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

we not do better than this? Is it possible to find parallels between Bach’s conservative
Lutheran aesthetics and the apparently very different aesthetic climate of early
Romanticism?
Christoph Wolff has argued a consciousness of his genius on the part of J. S.
Bach; that ‘Bach himself, in a self-aware and self-assured manner, laid the foundation
for the image of genius that emerged after his lifetime and reached full bloom by the
1770s and 1780s.’ 14 He does so chiefly by drawing out the implications of the obituary
(written by C. P. E. Bach and J. F. Agricola, partly on the basis of material originating
with Bach himself) and relating it to mid-century ideas about genius. Even he has to
admit, however, that ‘in line with the conventions of his time, Bach left virtually no
direct documents transmitting his own view of himself, a kind of self-assessment.’ 15 It
is hardly possible, furthermore, that he could have imagined the canonical significance
his music would come to have a century after his death (although no doubt he hoped it
would serve as a model for future composers in the way that the music of Böhm,
Froberger, and Frescobaldi had for him).
Another link to the nineteenth century might be found in Dietrich Bartel’s
article about Baroque rhetoric, significantly entitled ‘Ethical Gestures’:
Music and rhetoric were ultimately ethical, that is ethos-oriented disciplines. When Rudolf Agricola
writes in 1479 that ‘the first and proper objective of speech is to teach’, when Wolfgang Caspar
Printz writes that ‘the ultimate and final purpose of music is the moving of the human affections’, or
when Mattheson proclaims: ‘In summary, everything that occurs without affections means nothing,
does nothing, and is worth nothing’, they share a common sentiment: whether in the art of speech or
music, the goal is to effect change in the heart of the listener. Baroque music is an exercise in ethics
more than in entertainment. 16
14 ‘Defining genius: early reflections of J. S. Bach’s self-image’, Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 145/4 (Dec 2001), 475.
15 Ibid., 481.
16 Musical Times 144/1885 (Winter 2003), 15.
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