Word: bache
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Linked forever by a happy accident that saw them born within a month of each other in cities only 80 miles apart, Bach and Handel make an odd couple. Handel, whose 300th birthday was last month, was the son of a Halle barber- surgeon who wanted his boy to study law. A well-traveled cosmopolitan, he settled in London, anglicized his name from Handel, and became the dominant operatic and oratorio composer of his day. When he died, a bachelor at 74, he was buried with great ceremony in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. By contrast, Bach, whose birthday...
Modern history has drastically reversed the judgment that earlier generations made of the two composers. A poll taken in the mid-18th century would undoubtedly have found Handel the more admired, especially in England, where his German-accented ghost smothered native British music for more than a century. Bach was considered an outdated figure working in a dying contrapuntal medium of four-part harmony and abstruse fugues. "The old wig" his son Johann Christian is said to have called...
...Bach's music, however, has steadily grown in stature. It has even gone into space aboard Voyager 1 and 2 as an example of the best that human culture has to offer. Yet the contemporary image of Bach is, in its own way, as myopic as that of previous eras. We tend to perceive the cantor of St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig as, above all, an unsmiling, devout Lutheran, who erected cathedrals in sound dedicated to the glory of God. Bach's music, we think, is great because it is good for us. But to consider Bach only...
...Bach's memorabilia are largely confined to his scores, letters and other documents. There is only one authenticated portrait of the man, and his birthplace on the Lutherstrasse in the hilly Thuringian mining town of Eisenach was destroyed long ago. In Weimar, the cultivated city of Goethe and Schiller, where Bach spent almost a month in jail for the crime of wanting to change jobs, there is only a plaque to mark the spot on which the family home stood. In Cothen, where Bach worked for the music-loving Prince Leopold from 1717 to 1723, producing among other masterworks...
...quill in hand and manuscript paper at the ready; beyond it, high on a hill in the distance, sits the Wartburg Castle, where Luther, in disguise, completed his translation of the New Testament while hiding out from Catholic wrath and Wagner set his opera Tannhauser. In Leipzig, a sterner Bach is memorialized outside the Thomaskirche by both a full-length statue and, not far from the church, a bust dedicated by Felix Mendelssohn. Genius pays homage to even greater genius: it was the romantic Mendelssohn, a Christianized Jew, who in 1829 revived Bach's greatest religious work, the towering...