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

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eauty with ‘an excess of art.’ 20 To critics like these it was clear that Bach, whom<br />

even his sons are supposed to have referred to as ‘the old peruke’, 21 had nothing to say<br />

to them.<br />

Yet it was Rousseau’s own Le Devin du Village which was eventually to<br />

receive precisely this critique, ‘extinguished forever under beneath a huge powdered<br />

peruke, thrown at the heroine’s feet by some practical joker.’ 22 As Berlioz noted, ‘Le<br />

Devin du Village, since that evening of blessed memory, has never reappeared at the<br />

Opéra.’ 23 This happened in 1829, the same year as the triumphant rediscovery of J. S.<br />

Bach’s St Matthew Passion. ‘Me voilà perruqué!’ Mendelssohn laughed upon the<br />

publication of his own preludes and fugues op.35 and 37 (1837), 24 but already the term<br />

‘Zopfstil’ was coming to refer not to the age of Bach and Handel, but to the once-<br />

fashionable galant style that had succeeded it: ‘the easy-going, the mechanical, the<br />

stereotyped, the mediocre, the manneristic and that kind of eighteenth-century<br />

composition in which immediate effectiveness took the place of something felt by the<br />

composer and toiled after by him in the effort to embody it in a dignified and worthy<br />

form.’ 25 Robert Schumann, for example, referred to galant sonatas as<br />

‘Perückensonaten’. 26 The wig had been bequeathed to the next generation.<br />

The success of Bach’s Passion demonstrated that his music was not just for<br />

private or semi-private performance (as Baron van Swieten’s soirées had been), but<br />

that there was sufficient public interest for large undertakings of this sort. People’s<br />

tastes were changing. There was a new appetite for the archaic, the ‘Gothic’, the<br />

20 nd H. T. David and A. Mendel, The Bach Reader 2 ed. (London: Dent, 1945, 1966), p.238.<br />

21 See p.60 above.<br />

22 The memoirs of Hector Berlioz, tr. D. Cairns (London: Cardinal, 1990), p.45. Berlioz himself,<br />

present at the performance, was accused of having thrown the fatal wig; his denial is an<br />

unconvincing mixture of disapproval and amusement.<br />

23 Ibid. p.45, fn (Berlioz’s note).<br />

24 R. L. Todd, ‘“Me voilà perruqué”: Mendelssohn’s six preludes and fugues op.35 reconsidered’,<br />

Mendelssohn studies (Cambridge: Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press, 1992), pp.162-99.<br />

25 th P. Scholes, ‘Zopfstil’, Oxford Companion to Music, 10 ed. (Oxford: Oxford <strong>University</strong> Press,<br />

1970), p.1127. This use parallels more closely the original application of the term in the visual arts<br />

and crafts.<br />

26 G. Stanley, ‘The music for keyboard’, The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. P. Mercer-<br />

Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press, 2004), p.155.<br />

406

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