Description: At the end of his second year in Leipzig, J.S. Bach composed nine sacred cantatas to texts by Leipzig poet Mariana von Ziegler (1695-1760). Despite the fact that these cantatas are Bach's only compositions to texts by a female poet, the works have been largely ignored in the Bach literature. Dr Mark Peters presents the first comprehensive account of this repertory, providing a significant new perspective on both Ziegler as poet and cantata librettist and Bach as cantata composer.
Review Quotes: �Peters� book is a testament that ... challenging some of the old established perceptions can be ... stimulating and continues to yield valuable new insights. Moreover, among the relatively small number of studies on the women in Bach�s life, which for the most part focus on Anna Magdalena, the present book represents an important factual contribution to a subject which in the past had more often belonged to the realm of fiction than historiography.� Bach Bibliography �Naturally, a musician's main interest in Ziegler is likely to be connected with the fact that she is one of the few librettists of Bach's cantatas of whom we know the name. Peters' project is to fill out the conventional image of Ziegler as an early feminist writer, and to assert that Bach probably did not, as has often been claimed, adapt her texts in his nine cantata settings of April to May 1725 but, on the contrary, set them in the form supplied to him by the author and, indeed, drew inspiration from their particular qualities.� The Consort