J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Could we not then place him on a level with the best of Bach’s organist
colleagues and predecessors: Walther, or Böhm; perhaps even Buxtehude? This would
seem reasonable, but there is one important difference. The fugal style of the later
seventeenth century was not a difficult idiom to master, and dozens of composers,
from Pachelbel in the south to Weckmann in the north, created countless fugues which
can still be listened to with pleasure and studied with interest. J. S. Bach’s own fugal
style, as we have said, was exceptionally difficult to handle; perhaps Bach himself was
was the only one ever able to fully coordinate its densely-layered resources in all their
complexity. In the case of Krebs, the attempt to absorb this rather indigestible model
resulted in a sort of compositional hubris: the ambition to build on a scale that even
Bach never sought.
It is hard to deny that the less ambitious attempts of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
107