Author: Annette Richards

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 022680626X

"This book examines the renowned portrait collection assembled by C. P. E. Bach, J. S. Bach's second son. Containing nearly 400 objects from oil paintings to engraved prints, Bach's collection is a remarkable artifact of eighteenth-century music culture. Taken together, the portraits provide a vivid panorama of music history and culture as well as the sensibility and humor of the time in which they were made. Most importantly, Richards argues, the collection sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historiographical value-as an art with a history. Richards makes the collection come alive, showing readers what it was like to tour the portrait gallery and to experience music in a room whose walls were packed with art. She uses the collection to analyzes the "portraitive" aspect of Bach's music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a way to cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach's domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling"--