Michael Marissen

Michael Marissen (born July 31, 1960, Hamilton, Ontario) was professor of music at Swarthmore College, where he joined the faculty in 1989. Marissen studied music history at Calvin College and received his PhD from Brandeis University. He has guest taught on the graduate faculty at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. In June 2014 Marissen announced that he had retired from active teaching at Swarthmore, although he remains a professor emeritus. He now works as a freelance writer, lecturer, and scholar.

Marissen's books, centered on the issue of music and religion, include The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton, 1995), Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto (Oxford, 1998), An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford, 1998) with Daniel R. Melamed, and Bach's Oratorios: The Parallel German-English Texts with Annotations (Oxford, 2008), and Bach & God (Oxford 2016).

Marissen's most controversial work began as an essay published in The New York Times on Easter Sunday, 8 April 2007, entitled “Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’", which is the basis for his recently published monograph entitled, Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah: The Unsettling History of the World’s Most Beloved Choral Work (Yale University Press, 2014). The first half of the book outlines his thesis that Handel and his librettist showed an unattractive and morally questionable anti-Judaism that manifested itself in "triumphalism," a caustic celebration of the defeat of the Jews at the hands of the Romans (in AD 70, with the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple). The second half of the book contains an annotated libretto of "The Messiah," illuminating the many often obscure passages that rely on an extensive understanding of typology as a technique for understanding Christianity and the New Testament.

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