ABSTRACT
It has now been over fifty years since Manfred Bukofzer published “Allegory in Baroque Music.” 1 In this classic essay he discusses the manifold ways Baroque composers—especially Bach—used musical devices to represent the meaning of texts in vocal works. The basis of musical allegory is a “coherent” relationship between a particular compositional procedure and some extra-musical object or idea. Bukofzer explains:
Music does not plainly imitate what is allegorized. It produces an event in the musical sphere which is analogous to an event in the spiritual sphere…. The analogies in music may refer only to one voice or to all the voices, to the rhythm alone, to the harmony alone, to the setting and instrumentation alone, or simply to the intensity of sound. It is also possible to combine some or all of these elements. 2
