Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks

by David Yearsley

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history’s most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music—long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening—has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity.
            Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject—at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow—and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks’ more idiosyncratic entries—like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality—against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying.
 

Genres: Music, History, Biography

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 9, 2019

About the author

Professor of music at Cornell University.

Reviews

[Frazer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the concept of this book, but the notebooks themselves just don't contain the 'world' that Yearsley attempts to build up around Anna Magdalena. He frequently spends many pages discussing unrelated works of Bach, to try and make a point about Anna's life or position, which seemed forced at times.

The book's really well written and researched. Hats off to Yearsley for attempting it, and not for claiming there's more in the notebooks than there is, but I got tired of this book half way through.

[Barbara Phillips-Farley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yearsley wrings every bit of meaning possible from Anna Magdalena’s 2 notebooks. He speculates more than this reader liked. The book is well-researched, but I felt it could have been shorter.

[Annm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent research.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, zippy book about the world of the Bachs and the context of Anna Magdalena Bach’s notebooks.