Death
Bach’s eyesight had long been failing. The strain to which he had mercilessly subjected it all his life, copying music as well as engraving elaborate compositions of his own, was now telling on it. By the end of 1749 his vision was in such a state that an English eye specialist, John Taylor, who later treated Handel but at this time chanced to be touring the continent, was summoned and operated on Bach about the beginning of 1750. It was of little avail. Prolonged confinement in a dark room, medicines and dressings told on the master’s ordinarily robust constitution. When his condition permitted and his sight temporarily improved he recklessly returned to his creative labors and also prepared for the engravers a set of eighteen choral-preludes for organ. But the end was at hand. Calling to his side his son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnikol, Bach dictated to him the variation on the chorale When We Are in Our Deepest Need, prophetically bidding him alter the title to With This Before Thy Throne I Come. On July 18 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and lay for ten days in a desperate state. At nine in the evening on July 28, 1750, he passed from a world that could barely discern the shadow of his greatness.
It is excessive, perhaps, to maintain that for over three quarters of a century after his death Bach went into total eclipse. But he was disregarded if not forgotten. A handful of musicians, indeed, remembered him, among them some of his talented pupils. From time to time a few scattered works of his gained a limited circulation and came into worthy hands. Thus, in the seventeen-eighties several became known in Vienna, and at the Baron Van Swieten’s Mozart had occasion to acquaint himself with a few specimens, which powerfully stimulated his genius. Afterwards, in Leipzig, being shown the parts of one of the motets he exclaimed after closely studying them: “Here, at last, is something from which one can learn!” Beethoven, too, knew the Well-Tempered Clavier and even went so far as to ask someone to procure him the Crucifixus from the B minor Mass. His exclamation is well known: “Not Bach (brook) but Ocean should be his name!”
Yet, in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was chiefly Philipp Emanuel, not his father, to whom one referred when the mighty name was invoked. For the sons of Bach, not the mighty parent, embodied “the spirit of the time.” Even prior to his death Johann Sebastian had passed for outmoded and rather hopelessly “old hat.” Philipp Emanuel went so far as to call his father “a big wig stuffed with learning”; and such was the opinion shared by many of the young bloods in Leipzig and elsewhere. In a way this was not surprising. Bach represented a type of music whose complex profundities were giving place to homophony, entertainment and the graceful superficialities of the so-called “gallant style.” The new age was concerned with the problems of the sonata and the opera. Even if Bach’s scores—most of them unpublished—had been accessible, it is questionable whether the epoch we call “classical” would have been able to see him in a just perspective.
In due course the wheel was to turn full-circle and surely none would have been more amazed than Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian could they have known that one day their own works would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the “learned old perruque” had become the fountain of musical youth, the perpetual source of strength and of illimitable, self-renewing wonder. With Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 there began that resurrection which went on increasingly through the nineteenth century, headed by the redemptive labors of the Bach-Gesellschaft, and which continues to gain momentum right through our own day. Boundless as the universe, timeless as eternity, modern as tomorrow, Bach remains from decade to decade what Richard Wagner once called him—“the most stupendous miracle in all music.”