With reverence, and a sense of deep obligation, every sterling musician looks back to Johann Sebastian Bach, seeing in him the virile forebear of whatsoever is rich and euphonious and learned in modern instrumental music. Composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Franz, have sat at the feet of Bach and hailed him their musical Messiah, and many, numbered not in the circle of such discipleship, have harkened to the voice of his teaching; and some there be, who, touching but the hem of his garments, were cured of weakness and infirmity.
The grand, old German Chorals, those voicings of religious fervor steadfast and heart-deep, wherefrom every frivolity of the world was banished; those massive, stately hymns of a communion whose worshippers each mingled his individual offering with the outpour of congregational praise, are forever associated with the name of Bach, their amplifier and enricher, as with the name of him who introduced them into the service of the Lutheran Church. Bold and enduring, like monolithic hills, those rugged Chorals long had stood untouched by the meddlesome hand of Mediocrity. Surely their incorporation by Bach into his greatest works demanded a genius equal to that of their originators, and, in addition, the total of judgment and learning which our master summoned to his well-accomplished task.
At the very outset of his career, Bach was drawn to the style of composition which thereafter characterized his efforts. The Italian Opera, that belonging of quite another people, that importation which was to absorb, until past middle life, the energies of his great contemporary Handel, held for Bach no allurements. He had in supreme degree the instinct of the born specialist; he desired and aimed to do a supreme thing supremely. His was that native wisdom which confined his energies within their wide and deep channel, the course of non-resistance indicated by the cleavage of the hills and the lay of the valleys of the rugged, musical landscape which had environed his predecessors, and amidst which he himself matured to self-conscious, artistic being. But, though a specialist, Bach was so in the true sense of the word. His comprehensive interest could not be circumscribed and iron-bound by his specialty. Well he knew the anatomy of the whole body of music, and well he realized the interdependence of its various members; and so with keen interest he noted every happening in parts most removed from the center of its life.
Naturally, we find him seeking acquaintance with Handel far off in the English home of his adoption. But the opportunity for a friendship no doubt of vast, mutual advantage, Handel seems to have ignored. Perhaps he preferred the lone sufficiency of his gigantic selfhood. Other reasons might be conjectured, but, in truth, Handel had grown somewhat out of touch with Bach. Aside from the matter of the Italian Opera, the environments of London metropolitan life, and also the art life of England—largely moulded by her great masters of English verse—had reacted upon the genius of Handel making him in some degree non-German, and yet, by way of compensation, making him the chief glory of English music, and the model of native composers who but for him might have harked back to Purcell and Orlando Gibbons. Different indeed was the life of Bach, a life remote from the great centers of worldly activity. In that life is seen no arenal contests like those which, fast and furious with thrust and counter thrust, too much filled the rival days of Handel and Bononcini.
The compositions of Bach provoked no partisan spirit, nor cared he for that mere notoriety which benefits the well-damned equally with the well-praised. In the lives of men like Bach and Handel, every moment of well-ordered activity is a boon to their public, every moment of misdirected effort is an unmitigated loss. However, in the life of Bach we lack cause to regret an abortiveness of result lamentable in the life of Handel of whom it might be asked, Of what musical enrichment to the present are those many operatic effusions of his busy, young manhood, and his industrious middle-prime? For the most part they are dead and coffined in the dark of oblivion. Whatsoever escapes forgetfulness has, with rare exceptions, experienced a veritable reincarnation among the florid beauties of his Oratorios, the crown and glory of his last and greatest years.
II
By virtue of his high endowment, Bach possessed that wisdom of genius which, to the thrifty and so-called practical, is but the foolishness of the visionary. Except in the case of a few works engraved by his own hands, he gave no thought to the immediate outcome of his labors; and yet, amidst the accumulation of his great, unpublished compositions, he wrote on as if all the engravers and compositors of Saxony were crying for copy. A lesser man, a man of talent, would have seen to it that his masterpieces for voice and clavichord and organ were first in the shop and then in the home, the church and the concert hall. That he felt concern for these, his mentally-begotten, is certain; else he had spared himself that prodigious concentration of thought the result of which each preserves in a body vitalized to endure throughout the centuries. No time had he for obtuse and over-cautious publishers, nor would he debase his ideals to popularize and make saleable his inspirations. His was an artistic conscience analogous to that of the saint and the martyr; his their self-sacrifice to principle; his that undebasable virtue, that adherence to conviction, which is its own sweet reward in whatever of high or humble man's lot is fixed. His every creative act spake something like this: «Brief indeed is the most lengthened life of man, and long must the world await another Sebastian Bach. Let me use my permitted day of sunshine ere the hastening gloom enshroud and silence it forever!» So he filled to fullness the incomparable hours. Trusting in God and the Time Spirit, he left to an unknown future the propaganda of his deeds.
Ah, when the ravisher of Peace, and the subjugator of his kind, has fulfilled his fierce ambition, and the rent land is desolate and a nation enslaved in tyrant-welded bonds, how fares his name within the hearts and on the lips of men? Does not its lettering pollute with blood the annals of his time? Not with the harsh rattle, not with the red horror of war, but rather with a sound of sweetest harmony comes the conquering musician, and the charmed world, his debtor, proclaims him lord of a realm more peaceful than once the great Augustus mildly ruled.
Longfellow's often-quoted lines:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,