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

This ethical approach to music, so different from the easy-going galant attitude
(‘Music is an innocent luxury, unnecessary, indeed, to our existence, but a great
improvement and gratification of the sense of hearing’ 17 ), has certain affinities with the
Romantic ethos which emerged in the nineteenth century. The Romantics took artistic
creation very seriously indeed, elevating art (and especially music) to the level of a
new kind of morality of its own. For Baroque thinkers the ethical significance of
music derived from its social function on the stage, in the chamber, and (most
particularly) in the church; by contrast, the Romantic doctrine of artistic integrity was,
if anything, almost anti-social. Questions of musical emotion, however, were central
in both cases. While the Baroque age thought chiefly in terms of effects upon the
listener (‘Affekt’; rhetoric), the Romantics saw music as expressing the emotion of the
creator; but, even allowing for the great difference between seventeenth- and
nineteenth-century understandings of the emotions, these complementary approaches
came to much the same thing as far as questions of actual composition were
concerned. 18 Both generations were acutely aware of the musical traditions in which
they had been educated. Bach’s unshakeable belief in the intrinsic value of musical
elaboration for its own sake as a part of God’s creation, the affective traditions of
generations of musicians setting devotional texts that moved from sentimental
intimacy to intense suffering to exalted jubilation, the high standard of contrapuntal
and formal craftsmanship he inherited from his predecessors, and surpassed—all these
have analogues in the attitudes of the musicians who were at once trying to make sense
of the overwhelming legacy of Haydn and Mozart, and seeking to develop new
17 Charles Burney, A general history of music from the earliest ages to the present period, 4 vols.
(London, 1776-1789), vol.1, p.xiii.
18 Just to confuse matters, the galant aesthetic also had its own approach to musical expression:
‘sensibility’, as embodied pre-eminently in the empfindsamer Stil. From generation to generation the
same concepts seem to recur, perhaps in different relations to each other—a fact which gives a
curious recyclability to musical discourse. For example, Albert Schweitzer’s J. S. Bach is full of the
excitement of his discovery of the kinship between Wagner’s concrete representationalism (then—in
1899—the last word in musical aesthetics) and Baroque musical symbolism.
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