Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich Sch tz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred. Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Sch tz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect.

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"What is the Baroque? Where did it come from and where did it go? Why do we have to ask these questions? Because art historians seem largely satisfied with their answers and most scholars of German literature are not satisfied, yet have stopped asking.This book discerns in the Baroque an aesthetic phenomenon that crosses both media and national boundaries in its celebration of excess and its disintegration of system, unity, and identity. The compositional principles and theoretical implications of the Baroque, as it first arose in Italian art, find expression in German poetics, drama, poetry, and narrative ? expression accessible only through resolute close reading. Readings of Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez, Rubens, Fracanzano, and de Hooch precipitate readings of Opitz, Gryphius, Fleming, Zesen, Hoffmannswaldau, and Grimmelshausen, demonstrating that seventeenth-century German literature both is Baroque and confirms what the Baroque is."--Page 4 of cover.

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

This anthology presents in English verse translation a selection of the best of German poetry, together with discussions of the chief authors and literary periods and brief explications of the individual poems. Taking the reader from the Minnesingers' songs of courtly love to Goethe and Rilke, this volume gives an excellent introduction to eight centuries of German poetry.