Word: leipzigers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Harvard is not alone in its tribute to Bach. On March 21, Bach's actual birthday, St. Matthew's Passion, one of his major works, was broadcast worldwide from Leipzig, the city where Bach spent most of his life. A number of other universities have also celebrated Bach's birth, but mostly with one-day celebrations...
...gone into space aboard Voyager 1 and 2 as an example of the best that human culture has to offer. Yet the contemporary image of Bach is, in its own way, as myopic as that of previous eras. We tend to perceive the cantor of St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig as, above all, an unsmiling, devout Lutheran, who erected cathedrals in sound dedicated to the glory of God. Bach's music, we think, is great because it is good for us. But to consider Bach only as a kind of musical chaplain takes no account of the music that...
...jobs, there is only a plaque to mark the spot on which the family home stood. In Cothen, where Bach worked for the music-loving Prince Leopold from 1717 to 1723, producing among other masterworks the Brandenburg Concertos, the exact identity of Bach's home is uncertain. And in Leipzig, the Saxon center of commerce and learning, where Bach spent the last 27 years of his life, the school in which Bach lived and taught was torn down...
...from a pedestal, quill in hand and manuscript paper at the ready; beyond it, high on a hill in the distance, sits the Wartburg Castle, where Luther, in disguise, completed his translation of the New Testament while hiding out from Catholic wrath and Wagner set his opera Tannhauser. In Leipzig, a sterner Bach is memorialized outside the Thomaskirche by both a full-length statue and, not far from the church, a bust dedicated by Felix Mendelssohn. Genius pays homage to even greater genius: it was the romantic Mendelssohn, a Christianized Jew, who in 1829 revived Bach's greatest religious work...
...Germany, myth and reality intertwine: the real Faust was Luther's contemporary, and Goethe set one of his play's scenes in the Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig. Today the ancient tavern is guarded by statues of Faust and Mephisto, and the latter is seen casting a spell over a group of Leipzigers. "Loose the bonds of illusion from their eyes!" Mephisto says as he releases them. "Remember how the devil joked." They are words too often unheeded, as modern history testifies...