From the Church to the Concert Hall: J.S. Bach, Mendelssohn, and the Imaginary Chorale
‘Every room in which Bach is performed is transformed into a church.’ We do not know the context for this remark attributed to Mendelssohn (sometime before March 1835), but it reflects one significant thread in the nineteenth-century ‘emancipation of music’, namely the revival of the music of J.S. Bach, and his transformation from a largely forgotten Leipzig church musician into a dominant, canonic figure in European concert music. This chapter revisits some familiar aspects of Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s music, for example the seminal revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, and Mendelssohn’s spiritual trajectory from Judaism to Christianity, and then explores ways in which his own music tested boundaries between sacred music for performance in church versus the concert hall. One way in which Mendelssohn allied his music with the spiritual was through the use of imaginary, ‘free’ chorales-that is, newly composed, textless chorale melodies that he inserted into a number of his purely instrumental compositions as a means of underscoring his newly acquired Protestant faith. The chapter concludes by exploring the significance of this device for several other nineteenth-century composers who similarly invoked the divine and sacred in their concert music
