Fac-simile of the manuscript of the first page of the first Prelude from Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord."

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That in Bach we behold the highest degree of development attained by a race of musicians who flourished through many generations, is due to his wonderful and manifold musical gifts, rather than to his having followed directly in the footsteps of any of the more important composers among his ancestors. He was endowed with a talent for composition of the very first order, has not been excelled as a performer upon the organ and the clavier up to the present day, and was a violin player of the profoundest intelligence, exhibiting complete mastery over the technique of his instrument. At the same time he had a thorough knowledge of organ-building and also distinguished himself by the invention of a new stringed instrument, called the "viola pomposa", and a keyed instrument which was an ingenious combination of the lute and the cembalo. He devised the first perfectly satisfactory method of tuning a clavier according to the tempered system, and introduced the style of fingering, which, with a few modifications, is now in use. But the particular musical form in which his uncle Johann Christoph Bach, of Eisenach, became so great a master—the motet—while cultivated to some extent by Sebastian Bach, was developed differently by him, and his immediate predecessors in the art which made him especially great were not found among the men of his own race.

Bach is first of all a composer of organ music as employed in the domain of the church, and his work must be viewed from this standpoint, if we are to judge him aright. The original foundation of organ music in Germany had been the ecclesiastical Volkslied, or Protestant choral. This does not mean that the melody of a choral was played from beginning to end upon the organ, but that it was made the central point of an independently constructed work, an arrangement possible to be effected in three different ways. Firstly: the choral was played in direct combination with the organ accompaniment, in a way to introduce the congregational singing as the principal feature; in this case a few lines only were worked out in free, contrapuntal style, so as to acquire the character of an improvisation. We see here the choral prelude in its most restricted form. In the second place, the choral was treated as an independent piece of music and resolved into its elementary parts, each one of which was worked out for itself, the composer being influenced in a general way by the poetic sentiment of the text and allowing the musical form to be determined by the relation which the separate lines of the melody bore to each other. Thirdly: the choral, as it left the composer's hands, seemed to him the expression of the poetical thoughts and sensations embodied by the text, and, if played merely by one person, he regarded it as the form in which the assembled congregation gave utterance to its feelings; the choral melody then became the middle point of an independent composition, one part of which moved majestically and solemnly onward, while to the others was entrusted the office of expressing the delicate and personal emotions awakened in the breast of the composer.

By the side of these choral compositions, which, as we have seen, are founded upon a given melody, stand other important forms of music in the seventeenth century: the toccata, the praeludium, the fugue and the passacaglio, or ciacone. While the two last-mentioned proceed from the free invention of the composer, yet here also the Volkslied has exerted its influence, as can easily be seen from the nature of the fugal themes, which are much more expressive and definite than those employed by the Catholics, because with the latter the strong attraction for the Volkslied was wanting. The two greatest organ masters directly preceding Bach were Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel. The latter was born in Nuremberg in 1653 and died there in 1706, while holding the position of organist.