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

accommodating (and successful) brothers. Emanuel Bach could write both works to
satisfy himself and music for the court. Johann Christian made a career out of pleasing
the public. Wilhelm Friedemann could no more write pot-boilers than could his father,
and was even more intransigent in his personal relations. Unfortunately, while Johann
Sebastian rendered himself nearly invulnerable by noble patronage and by his national
reputation, 56 his son merely rendered himself unemployable. Was Wilhelm
Friedemann simply a J. S. Bach cut adrift from his stable church/state musical
environment? The correlation between his unstable personality, his unstable career,
and his unstable musical style, draws one irresistibly to the conclusion expressed by
Wilfred Mellers:
J. S. Bach’s piece [the E flat minor prelude from book I of the WTC] sounds like a Passion aria: the
suffering is Christ’s, which happens to be Bach’s and ours because Christ died for us. W. F. Bach’s
piece [the polonaise in the same key] is a passion 57 aria, which is about his own suffering, because he
was an eccentric and a misfit who became, before his time, the typical artist of romanticism. 58
His situation as a prototypically Romantic ‘failure’ before his time attracted the
attention of nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographers and novelists (Johann Peter
Lyser, Albert Emil Brachvogel, Karl Stabenow, Hans Franck), just as the intense
personal expressivity of a few of his works (notably the twelve polonaises) endeared
him to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics.
Nevertheless, considered as a whole, his oeuvre appears to have certain
deficiencies. First of all is its size; Peter Wollny’s catalogue of his works is less than a
tenth the size of Schmeider’s Bach catalogue. The complete organ works (and
remember that W. F. Bach was perhaps the greatest organist of his time) consist of two
56 See Wolff, Learned musician, p.253.
57 Note the lower-case ‘p’.
58 A. Harman, A. Milner, and W. Mellers, Man and his music (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962),
p.592.
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