The University at Albany Department of Music is pleased to welcome guest lecturer Michael Marissen on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 7pm in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus. The Swarthmore professor will lecture on Bach, Luther, the St. John Passion and Anti-Judaism. Co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, Marissen’s address will be followed by a question-and-answer period.

Marissen is the first scholar to write about the relationships among the Gospel of John, Luther, Bach and Anti-Judaism. In his presentation at UAlbany, he will look deeply into textual issues surrounding one of Bach’s most popular works -- Where did Bach’s oratorio texts come from? Was Bach anti-Judaic? Should the texts in the St. John Passion be altered for modern performances?  Marissen will deal with these and many other thorny questions surrounding John, Luther and Bach.

He writes: “Bach's St. John Passion is surely one of the monuments of Western music, yet performances of it are inevitably controversial. In large part, this is because of the combination of the powerful and highly emotional music and a text that includes passages from a gospel marked by vehement anti-Judaic sentiments. What did this masterpiece mean in Bach's day and what does it mean today? ...almost no scholarly attention has been given to relationships between Lutheranism and the religion of Judaism as they affect Bach's most controversial work, the St. John Passion...”

Marissen holds a B.A. from Calvin College and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He joined the Swarthmore faculty in 1989 and since then has also been a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is author of Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism and Bach’s St. John Passion (Oxford) and The Social and Religious Designs of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton) as well as co-author with Daniel R. Melamed of An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford). He was editor of Creative Responses to Bach from Mozart to Hindemith (Nebraska) and has published many articles on J.S. Bach’s instrumental and vocal music. Marissen is the Daniel Underhill Professor of Music at Swarthmore College and is past Vice-President of the American Bach Society. 

Admission to the lecture is free. For further information, contact the Box Office at (518) 442-3997 or visit the Performing Arts Center website at www.albany.edu/pac.

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