The Bach Reader
$6.00
Ed. byand NORTON
COMPOSERS’ lives are exciting enough without any fictional frills. As with the third act of Tristan, their drama is inside. Externally, Bach’s life could look dry-as-dust, but the farther into it you go, the more exciting it is: the organic development of his talent from cradle to grave, his indifference to what is now considered fame and fame’s comparative indifference to him, the nearly hundred years between his death and his rediscovery by the Romantic composers (of all people!) — a century during which not only his grave went unmarked but his masterpieces lay on shelves in manuscript. (That of the Matthew Passion Music was saved from a wastepaper junk pile by the grace of God and a longhandled spoon.)
Bach prevails over the gates of death by the sheer weight of ability, industry, character, and devotion at once to his art and to what he conceived to be his duty. Our slang name for this is genius. But what is genius? The more one knows about Bach, the more one wants to know.
Between your Forkel, the first and in many ways still the most interesting of Bach’s biographies (1802), and Charles Sanford Terry’s (1928) should stand this Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. Its introductory essay is full of arresting observations; its closing section recites the story of Bach’s rediscovery; old friend Forkel is reprinted in full as an intermediate section; and in between these is the complete documentation of Bach’s life from baptism to burial, at Eisenach, Weimar, Leipzig, and way stations. Here, then, are the data from which a reader can construct his own biography of Bach and peer into the mysteries of that prodigious and unworldly career.
The growth of interest in music during the past quarter of a century in the United States is something which to be believed must have been seen. A freshet of books about music and composers, some good, others fluff, has poured after this inundation. The art of music has passed from Europe to America at the peak of its complexity, and our symphonic composers have been betrayed into making it more complex. Bach was not only a culmination: he was also a beginning. He unites complexity with simplicity, which is what must be done in America if we are to make another beginning. Along with Spitta, Schweitzer, and Terry, this Bach Reader belongs in every music school and in every considerable library. As Frederick the Great said to his courtiers on a memorable occasion: “Old Bach is here.”
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