Behold him the progenitor of many children after the flesh, and many, many sprung from his teeming and tireless brain! Behold him, the musical athlete, challenging virtuosity to trial of skill and endurance, while he himself rejoices like the swift and strong runner sure of his lead in the race!
Behold him deferential, but not obsequious, the admired and sought of a monarch and the chief comer to the palace of Potsdam! Behold him, unflattered by the attentions of royalty and court, wending back to Liepsic, and his humble cantorship with its meagre stipend! Behold his reverent return to the old Lutheran Church of Saint Thomas and the well-remembered organ where with praiseful notes he often had sought and found a greater than Frederic, or any earthly potentate!
Between the death of Bach and the present time, more than one hundred and fifty years have intervened. Years indeed memorable; years of unparalleled activity and change in the musical world; years of greater enrichment of its repertory than were all preceding them. Those one hundred and fifty years have given us the perfected beauties of Italian, French and German Opera. They have produced for us Haydn and his great contemporaries and near successors. From them is that priceless heritage, the Mendelssohn Oratorios. They have brought to our charmed ears the lyric songs of Schubert and Schumann, and the unique and wholly adapted tone-poetry of Chopin, composer par excellence for that instrument of which the clavichord was the humble precursor. Those years have enlarged the orchestra by introducing many new and telling instruments, also they have developed its technique and otherwise elevated it to the virtuoso demands of our most modern composers. Nevertheless, the music of Bach is nothing belittled by the vast sum total of subsequent achievement, nor grows it useless like a garment cast aside because no longer of fashionable cut and color. And yet that music was underestimated and much neglected in Bach's lifetime, and, afterwards for a long period, almost forgotten, until, through the efforts of Mendelssohn and Franz and the Bach society, it was rescued from the possibility of a fate like that of many an ancient writing for which the regretful world has vainly sought.
Bach was the famed virtuoso of an era when far less than modern skill was necessary for the manipulation of the organ and the clavichord, and yet his works are to-day surprisingly well adapted to the technical needs of the advanced student. Those for clavichord are musically adequate in the programmes of the modern concert hall, whilst the «Preludes and Fugues,» and also the Toccatas, are the delight and ambition of good organists throughout the world.
The man Johann Sebastian Bach; how much might be said of him, the kind husband and father, the good and respected citizen, the devout follower of Luther, the foremost among contemporary virtuosi, the faithful music-master in the school, the conscientious precentor in the church, the unobtrusive genius touched not by the infirmities of noble minds. Surely much more might be said in way of encomium than here undertaken.
The composer, Johann Sebastian Bach; how much more might be said of his works than in these meagre pages; how much more in way of analysis; but such is not our object.
As for praise, in the performance of those works we are heart to heart with the living Bach, the immortal one, the deathless part of whom speaks from every full and satisfying measure their meed of praise, wherefore the musical world, even the modern musical world, listens and approves.
But to what shall we liken his works? With what shall they be compared? Surely with the mighty, the steadfast, the undecaying! They are comparable with those man-builded mountains of stone resting forever upon the floor of the Nile Valley. Yes, they are in very truth the Pyramids of Music, and Bach with Cyclopean hand has quarried them, block by block from the enduring substance of the cliffs, and he has fitted each to other with that accuracy of judgment, precision of workmanship, and grandeur of conception, which characterized the architect-builders of Old Egypt; those whose models were the indestructible upbuildings of God, even the ancient and everlasting hills.