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

tentative way. In certain quarters the organ music of J. S. Bach was early
recognised as being a definitive model of permanent authority. Justin Heinrich
Knecht, John Stanley, and Claude Balbastre showed that other possibilities
existed during the eighteenth century but, interpreted in different ways, the
authority of Bach came to dominate the nineteenth, and if anything it only gained
in influence during the anti-Romantic twentieth. Nevertheless it is widely
accepted that the composer who consistently came closest to emulating the style
of J. S. Bach was ‘der einzige Krebs im Bache’: Johann Ludwig Krebs.
In his organ works Krebs often seems to be emulating—paraphrasing,
even—particular works of J. S. Bach, rather than his style in general. The
Toccata and Fugue in F BWV 540 obviously made quite an impression on
Krebs, consequences of which can be seen in his two toccata/fugue pairs, in E
major and A minor. His Prelude and Fugue in C is modelled on the outer
movements of Bach’s Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue BWV 564; the Prelude and
Fugue in F minor on that in B minor BWV 544, and those in C minor and D
major upon Bach’s preludes and fugues in the same keys BWV 549 and 532.
During the last decade of Krebs’s life (he died on the first day of 1780) an
important change in critical attitudes to music took place. From being primarily
concerned with technical correctness, suddenly ‘almost as if cued by the stroke of
midnight’ 78 in 1770 musical critics began writing as if creative genius and originality
were the only things that mattered. Perhaps the most transparently naïve response to
this change was that of the Weimar composer Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1735-1792): ‘I
have long believed that there is nothing greater in the world than [Emanuel] Bach, and
78 M. S. Morrow, German music criticism in the late eighteenth century: Aesthetic issues in
instrumental music (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.100. See in particular ‘The
reign of genius’, pp.99-133. G .J. Buelow has traced the sources of these ideas to mid eighteenthcentury
English thought: ‘Originality, genius, plagiarism in English criticism of the eighteenth
century’, Internation Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 21/2 (December 1990), 117-
28; whilst R. Eberlein finds their origin in Kant: ‘Originalitätsstreben und die Fortentwicklung einer
musikalischen Syntax’, Perspektiven und Methoden einer Systemischen Musikwissenschaft: Bericht
über das Kolloquium im Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität zu Köln 1998, 315-321.
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