Bach and the Soprano Voice

The chapter begins with a simple question: given the fact that Bach’s music for sopranos was composed almost exclusively for boys, why have early music practitioners—including those endorsed in 2018 by the Bach Leipzig Archive—become so accustomed to using female sopranos? Taking account both of the rhetorical strategies that Bach uses in a representative group of soprano arias (choice of affect, use of topoi, scoring, and vocal writing) and the use of female sopranos in this repertory in concert, radio, and recordings since the nineteenth-century revival, this chapter proposes that Bach imbued his soprano arias with an intrinsic sense of femininity—passion, optimism, desire, compliance, modesty, and submission—that was central to his expression of Lutheran theology and that emerges as no less vital for listeners, even long after the original theological context had lost its relevance. The chapter also shows how Bach’s unacknowledged capacity for representing female subjectivity has influenced even the most historically informed performance practices.

Kirsi Stjerna, Lutheran Theology: A Grammar of Faith

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Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reformed, Anglican, and Lutheran Reception of Aquinas

This chapter provides an account of the way in which some major figures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Reformed, Anglican, and Lutheran theology interacted with the theology of Thomas Aquinas. As in contemporary Protestant engagement of Aquinas, this reception of the Angelic Doctor’s thought has both appreciative and critical moments. The section on the Reformed tradition discusses the role of Aquinas in the Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge and the early volumes of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics. The section on the Anglican tradition discusses the role of Aquinas in the ecclesiological reflections of E. B. Pusey and Charles Gore. Finally, the section on the Lutheran tradition discusses the role of Aquinas in the work of Isaak Dorner.