The Mass in B minor (BWV 232) is a musical setting of the complete Latin Mass by Johann Sebastian Bach. The work was one of Bach's last, not completed until 1749, the year before his death in 1750. Much of the Mass consisted of music that Bach had composed earlier: the Kyrie and Gloria sections had been composed as a Lutheran Missa in 1733 for the Elector of Saxony at Dresden. The Sanctus dates back to 1724, and the Qui tollis movement was based on a cantata chorus dating from 1714. To complete the work, however, in the 1740s Bach composed new sections of the Credo such as Et incarnatus est. The completed Mass was his last major composition.

It was unusual for composers working in the Lutheran tradition to compose a Missa tota and Bach's motivations remain a matter of scholarly debate. The Mass was most probably never performed in totality during Bach's lifetime, and the work largely disappeared in the 18th century. Several performances in the early 19th century, however, sparked a revival both of the piece and the larger rediscovery of Bach's music. Today, it is widely hailed as a monumental work of the late Baroque and is frequently performed.

B minor is a minor scale based on B, consisting of the pitches B, C♯, D, E, F♯, G, and A. The harmonic minor raises the A to A♯. Its key signature has two sharps (see below: Scales and keys).

Its relative major is D major, and its parallel major is B major.

Changes needed for the melodic and harmonic versions of the scale are written in with accidentals as necessary.

In Baroque times, B minor was regarded as the key of passive suffering. The theorist Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739–1791) regarded B minor as a key expressing a quiet acceptance of fate and very gentle complaint, something commentators find to be in line with Bach's use of the key in the St. John Passion. By Beethoven's time, however, the perception of B minor had changed considerably: Francesco Galeazzi wrote that B minor was not suitable for music in good taste, and Beethoven labelled a B minor melodic idea in one of his sketchbooks as a "black key". In relation to the Baroque interpretation of the scale, the B minor chord also has a very melancholic and grieving feel to it, giving the feeling of suffering and gentle complaint. Eagles' "Hotel California", Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb", Metallica's "Fade to Black" and Paul Kelly's "Peace", all commonly renowned to be very emotional and melancholic songs, are written in B minor.^{[citation needed]} The second movement of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, one of the most famous compositions for the classical guitar, is in B minor.

Philippe Herreweghe (born 2 May 1947, Ghent) is a Belgian conductor.

In his school years at the University of Ghent, Herreweghe combined studies in medical science and psychiatry with a musical education at the Ghent Conservatory, where Marcel Gazelle, Yehudi Menuhin's accompanist, was his piano teacher. In the same period, he began conducting and in 1970 founded the Collegium Vocale Ghent, and gave up medicine. Very soon Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt took notice of his musical approach, and invited him and the "Collegium Vocale Gent" to join them in their recordings of the complete Bach cantatas.

Herreweghe's approach to baroque music came to be widely recognised, and in 1977 he founded another ensemble in Paris, La Chapelle Royale, to perform the music of the French Golden Age. Since then he has started several other groups and ensembles with whom he managed to create a repertoire stretching from the Renaissance to contemporary music: the Ensemble Vocale Européen, specialised in Renaissance polyphony, and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées, founded in 1991 to bring alive, once again, the repertoire of the romantic and pre-romantic era on original instruments.

Thomas Boys (1792–1880) was an English theologian and antiquary.

His father was Rear-admiral Thomas Boys of Kent. He was born at Sandwich, Kent, and educated at Tonbridge Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. The failure of his health from over-study prevented his taking more than the ordinary degrees (B.A. 1813, M.A. 1817), and, finding an active life necessary to him, he entered the army with a view to becoming a military chaplain, was attached to the military chest in the Peninsula under Wellington in 1813, and was wounded at the battle of Toulouse in three places, gaining the Peninsular Medal. He was ordained deacon in 1816, and priest in 1822.

He established a reputation as a Hebrew scholar, being teacher of Hebrew to Jews at the college, Hackney, from 1830 to 1832, and professor of Hebrew at the Missionary College, Islington, in 1836. While holding this last post, he revised Deodati's Italian Bible, and also the Arabic Bible.

Boys also made a translation of the Bible into Portuguese. He began by making a critical revision of João Ferreira de Almeida's version: according to The Bible of every Land, published by Samuel Bagster in 1848, Boys "appears to have completed the revision of the New Testament, and to have published small editions of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and of the Psalms". Then, in 1837, the Trinitarian Bible Society decided to publish a new Portuguese translation from the Greek and Hebrew texts, and appointed Boys to carry out the work. He was instructed to use Almeida's version as a basis, but carry out a careful comparison with the Hebrew, and to make his version comprehensible to contemporary readers. The New Testament was published in 1843, and the Old Testament in 1847.

Andreas Scholl (born 10 November 1967) is a German countertenor, a male classical singer in the alto vocal range. He is noted as a specialist in Baroque music.

Scholl was born on 10 November 1967 in Eltville, Germany, and grew up in neighboring Kiedrich. All of his family members were singers. He was enrolled at the age of seven into the Kiedricher Chorbuben (Kiedrich Choir-Boys) — which was first documented in 1333 as "a schola of men assisting the priests on all Sundays, singing the Gregorian chant." At age 13, Andreas Scholl sang the second boy (his sister Elisabeth sang the first boy) in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden. That same year, he was one of 20,000 choristers from all over the world gathered in Rome for a festival where Scholl was chosen to sing solo at Mass on 4 January 1981 and met Pope John Paul II. Along with his fellow choristers, Andreas Scholl was an extra in the film The Name of the Rose, playing a young monk standing alongside Sean Connery in scenes shot at Eberbach Abbey, near Kiedrich.