the internationally syndicated radio program "Adventures in Good Music," has an inimitable flair for bringing classical music to life. This is a definitive and fascinating reference work for anyone who loves classical music and wants to learn more about its many aspects and dimensions.

The BBC Proms is the world's biggest and longest-running classical music festival and one of the jewels in the crown for the BBC. It is one of the strongest brand names in the music world and attracts a glittering array of artists and orchestras from the UK and around the world in over 150 concerts, talks, workshops and family events around London every summer. Whether you're a first-time visitor or an experienced Prommer, watching at home or listening on radio or online, the BBC Proms Guide will help you to plan your summer of music and discover in depth what lies behind the Proms – from the composers to the performers to how the events are broadcast. The Proms Guide contains brand-new articles on featured composers and insights on performers, new music and accompanying events.

The cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach are among the best known and most frequently performed musical works of the Baroque period. In an illuminating discussion of the musical, literary, aesthetic, and theological aspects of the composers early cantatas, leading Bach scholars place the works in their historical and biographical context. 85 photos.

If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn’s music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer’s life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.

The year 2017 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, if that event is dated from the posting of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. Admittedly, 2017 is an arbitrary and somewhat artificial milestone. Nevertheless, anniversaries can be special occasions that allow for an appreciation and evaluation of memorable persons and events. As a number of Reformation anniversaries approach, the historical significance of the Reformation merits increased attention. Employing a variety of historiographical methods from intellectual history to postcolonial theory, this volume demonstrates how four major traditions observed the Reformation: Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Roman Catholic. The foreword and preface place the essays into the contemporary and broader historical contexts in the history of reform. Commemorations of the Reformation varied in different periods, often influenced by immediate historical contexts. How are those sixteenth-century events, which caused both renewal and conflict in church and society as well as divisions between those expressions, to be viewed in the twenty-first century in a setting broader than Europe?

Focusing on the works of J. S. Bach, this invaluable guide surveys the choral-orchestral repertoire.