Sex, Death, and Minuets

[A] richly absorbing book. . . -- Revue de Musicologie In his fact-based portrayal of this gifted and underappreciated musician, wife, and mother, Yearsley provides insightful commentary on the Bach family's musical life and also an insightful overview of the culture in which the Bachs lived. Yearsley's touching account of Anna Magdalena's impoverished, ten-year widowhood exemplifies the sad fate of many widows of the time. This is an important and fascinating book. . . . Highly recommended. -- Choice In this book David Yearsley corrects the 'rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity'. . . . excellently researched. . . . Many illustrations and music examples enhance this beautifully produced book. -- Classical Music Magazine Singer, musical copyist, second wife of one of music's most revered composers, Anna Magdalena Bach remains a shadowy figure for biographers. Yearsley takes the musical notebooks that bear her name as the starting point for a scholarly investigation into her life and times. -- Financial Times Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena, an accomplished soprano and skilled harpsichordist, compiled two notebooks of music by himself and others, as well as additional annotations. Musicologists have laboured to rationalise these marvels for generations. . . . This is an informed, punctilious account of the Bachs in their historical context, with fair-minded, even-handed explorations of whether Anna Magdalena might have composed music (none survives) or played the organ (quite possibly). --Benjamin Ivry Times Higher Education With irreverent voice, disarming wit and a very sharp ear, Yearsley unpacks the many secrets hidden in the better known of the two notebooks that belonged to Sebastian Bach's second wife, a gifted singer about whom we know next to nothing. In this vivid tour through its provocative pages, Yearsley's dextrous scholarship discovers a vibrant life beneath the surface of the austere Lutheran Leipzig in which the Bachs flourished. A stunning achievement with a surprise on every page. --Richard Kramer, author of Cherubino's Leap and Unfinished Music A stimulating and tremendously enjoyable reanimation of Anna Magdalena Bach and her music. Yearsley's account--sympathetic, myth-busting, historically nuanced, musically sensitive, erudite yet thoroughly readable--will doubtless stand as the definitive account of the 'Bachin' and her notebooks for years to come. --Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge Yearsley's entertaining but strictly historical focus on the Notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach trains its razor-sharp lens on the talented wife-consort of the Leipzig master, with both of them emerging from the dour shadows of their stone monuments as delightful 'flesh-and-blood' figures who indulge a love of domestic music rampant with ruminations on earthly mortality as well as with humorous puns and 'lowbrow' eroticism. That both Anna Magdalena and Johann Sebastian Bach saw no contradiction between 'real-world' obsessions and their well-documented Christian piety sheds a welcome light on more familiar tropes of Bachian pain and suffering never divorced from spirits and bodies inhabiting the 'here-and-now.' A portrait of Anna Magdalena as accomplished singer and keyboardist in her own right--perhaps even as organist--places her among leading Leipzig literary figures who were also female, thereby spinning out a fascinating tale of women whose cultivation of music-making rivaled that of theatre and poetry. --Laurence Dreyfus, University of Oxford A fresh re-examination of Bach's music from literary, social, theological and political perspectives. . . . [Sex, Death, and Minuets] winningly harmonises sacred and secular aspects of Bach's life and work. -- International Piano Magazine David Yearsley's Sex, Death, and Minuets paints a warm, insightful, and compelling portrait of Anna Magdalena Bach while taking the reader on a fascinating excursion into the world of her musical notebooks. --Matthew Dirst, University of Houston