Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work

Johann Sebastian Bach. About 1720. (From the picture by Johann Jakob Ihle, in the Bach Museum, Eisenach).
Johann Sebastian Bach His Life, Art and Work. Translated from the German of Johann Nikolaus Forkel. With notes and appendices by Charles Sanford Terry, Litt.D. Cantab.
Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Charles Sanford Terry


As a composer Forkel has long ceased to be remembered. His works include two Oratorios, Hiskias (1789) and Die Hirten bey der Krippe; four Cantatas for chorus and orchestra; Clavier Concertos, and many Sonatas and Variations for the Harpsichord.
In an illuminating chapter (xii.), Death and Resurrection, Schweitzer has told the story of the neglect that obscured Bach's memory after his death in 1750. Isolated voices, raised here and there, acclaimed his genius. With Bach's treatise on The Art of Fugue before him, Johann Mattheson (1681-1664), the foremost critic of the day, claimed that Germany was “the true home of Organ music and Fugue.” Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718-95), the famous Berlin theorist, expressed the same opinion in his preface to the edition of that work published shortly after Bach's death. But such appreciations were rare. Little of Bach's music was in print and available for performance or critical judgment. Even at St. Thomas's, Leipzig, it suffered almost complete neglect until a generation after Forkel's death. The bulk of Bach's MSS. was divided among his family, and Forkel himself, with unrivalled opportunity to acquaint himself with the dimensions of Bach's industry, knew little of his music except the Organ and Clavier compositions.
In these circumstances it is not strange that Bach's memory waited for more than half a century for a biographer. Forkel, however, was not the first to assemble the known facts of Bach's career or to assert his place in the music of Germany.
Putting aside Johann Gottfried Walther's brief epitome in his Lexikon (1732), the first and most important of the early notices of Bach was the obituary article, or “Nekrolog,” contributed by his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, and Johann Friedrich Agricola, one of Bach's most distinguished pupils, to the fourth volume of Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, published at Leipzig in 1754. The authors of this appreciation give it an intimacy which renders it precious. But Mizler's periodical was the organ of a small Society, of which Bach had been a member, and outside its associates can have done little to extend a knowledge of the subject of the memoir.