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

continually surpass his own creative achievements, to fully explore and recombine
existing genres, to write at the very limits of technical possibility, are curiously
nineteenth-century qualities for an eighteenth-century Lutheran cantor to display. The
only serious competitor was of course George Frideric Handel, whose very different
manner showed a similar creative unrest—it is no accident that he was the other
Baroque composer for whom Beethoven expressed unbounded admiration. By the
standards of his era Bach seemed to have an unusual awareness of the claims of
posterity (arrived at no doubt through his own study of earlier music), and spent much
time toward the end of his life collecting and editing the part of his music he felt worth
preserving. Like Beethoven, his tremendous gifts were widely recognised, but, also
like Beethoven, he found himself out of step with contemporary taste, especially
toward the end of his life—in both cases their personal and musical intransigence led
to a certain amount of cultural isolation. When all these factors are taken into account,
the tremendous success-story that was nineteenth-century Bach-reception becomes
much easier to understand. Even after all the musicological efforts of the last hundred
years, there is still a sense in which the Bach we know is a creation of the nineteenth
century (see the discussion of the ‘two Bachs’ at the start of chapter 1).
Why should the music of a nearly-forgotten Kapellmeister have awoken such
resonance fifty years after his death? ‘The fact that Bach’s works could become the
paradigm of a concept of art that they did not originally partake of is an
historiologically baffling, almost monstrous occurrence.’ 12 We could of course refer
the explanation ahistorically to his ‘innate genius’, his access to an undifferentiated
stratum of musical greatness entirely free of cultural and musical specificity, 13 thereby
effectively denying that any explanation is necessary: ‘deep calls unto deep’. But can
12 C. Dahlhaus, Foundations of music history, tr. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), p. 157.
13 Something, that is, akin to Matthew Arnold’s ‘the best that is known and thought in the world,
irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind’ (from ‘The function of criticism in the
present time’, in his 1865 Essays in criticism).
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