CHAPTER XXIII.
JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH.
LL things considered, the most remarkable figure of this period was that of the great John Sebastian Bach, who was born at Eisenach, in Prussia, in 1685, and died at Leipsic in 1750. It is scarcely too much to say that this great man has exercised more influence upon the development of music than any other composer who has ever lived. In his own day he led a quiet, uneventful life, at first as student, then as court musician at Weimar, where he played the violin; later as organist at Arnstadt, a small village near Weimar, and still later as director of music in the St. Thomas church and school at Leipsic. In the sixty-five years of his life, Bach produced an enormous number of compositions, of which about half were in fugue form, a form which was at its prime at the beginning of this century and which Bach carried to the farthest point in the direction of freedom and spontaneity which it ever reached.
Fig. 51.
JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH.
It is the remarkable glory of Bach to have rendered his compositions indispensable to thorough mastery in three different provinces of musical effort. The modern art of violin playing rests upon two works, the six sonatas of Bach for violin solo, and the Caprices of Paganini. The former contain everything that belongs to the classical, the latter everything that belongs to the sensational. In organ playing the foundation is Bach, and Bach alone. Nine-tenths of organ playing is comprised in the Bach works. Upon the piano his influence has been little less. While it is true that at least four works are necessary for making a pianist of the modern school, viz., the "Well Tempered Clavier," of Bach; the "Gradus ad Parnassum," of Clementi; the "Studies," of Chopin, and the Rhapsodies, of Liszt, the works of Bach form, on the whole, considerably more than one-third of this preparation. Nor has the influence of Bach been confined to the province of technical instruction alone. On the contrary, all composers since his time have felt the stimulus of his great tone poems, and Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin and Wagner found him the most productive of great masters.
The life of Bach need not long detain us. A musician of the tenth generation, member of a family which occupies a liberal space in German encyclopedias of music, art and literature, Sebastian Bach led the life of a teacher, productive artist and virtuoso, mainly within the limits of the comparatively unimportant provincial city of Leipsic. His three wives in succession and his twenty-one children were the domestic incidents which bound him to his home. Here he trained his choir, taught his pupils, composed those master works which modern musicians try in vain to equal, and the even tenor of his life was broken in upon by very few incidents of a sensational kind. We do not understand that Bach was a virtuoso upon the violin, although no other master has required more of that greatest of musical instruments. Upon the piano and organ the case is different. Bach's piano was the clavier, upon which he was the greatest virtuoso of his time. His touch was clear and liquid, his technique unbounded, and his musical fantasy absolutely without limit. Hence in improvisation or in the performance of previously arranged numbers he never failed to delight his audience. It was the same upon the organ. The art of obligato pedal playing he brought to a point which it had never before reached and scarcely afterward surpassed. He comprehended the full extent of organ technique, and with the exception of a few tricks of quasi-orchestral imitation, made possible in modern organs, he covered the entire ground of organ playing in a manner at once solid and brilliant. Many stories are told of his capacity in this direction, but the general characterization already given is sufficient. He was a master of the first order. The common impression that he played habitually upon the full organ is undoubtedly erroneous. He made ample use of registration to the fullest extent practicable on the organs of his day.