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

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CHAPTER 1<br />

THE CIRCLE OF J. S. <strong>BACH</strong><br />

There are, in a sense, two Bachs. One was born in 1685 in Eisenach, died in 1750, and<br />

lived as an organist and Kantor, part of the milieu of court, town, and church in<br />

eighteenth-century Germany. The product of a tradition that stretched back to the<br />

sixteenth-century Reformation, his music has much in common with that of his<br />

predecessors such as Kuhnau and Buxtehude, contemporaries like Walther and<br />

Vivaldi, and successors like Krebs and Homilius.<br />

The other Bach was born, slowly and painfully, during the first half of the<br />

nineteenth century; and he shows no sign of dying any time soon. 1 This is the<br />

transcendental Bach, Bach as towering genius in the canon of western music. This<br />

Bach is the centre of a rich, diverse tradition of interpretation and criticism, an ongoing<br />

cultural conversation which is paralleled only by those concerning Beethoven and<br />

Mozart. Bach’s presence in the musical canon has tended to sever his connection with<br />

his original context, substituting a new, largely ahistorical set of relationships with<br />

other figures who have nothing in common beside their towering cultural significance.<br />

These figures, larger than life, have been likewise abstracted from their own historical<br />

contexts by the process of canonisation, together forming a sort of musical Mount<br />

Rushmore. From this perspective, if one of Bach’s actual associates—colleagues,<br />

predecessors, pupils—should accidentally wander onto the stage, it is indeed, so<br />

1 H. Eggebrecht, ‘Mythos Bach’, in Texte über Musik: Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler (Essen:<br />

Blaue Eule, 1997), pp. 9-17. A similar dichotomy has become an important feature of Josquin<br />

research; see P. Higgins, ‘The apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and other mythologies of musical<br />

genius’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/3 (Fall 2004), 443-510; and R. C.<br />

Wegman’s statement of purpose for the 1999 conference ‘New directions in Josquin scholarship’,<br />

http://www.princeton.edu/~rwegman/statement.html (accessed 15 October 2006).<br />

37

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