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

Peter Williams has pointed out that the Surrey Chapel (where the letters’
recipient, Benjamin Jacob, was organist) was a centre of musical as well as
ecclesiastical Nonconformity; the same people who were interested in J. S. Bach in
1800 had been interested in J. G. Vogler ten years earlier. Williams speaks of this as
‘backing the wrong horse’, but at the time there was no sign that the music of J. S.
Bach (unlike that of Vogler) was one day to become the ‘immortal and adamantine
Pillars’ of a new musical establishment. One might get a feel for their position around
1800 by comparing the situation today of advocates for a composer like, say, Havergal
Brian: ‘the last great undiscovered twentieth century English composer’, in the words
of the Havergal Brian Society (website: http://www.havergalbrian.org/). 79
Few probably shared Samuel Wesley’s potentially heretical theological
presuppositions; yet it is perhaps hardly surprising that the son and nephew of two of
England’s greatest evangelists should come to think of the music of Bach in
evangelical terms. Although we do not know the details of Wesley’s own conversion,
he describes how ‘[Bach’s] Compositions had opened to me an entirely new musical
World, which was to me at least as surprizing as (when a Child) I was thunderstruck
by the opening of the Dettington Te-Deum in the Bristol Cathedral, with about an
hundred Performers (a great Band in those Days.)’ 80 From this point onward he
devoted himself to ‘...the solid & permanent Establishment of truth, & overthrow of
Ignorance, Prejudice, & Puppyism with regard to our mighty Master.’ 81
It is difficult—perhaps impossible—to be sure how much he meant by his
religious language. The discourses of conversion, of temptation, of evangelism, have
their own integrity, and in a sense sustain themselves. Was he sincere in his quasi-
deification of J. S. Bach; or did he have his tongue in his cheek, at least half-
79 (Accessed 10 December 2006.) The works of Havergal Brian today: vast, unmanageable, gothic,
old-fashioned—and unperformed—are a good analogue for the way in which J. S. Bach’s oeuvre
was generally seen in the later eighteenth century.
80 Letter to Jacob, 17 September 1808, Olleson, Letters, p.75.
81 Letter to ?C. F. Horn, ?c.30 September 1809, ibid., p. 126.
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