[151] Arnold Schering: Geschichte des Oratoriums.
[152] Riemann: Op. cit.
[153] His introduction of choruses in the new version aptly illustrates the metamorphosis which the Handel oratorio underwent, and how indispensable the choral element had by this time become.
[154] Oxford: ‘History of Music,’ IV, 3.
CHAPTER XV
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Introduction—The life of Bach—Bach’s polyphonic skill and the qualities of his genius—Bach’s contribution to the art of music and the forms he employed—The revision of keyboard technique and equal temperament—Bach’s relation to the history of music.
That Bach lived at a time when the musical public was opera mad, when the Italian singers were dictators, when the grace and ease of Italian melody were bewitching and relaxing all music, yet that he himself never wrote for the stage nor ever surrendered in spirit to the force of the new movement, inevitably obscures and misrepresents his relation to the past and present of his day. By the peculiar nature of his genius which has filled his music with a seemingly forever unweakening power to stimulate, because of its perhaps unmatched greatness, he will always stand a little above and apart from other composers and will appear unlinked in the slow development of music. Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, even the greatest and most original composers of the present age, all have hailed him as the father of modern music, have drawn inspiration and knowledge from him as from an inexhaustible source, and this unfailing tribute and dependence from nearly all subsequent composers has helped to fix our conception of him as the source and ultimate scope of music. His gift of expression was indeed all-comprehending, if not infinite. The freshness of his music has been judged immortal. He partakes of the superhuman. He seems perfection. Yet one has but to look through the eyes of devoted historians to see a man human and simple, straightforward, stubborn, sometimes quarrelsome, quite independent, even defiant, and an artist standing as firmly rooted as an oak in the work of his predecessors, thoroughly awake to the music of his day, and drawing in his own fashion many of the features which marked it.
Like Beethoven, he invented no new forms, but took the forms at hand, property common to all composers of his day, and, by his most uncommon genius, gave the touches which transformed them into monuments of imperishable beauty and perfection. But, more than in the case of Beethoven, it was the quality of his own inspiration which gave to these forms their first and last glory. There are symphonies of Haydn and Mozart written ten or a dozen years before Beethoven wrote his first symphony which we can hardly believe will ever lose their hold upon the public, which seem destined to immortal life, for which no apology of time nor circumstance need ever be made; but before Bach there are no fugues, no suites, no cantatas, no settings of the Passion for which such apologies are not necessary, which must not henceforth conceal defect or weakness in the respectable toga of antiquity. This distinction, of course, offers no ground for a comparison of the two men. It is the result of circumstance, of accident.
The seventeenth century, of which Bach and Handel were the two great results, was a period of experiment fraught with more tentativeness and uncertainty than have ever since hindered composers. We need only recall how, before the beginning of that very century, which was to prove the most fruitful of all in the long history of music, the vocal art of polyphony, the consummation of a century of effort, had been shattered into various parts, each of which had almost to begin life anew, to mold itself to strange needs and surroundings; how the invention of opera had smashed down the last restraining barrier of mediæval scholasticism and let loose a thousand restless composers to wander at will in lands hitherto all but undreamed of. The improvement of the organ and of other instruments, the perfection of the violin had yet to come; the principles of form which should give music a foundation apart from that of a text were yet to be discovered; the modern art of harmony was to develop from the seed; and the vigor of rhythm to be accepted little by little into the constitution of serious music. Music was still either old-fashioned or weak or unsettled to the very day of Bach and Handel. Through them it emerged from its period of probation and experiment, splendid and secure. They therefore appear to the later eye in the glory of creators, and especially Bach, because, for all the vast number and proportions of his choral works, he is fundamentally an instrumental composer and instrumental music was the greatest bequest of the seventeenth century to the future of music.