More happily inspired in his emulations, or better served by his talents, we behold Bach in a composition in three movements, little known up to this time: a "Fantasie" in G major.[62]
The first two movements are still rather weak, perhaps influenced by the Italian music heard and played during the few months preceding, when Bach was a violinist in the orchestra of Prince Ernest of Weimar.
The third movement is remarkable, at least with regard to its depth of thought, and to its adoption of all that was most to be desired in Buxtehude's style. The upper parts cross each other upon the scale given out by the bass, as in a Chaconne; it is the resistance of surging waves to the slow rising of the stream, expressed by the implacable repose of the fundamental theme, whose intensity, with its own imperturbable repetitions, overcomes all resistance.
In many of Bach's works we encounter these ascending and descending scales, but they are of varying significance. We find them again in a piece closely allied to the foregoing: a Fantasia,[63] also in G major, where the diatonic scale serves as the foundation of harmonies, whose interest, cleverly held in check, is augmented by the uninterrupted progression of five real parts.
These works are no longer mere plagiarisms; a glimmer of individuality discloses itself. For example, let us look at the prelude and fugue in E minor.[64] If Buxtehude is here brought in mind, it is because of that quality of his which is most neutral, and no longer through his peculiar originality, his personal resources; in trying to avoid which a mere imitator must always come to grief. Many a detail in construction is derived from the Lübeck organist; for instance, those detached chords, which so successfully set off that plaintive syncopated progression, the sobbing of whose notes is thereby rendered always more intense; the last sections repeating the first, now broken into two still more earnest entreaties.
And of this fugal theme, beginning in two separate fragments upon the dominant, we have seen examples in Buxtehude; but there this repetition of the subject expressed in its intensity a joyous declaration.[65]
It is here a tremulous, hesitating interrogation, which seems to dread its answer; the prelude is full of lonely sadness, as deep as it is despairing; in the fugue it converses in dialogue with itself, one might say in accents which proclaim a public misfortune.
But if one may not seek "in a musical work the expression of any condition of the soul, or the narration of any story of the heart,"[66] one can hardly deny that music expresses "the being, even the personal will"[67] of psychological phenomena, at least in the sense that the interest of certain works of art, aside from every æsthetic consideration, is correlative to the mental condition in which one receives them. This may explain the position occupied among the works of Bach by this piece, whose many weaknesses are revealed to us by a technical analysis.