Word: bache
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus might Johann Sebastian Bach and his family have celebrated Christmas nearly 250 years ago. In its joyous expression of a faith that was as natural as breath, that scene seems to be more than a millennium away from 1968, when the season celebrating the Saviour's birth is a time of commercial convulsion. Even many of those yearning for piety find Jesus elusive, a shadowy problematical name in history rather than a symbol of ultimate reassurance. Seen through the scrim of contemporary anxiety and unbelief, everything about the Bach-family Christmas seems to be a quaint anomaly...
Everything, that is, except the music, which looms far larger today than it did in Bach's own time. In 18th century Germany, Bach had a national reputation as a virtuoso organist. Yet as a composer, he attracted mostly condescending notice-even his son Johann Christian, one of the four Bach children who distinguished themselves as composers, referred to him as "the Old Wig." Today, of course, Bach is universally ranked among the transcendent creators of Western civilization. Choral works that he turned out for rowdy schoolboys to sing in drafty provincial churches are cherished by the world...
Even the creators of new music that points firmly away from Bach cannot escape him. He is too deeply embedded in the curriculum of music conservatories, and he towers too imposingly as an unrivaled craftsman. Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, 35, acknowledges the continuity between Bach and his own St. Luke Passion (1966) by spelling out the master's name in a recurring cantus firmus: B flat, A, C, H (the German notation for B natural). Used by Bach himself in The Art of Fugue, the motif is a traditional tribute that has been paid by composers as diverse...
...family wealth and power upon the eldest child. Siblings were absorbed into the firm, but only as drab underlings. After Fritz's death in 1902, the succession fell to his daughter, Bertha, and led to the long reign of a king-consort, Gustav von Bohlen und Hal-bach. Hand-picked by the Kaiser to marry the munitions business, he was also granted the right to use the Krupp name and to pass it along, though only for one generation and only to his eldest son. He ran the Konzern until 1943, outdoing the Krupps in ruthless efficiency. Gustav...
...lucidity, and particularly his severe economy of expression in which not a single note or beat is gratuitous excess. The Octet is a collection of crystalline inflections reflecting jewel-like through the mists of Strauss' Suite. Stravinsky is the greatest master of the liberating freshness of technical discipline since Bach. His pellucid textures are never subjected to the spoilage of superfluity but rather to an intensely self-conscious merging of the intoxication of original inspiration with master-craftsmanship. The Octet reflects this Master's modality of intellectual fervor and artistic vigilance. In its investigation of sonata form it also reflects...