Heinrich Nikolaus Gerber, who was Bach's pupil from 1724 to 1727, particularly emphasises this feature of Bach's teaching.
See on the whole matter Spitta, iii. 117 ff. Bach's method is illustrated by his Rules and Instructions (1738) printed by Spitta, iii. 315 ff., and also by the Einige höchst nöthinge Regeln at the end of A. M. Bach's Notenbuch (1725).
Mozart wrote as follows to a correspondent who asked him what his method of composition was: “I can really say no more on this subject than the following; for I myself know no more about it, and cannot account for it. When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments, etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all together. What a delight this is I cannot tell!…When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of my memory, if I may use that phrase, what has previously been collected into it in the way I have mentioned. For this reason the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination” (Life, ed. Dent, p. 255).
Wagner, writing in 1851 to Uhlig, who could not understand how the libretto of Young Siegfried could be set to music, expresses the same idea as Mozart: “What you cannot possibly imagine is a-making of itself! I tell you, the musical phrases build themselves on these verses and periods without my having to trouble at all; everything springs as if wild from the ground” (Life, trans. Ellis, iii. p. 243).
Schumann writes in 1839: “I used to rack my brains for a long time, but now I scarcely ever scratch out a note. It all comes from within, and I often feel as if I could go on playing without ever coming to an end” (Grove, vol. iv. p. 353).
Angela Berardi's Documenti armonici. Nelli quali con varii discorsi, regole, ed essempii si dimonstrano gli studii arteficiosi della musica was published at Bologna in 1687.
Giovanni Maria Buononcini, b. c. 1640, d. 1678; Maestro di Capella at Modena; published his Musico prattico at Bologna in 1673, 1688.
Johann Joseph Fux, b. 1660, d. 1741; Kapellmeister at Vienna; published his Gradus ad Parnassum at Vienna in 1725.
See supra, p. 74.
* I speak here only of those pupils who made music their profession. But, besides these, Bach had a great many other pupils. Every dilettante in the neighbourhood desired to boast of the instruction of so great and celebrated a man. Many gave themselves out to have been his pupils who had never been taught by him.