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

[that] a keyboard composer can and must not even think otherwise than to imitate him.
But now since Goethe’s arrival everything has become original with us. Therefore
thought I, you too must try to be original.’ 79 Although this new focus was soon to be
moderated by renewed attention to questions of craftsmanship and coherence, the
importance of originality as an aesthetic criterion has hardly been challenged ever
since. It is this desideratum, of course, which has denied Krebs a place in the canon;
the words in which Wolf described his debt to Emanuel Bach could be used to
describe that of Krebs to Johann Sebastian.
In part it is simply a question of the economics of time and attention: ‘Why’,
we ask quite reasonably, ‘do we need Krebs when we already have J. S. Bach?’ It is
not just that the position of culmination to the Lutheran Baroque tradition is already
filled, not just the fact that Bach supremely represents a particular phase of musical
history; what we respond to, rather, is the distinctive and individual sensibility which
characterises his music. To what extent is this sensibility J. S. Bach’s personal
possession? We saw earlier in this chapter how hard it is in certain cases to
distinguish between J. S. Bach’s authentic works and others which have merely been
attributed to him. One of the difficulties of approaching music from this sort of
distance in time is the risk of misreading as personal characteristics stylistic elements
that were common to the age.
But even during the eighteenth century Bach’s originality and was recognised;
Schubart wrote in 1784: ‘His spirit was so original, so vast, that centuries would be
needed to measure up to it.’ 80 With Krebs, things are different: in his New Grove
article Hugh McLean admits that ‘his fugues are thoroughly worked out but show few
touches of originality. He seems to have considered them more as examples of the
79 In conversation with J. F. Reichart: W. S. Newman, The sonata in the Classic era (New York:
Norton, 1983), p.383.
80 C. Wolff, ‘Defining genius: early reflections of J. S. Bach’s self image’, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 145/4 (December 2001), 475.
83