Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650-1750

Tanya Kevorkian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351574686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Drawing upon a rich array of sources from archives in Leipzig, Dresden and Halle, Tanya Kevorkian illuminates culture in Leipzig before and during J.S. Bach's time in the city. Working with these sources, she has been able to reconstruct the contexts of Baroque and Pietist cultures at key periods in their development much more specifically than has been done previously. Kevorkian shows that high Baroque culture emerged through a combination of traditional frameworks and practices, and an infusion of change that set in after 1680. Among other forms of change, new secular arenas appeared, influencing church music and provoking reactions from Pietists, who developed alternative meeting, networking and liturgical styles. The book focuses on the everyday practices and active roles of audiences in public religious life. It examines music performance and reception from the perspectives of both 'ordinary' people and elites. Church services are studied in detail, providing a broad sense of how people behaved and listened to the music. Kevorkian also reconstructs the world of patronage and power of city councillors and clerics as they interacted with other Leipzig inhabitants, thereby illuminating the working environment of J.S. Bach, Telemann and other musicians. In addition, Kevorkian reconstructs the social history of Pietists in Leipzig from 1688 to the 1730s.

PART II
The producers

Chapter Three

The clergy, the city council,
and Leipzig inhabitants

Clerics and city councilors were the main local authorities in the religious arena. They were actors in a complex world of urban and territorial institutions, each with specific, minutely regulated, and intersecting rights and duties.¹ They were also important producers of religious culture. The goal of this chapter is to understand their places in urban society and their relationships to other inhabitants. Both clerics and councilors held a great deal of power in the religious arena. They and their families were highly visible, the focus of popular scrutiny and emulation as well as formal ceremony. In a variety of ways, though, they were accountable to burghers and non-burghers.

City councilors, examined first, played a role in every area of urban society and culture. In the trade metropole of Leipzig, the regulation of the fairs and of commerce generally was particularly important. Religion was another important field of activity. Religious norms, expectations, and duties structured councilors’ theoretical mission, as well as many of their interactions with inhabitants. Historians have emphasized how councilors gained power during the Reformation through their assumption of new religious roles.² Less attention has been paid to how these roles made councilors reliant on and accountable to burghers. While ordinary inhabitants in Leipzig, as in many other towns, had lost direct participation in governance by the 1500s, they did have a voice in the religious arena. The theory of the covenant, which undergirded councilors’ authority, emphasized reciprocal obligations on the part of the authorities as well as the governed. Matters that were defined in religious terms, including councilors’ personal conduct, were subjects of urban gossip networks that helped to hold councilors to their proclaimed norms. Further, as Robert Beachy has emphasized, burgher status, property ownership, and burghers’ rights were closely associated,³ giving burghers not only, as we saw in the previous chapter, a claim on pews, but also a broader claim on participation in the religious arena.

Clerics, examined next, emerged as a distinct, powerful occupational group by the early 17^th century.⁴ Historians have recently developed a detailed picture of this profession and its location in urban society. This chapter places especial emphasis on the social processes by which individuals became clerics. Historians have reconstructed where students studied and what they learned. Much less attention has been paid to theology students’ everyday lives,⁵ important especially in a town such as Leipzig where almost all clerics were graduates of the University of Leipzig. The majority of students roomed and boarded with burghers, and many served as tutors. Through those arrangements, future clerics became an integral part of the social and cultural fabric of Leipzig. Once they were ordained, clerics came in contact with a broader range of inhabitants – more so than city councilors – through their pastoral duties. Here relations shifted, with the pastor providing essential services and becoming more socially aloof. patronage by individual councilors and other prominent Leipzigers before and after ordination was also important.

The extent and quality of pastoral care for the city’s population, generally considered inadequate in the literature on pietism, are considered here. In giving background for the collegia pietatis, a recent account claims that ‘With only two parish churches … with five clerics each, the nearly 20,000 inhabitants of Leipzig were insufficiently cared for. One result was a massive movement away from the church (unübersehbare Entkirchlichung); further, pious individuals lacked pastoral care, and withdrew to individual religious practice.’⁶ We will see that this characterization misses the mark. pastors were overburdened, but they had a strong commitment to their positions and their congregants. They and councilors struggled to accommodate and regulate inhabitants’ interests. For their part, inhabitants were assertive in seeking out not only, as we have seen, church pews, but also services such as communion.

Recent research has emphasized how clerics worked actively with secular authorities, while also criticizing rulers’ policies from the pulpit. Here too, the situation in Leipzig was similar to that elsewhere. Members of the two groups interacted constantly. Many dealings were collegial, but there were also some tensions. Most importantly, councilors appointed and promoted clerics, thus fundamentally shaping the clerical estate. This process, which has not been sufficiently emphasized, is one focus here.

