Thus after his death were treated the family and works of the man “to whom music owes as much as religion does to its founder.”
Chapter VIII
The Cantatas and the Chorale
Characteristics of Bach’s Music
The prevailing characteristics in Bach’s compositions are intense earnestness of purpose, and, in his church music, a deep religious feeling, too deep for the ordinary everyday person to appreciate; an absolute absence of anything extraneous, such as concessions to singers and performers, or to the fashion of the day. When Bach writes florid or highly ornamental passages, they are not intended merely to exhibit the skill of the performer—their most important purpose is the exact expression of the words or emotions in hand. In this he and Beethoven were at one. Their difficulties of execution arise from the necessities of artistic expression, and such difficulties will be found in all the truest and best art, the art that lives beyond the fashion of the hour.
Bach, like Beethoven, suffered from the influx of a superficial kind of music which so easily captivates an unthinking public.
The proximity of the Dresden Court, with its Italian Opera Company and the opening of an opera-house in Leipsic itself, had much the same effect in attracting the Leipsic public away from the solidity and severity of the cantor (whom, all the same, they never ceased to respect) as the Rossini fever had in the beginning of the nineteenth century at Vienna with regard to Beethoven’s music. Bach, however, was in a worse position than Beethoven, for he lived and worked in a small circle of German towns, and only in the domain of church music. Teutonic to the backbone, he expressed his thoughts in his own way without swerving to the right or left. He never had occasion to try and please any but a North German public, and he mostly endeavoured only to please himself, and promote the “glory of God” in his own way, by adhering strictly to what his genius told him was right; and posterity has endorsed his views.
Beethoven, on the other hand, lived at a time when communications between countries were beginning to be more rapid and frequent. The French Revolution, and the constant wars brought about by the ambition of Napoleon, though temporarily hostile to the actual practice of art, had the effect of making whatever art was produced more cosmopolitan, and therefore more easily appreciated outside the artist’s country. Thus Beethoven’s music soon became known in England: and at the very time when the Rossini fever was causing him to be forgotten in Vienna (the town of his adoption) the English Philharmonic Society was negotiating with the great composer for the composition of a symphony, and these negotiations, as is well known, resulted in the production of the greatest symphony the world has yet seen.
Bach and Handel