Word: bache
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your story on Bach [Dec, 27] was the best Christmas cover story for a long, long time. Every word brought illumination and joy; you had the symmetry, the inevitable Tightness in every part. You have an art of your own. I left a reading of every word with a sense of completeness; the Bach violin partitas began sounding through my mind as I got up. You caught the heart of the Bachian Restoration in a magnificent end-of-year cadenza. What is better for space travel than the accompaniment of Bach? Long live Bach...
...Bach was the last great voice of the polyphonic style that had lasted since the early 17th century. The very forms he favored-fugue, church cantata, motet-were outmoded as he used them, and he knew it. "My art," he said, "has become old-fashioned...
...trend in music moved away from virile counterpoint toward softer melody and simple accompaniment, from rich harmonic modulations toward more basic cadences, and from daring elaboration toward the cultivation of controlled elegance. Bach's composer sons-notably Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian and Wilhelm Friedemann -were all attracted to this style. After his death, Bach was mourned as a fine organist and teacher, but for 70 years his reputation as a composer was kept alive only by a few enthusiasts and composers, notably Mozart and Beethoven...
...Felix Mendelssohn, then 20, conducted a Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Although severely cut and subjected to a much doctored orchestration, the music awoke the public to Bach. Thereafter, the 19th century treated him with a mixture of veneration and desecration. His choral works were frequently performed, but with muddy-sounding 1,000-voice choirs and thick, brass-bottomed orchestras. His original scores were collected over a period of 50 years for the definitive 60-volume Bach-Gesellschaft edition of his works, completed in 1900 (a new, even more complete edition is now under way). But they contained...
...beginning of the modern outlook came in 1905, with the publication of Albert Schweitzer's two-volume musicological study J. S. Bach. Besides illuminating the context of Bach's works and propounding a more scrupulous performing style, Schweitzer showed that many seeming peculiarities in Bach came from his "pictorial" method of wedding music to text: a wiggling melody when a line refers to a Biblical serpent, an upward line when mists rise...