Councilors and inhabitants

Leipzig’s city councilors shared much with their peers around Western and Central Europe. They were part of a close-knit network of merchants, jurists, high clerics, and academics, the urban ‘social elite.’⁷ They and their families were commonly referred to as die Vornehmen (‘the elite’), while ordinary burghers and sub-burghers were known as gemeine Leute (‘common people’). As in many other towns, a group of senior councilors, known in Leipzig as the Enge, made many of the council’s decisions. Confirmation of their decisions in plenary meetings was largely formal. The specific form of the Leipzig council was more unusual: it was divided into three groups of ten to twelve each, with each group having one mayor. The groups rotated as the annual governing, or ‘sitting’ council. Councilors elected their own peers, and election was for life. From the mid-17^th century onward, the ratio of lawyers, or literati to merchants was about 4:3.⁸ Jurists held offices on the council requiring legal expertise, and increasingly dominated the Enge.⁹ Merchants had experience with the details of trade and banking that made up much of the council’s business, and were also expected to contribute money from their own pockets in times of need.¹⁰ Guilds, which played at least some role on many other town councils, were not represented at all in Leipzig after the 1540s.¹¹

Just as the Leipzig elites were generally, the city council was more open to newcomers than councils in many other towns. This probably correlated to the city’s steady economic expansion, which provided opportunities for new fortunes to be made and for new legal talent.¹² Almost half of the merchant councilors elected from 1680, and almost one third of the jurist councilors, were born outside Leipzig.¹³ In towns with stagnant economies, by contrast, existing elite families clung to their power. Upward mobility into the council was made easier in Leipzig because there were no rules or organizations governing eligibility for council membership, as there were in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Frankfurt.

The council’s power, and the clout of individual members, varied with the city’s fortunes. During most of the 17^th century the council faced major challenges to its authority. Not only had Swedish occupying forces exacted huge payments and supervised the council’s activities, but a burgher committee of sixty artisans had risen up in 1642. Like similar committees that arose around Germany,¹⁴ ‘the sixty’ protested councilors’ self-exemption from quartering soldiers and financial contributions. The Swedes authorized the group to administer quartering and contributions. The burgher committee’s challenge left sufficiently deep scars that the council suppressed the publication of a chronicle discussing it as late as 1685. As councilor Michael Thoma wrote, such accounts might give rise to ‘uncomfortable questions’ from burghers.¹⁵ Further, in 1628 an electoral commission had taken over the regulation of the city’s finances because the city had fallen four million thaler into debt. The city was able to bribe its way to autonomy with a 70,000 thaler payment only in 1688.¹⁶

Coming on the heels of these challenges, the period from the 1680s to the 1750s saw the council’s greatest display of power. individual councilors and the council as a whole administered ever more cash. The pomp, ceremony, and oratory of council elections and investitures of new governing councils reached a high point. In contrast to times of crisis, there was intense lobbying for election to the council.¹⁷ The council issued major legislation on numerous occasions, including its own constitution of 1688 and the begging ordinance of 1704.

The Leipzig city council’s many roles in the religious arena, which were like those of its peers around Protestant Germany, were central to its theory and practice of governance. During the Reformation, councilors had taken over many duties and responsibilities from the Catholic Church.¹⁸ The administration of those areas, and the council’s general mission, were formulated with an emphasis on the language of covenant and reciprocal corporate relations with burghers.¹⁹ The covenant was a theme at the annual installation of a new governing council, held in the city hall. Heads of Leipzig guilds and neighborhoods were present as guests. The installation opened with readings of the first chapter of the Book of Joshua, Psalm 20, and a prayer by a contemporary author.²⁰ The reading from Joshua is of particular interest here: Joshua assumed the Mosaic Covenant as a ruler and conqueror of cities. The passage dwells on Joshua’s pact with the population as well as God’s pact with Joshua. God commands Joshua to succeed Moses as leader of the Israelites; there is a distinct parallel between Joshua and the city council. The heart of God’s instructions is in verse 7: ‘observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee … that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.’ Joshua in turn speaks to ‘the officers of the people,’ who represent the burghers of Leipzig. The officers then swear fealty to Joshua as the successor of Moses and representative of God.²¹

The covenant concept informed many of the city council’s practical rights and duties. It was t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations and table
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I. Congregants’ everyday practices
• II. The producers
• III. The Pietist alternative
• IV. The construction boom and beyond
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index