Jeffrey S. Sposato is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Studies at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston. His book The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition (OUP, 2006) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2006 and a Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award finalist. His other publications include William Thomas McKinley: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood, 1995), as well as articles and reviews in 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, Choral Journal, Musical Quarterly, Ars Lyrica, Notes, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition), and several edited collections.

"In three probing, extended chapters that make up the bulk of the volume, Sposato treats three relationships, centered on the positions of Thomaskantor and city Kapellmeister, that document the musical life of the city, but have largely evaded a thorough accounting: Johann Friedrich Doles and Johann Adam Hiller, Hiller and Johann Gottfried Schicht, and Moritz Hauptmann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. One of the author's signal accomplishments in this volume is to weave a rich narrative history of this period, and to explicate the traditions of the musical culture that connected Bach's legacy to Mendelssohn. And another, equally significant contribution is to trace the symbiotic relationship between musical life in the church and concert hall." -- R. Larry Todd, Bach

"This insightful book covers Leipzig's rich history of sacred and secular music between the time of J. S. Bach to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Jeffrey Sposato successfully tackles this largely under-researched time in Leipzig's musical development, framing it with social and political context...For fans and researchers of Bach, Mendelssohn, and the establishment of the community choral ensemble, this book is a must-read." -- Angelica Dunsavage, Tuscan, USA, Choral Journal

"Leipzig after Bach is a significant contribution to music scholarship, fixing a sustained gaze upon religious and theological change as an agent in public musical life" -- Desmond Sheehan, Eighteenth-Century Music

"This is a comprehensive examination of the relationship between church and secular music in a Protestant city renowned for the composers in its service. ... The author also provides vivid depictions of music directors, accounts of how they were chosen, examinations of kinds of music composed, and discussion of the interrelationship between the choral and musical directors. Finally one sees how Mendelssohn came to exert sole influence over repertoire and choice of musical directors, gradually creating many of the secular and sacred traditions listeners enjoy today. The book includes footnotes with original German quotations, concert programs, contemporary reviews, and well-constructed charts categorizing musical offerings over time." -- CHOICE

"Leipzig After Bach is an important contribution that fills a significant gap in the literature about music in Leipzig.... This book should be read by Bach scholars, Mendelssohn scholars, and anyone else interested in the development of musical culture in a city that was unlike any other in Germany." --Jason Grant, Bach Notes

"Sposato has carefully constructed a narrative that threads together a wealth of political, social, and musical history, bringing clarity to a topic deserving of such attention." -- Valerie Walden, Early Music America

Leipzig is widely celebrated for its importance to music history, and for the role its beautiful churches played in the German Reformation. But the period between Johann Sebastian Bach's death in 1750 and Felix Mendelssohn's years in Leipzig in the 1830s and 40s has been largely ignored-until now. Leipzig After Bach fills this gap in our knowledge, and shows us why the musical and church traditions of Leipzig from 1750 to 1850 are critical to our understanding of the city's past and present."--Mayor Burkhard Jung, City of Leipzig

"In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna had their opera houses, which provided the focus for civic music-making. Leipzig was different, there was no opera house. Instead, in Bach's time, an active musical life overflowed from its churches into coffee houses and other locations, that was especially effective around the time of the Leipzig trade fairs, held three times each year. But by Mendelssohn's time the services in the churches began to sound like sacred concerts. In this significant study, much of it based on unpublished archival sources, Jeffrey S. Sposato skillfully charts the ebb and flow between religious and secular influences in the musical life of Leipzig from the time of Bach to the time of Mendelssohn, a period that until now has been imperfectly understood."--Robin A. Leaver, Emeritus Professor of Sacred Music, Westminster Choir College, Princeton