Unfortunately, it is impossible to identify Stephenson precisely, or to detect his activities in the musical circle in which Wesley includes him. In 1820 there was in Lombard Street a firm of bankers under the style of “Remington, Stephenson, Remington, and Toulmin,” the active partner being Mr. Rowland Stephenson, a man of about forty in that year. The firm was wound up in bankruptcy in 1829, Stephenson having absconded to America the previous year. He appears to have been the only banker of that name holding such a recognised position as Wesley attributes to him, though it remains no more than a conjecture that he was the author of the translation issued in [pg xxi] 1820.[3] But whoever “Stephenson the Banker” may have been, the poverty of his work fails to support Wesley's commendation of his “scientific” equipment, and suggests that his purse rather than his talents were serviceable to Wesley's missionary campaign.
For the facts of Bach's life, and as a record of his artistic activities, Forkel admittedly is inadequate and often misleading. Stephenson necessarily was without information to enable him to correct or supplement his author. Recent research, and particularly the classic volumes of Spitta and Schweitzer, have placed the present generation in a more instructed and therefore responsible position. The following pages, accordingly, have been annotated copiously in order to bring Forkel into line with modern scholarship. His own infrequent notes are invariably indicated by a prefixed asterisk. It has been thought advisable to write an addendum to Chapter II. in order to supplement Forkel at the weakest point of his narrative.
Readers of Spitta's first volume probably will remember the effort to follow the ramifications of the Bach pedigree unaided by a genealogical Table. It is unfortunate that Spitta did not [pg xxii] set out in that form the wealth of biographical material his pages contain. To supply the deficiency, and to illustrate Forkel's first Chapter, a complete Genealogical Table is provided in Appendix VI., based mainly upon the biographical details scattered over Spitta's pages.
In Chapter IX. Forkel gives a list of Bach's compositions known to him. It is, necessarily, incomplete. For that reason Appendices I. and II. provide a full catalogue of Bach's works arranged under the periods of his career. In the case of the Oratorios, Cantatas, Motets, and “Passions,” it is not difficult to distribute them upon a chronological basis. The Clavier works also can be dated with some approximation to closeness. The effort is more speculative in the case of the Organ music.
In his Preface Forkel suggests the institution of a Society for the publication and study of Bach's works. The proposal was adopted after half a century's interval, and in Appendix III. will be found a complete and detailed catalogue of the publications of the Old and New Bachgesellschaft from 1850 to 1918 inclusive. The Society's issues for 1915-18 have not yet reached this country. The present writer had an opportunity to examine them in the Library of the Cologne Conservatorium of Music in the spring of this year.
In this Introduction will be found a list of works bearing on Bach, which preceded Forkel's [pg xxiii] monograph. Appendix IV. provides a bibliography of Bach literature published subsequently to it.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mr. Ivor Atkins, of Worcester Cathedral, and to Mr. W. G. Whittaker, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who have read these pages in proof, and improved them by their criticism.
C. S. T.
October 1, 1919.