The rediscovery during the first half of the 19th century of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music marked the first time that a great composer, after a period of neglect, was accorded his rightful place by a later generation. Palestrina, Lully, Purcell and Handel had never been quite forgotten by the musical public, but Bach was known only to a small circle of pupils and devotees until the Romantic movement stimulated a growing interest in his art. The Bach Revival was an early example of a new historicism which eventually opened all periods of Western music to discovery and performance, and which now constitutes the dominant factor in the musical taste of advanced Western societies. It began at about the same time in Germany, where most of Bach’s descendants and pupils, and most of his surviving music, were to be found; and in England, where musical historicism was already well advanced by the end of the 18th century.
See also Early music.
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY/PETER WOLLNY
Bach was always a conservative composer, and in the latter part of his career his style had become outmoded, failing to win for him any reputation as a composer in the fashionable world. His music was attacked by Scheibe in 1737 for ‘excess of art’ and for its ‘turgid and confused style’. In the works of his last few years – the completed Mass in B minor, the Musical Offering, the Art of Fugue and others – he virtually turned his back on what remained of his public, writing for himself and, perhaps, for posterity. At his death public knowledge of his music was at a low ebb. Even at the Leipzig Thomaskirche, his successors only occasionally used his cantatas; the organ works, too, were rarely heard, unless they were played by one of his sons or pupils. Recent research has, however, modified the widespread belief, dating from the late 19th century, that Bach’s compositions were largely ignored by his contemporaries and forgotten for more than 50 years after his death. Although few of his works were published during his lifetime, his keyboard music was disseminated widely in manuscript and enormous numbers of copies were made, particularly of Das wohltemperirte Clavier. There is evidence that Bach lent his sacred music to friends and former pupils such as J.W. Koch and C.G. Wecker. Indeed, Bach’s large circle of pupils was a major force in the distribution of his works.
In the latter half of the 18th century Bach was remembered as a master of organ playing and of learned counterpoint. The first extended biographical notice of Bach, by J.A. Hiller, his third successor at the Thomaskirche, gave only a superficial and condescending account of his compositions (1784); while Reichardt remarked in 1782: ‘Had Bach possessed the high integrity and the deep expressive feeling that inspired Handel, he would have been much greater even than Handel; but as it is he was only more painstaking and technically skilful’. Bach’s own sons played a part in the rejection of the artistic principles he stood for, which went far beyond the normal changes in style that are found at other periods. C.P.E. Bach’s feelings were ambivalent. During his Hamburg period (1768–88) he used recitatives and choruses from his father’s two Passions as a framework for his own Passion music; he also incorporated some of the cantatas in pasticcios and edited the four-part chorales for publication. J.C.F. Bach too included chorale movements by the elder Bach in his cantata Der Tod Jesu and his oratorio Die Auferweckung Lazarus.
It was at Berlin, where C.P.E. Bach was employed until 1767, that the strongest group of Bach disciples was concentrated. They preserved and passed on most of the original manuscripts of Bach’s works that have survived. Agricola, Kirnberger, Nichelmann and Marpurg owned large collections of music and published influential treatises which discussed Bach’s compositions for various purposes. Increasingly conservative tendencies were manifested in the veneration of Bach by Kirnberger and the circle of Princess Amalia, where Bach was seen as a counterweight to recent developments in musical aesthetics. In Leipzig the cantatas acquired in 1750 from Anna Magdalena Bach’s inheritance served as the basis for performance of his music by Gottlob Harrer, Bach’s successor at the Thomaskirche, and J.F. Doles. A wish to have some of the large-scale choral works that had left Leipzig with Bach’s sons available for performance by the pupils of the Thomasschule accounts for a number of spurious ascriptions (the St Luke Passion, the oratorio Jesu, deine Passion, the Mass in G major), which had a considerable effect on the image of Bach around the turn of the century. There is evidence that Bach’s cantatas were performed in Leipzig in the early 19th century as well as in the second half of the 18th.
The Bach revival in Vienna in the late 18th century was instigated and greatly encouraged by such key figures as Baron Gottfried van Swieten and Fanny von Arnstein. The former was familiar with the Bach tradition from his post as ambassador to the Prussian court, and the latter from her origins in the Itzig family of Berlin. These two patrons must have had considerable influence on the regard in which Mozart and Beethoven held Bach. In April 1782 Mozart wrote that ‘nothing but Handel and Bach’ was played at the Sunday recitals in van Swieten’s house. The Austrian government officer Franz Joseph, Reichsritter von Hess, also owned an extensive Bach collection.
A more general appreciation of Bach came only as a result of the Romantic cult of the past. Arising in England, this movement was immensely strengthened in its German phase by patriotic and religious motives. The military and political humiliations of the Napoleonic period generated a desire to recover older German traditions, while a religious revival prompted the search for what was truly and distinctively religious in the cultural heritage. In this Bach was to become the archetypal figure. The influence of J.N. Forkel, organist and music director at Göttingen University, was particularly important. Forkel began planning a biography of Bach in the mid-1770s, and consequently was in touch with Bach’s two eldest sons. Through them he became acquainted with many of Bach’s compositions, and was able to acquire copies and in some cases original manuscripts. ‘This great man’, Forkel wrote, ‘was a German. Be proud of him, German fatherland, but be worthy of him too. … His works are an invaluable national patrimony with which no other nation has anything to be compared’.
Forkel was joined by Rochlitz in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, whose first volume (1798) contained a portrait of Bach. Rochlitz was inclined to paint a romantic, saintly picture of the master, comparing him aesthetically and morally with Dürer, Rubens, Newton and Michelangelo. The religious aspect of Bach’s art was important to another early convert, C.F. Zelter, a conductor at the Berliner Sing-Akademie, founded in 1791 by C.F.C. Fasch, one of the earliest German institutions to organize historical concerts. He had inherited an extensive collection of Bach’s music from Kirnberger and Agricola, and he drew from it in his pioneering revivals of Bach’s motets and other sacred works. He rehearsed the Mass in B minor in 1811 and the St Matthew Passion in 1815, but did not think it practical to perform them. Through Rochlitz and Zelter, Goethe in his old age came to a profound appreciation of Bach. E.T.A. Hoffmann, another influential literary figure, developed the idealized Romantic conception that Rochlitz had begun to build.
The mounting enthusiasm for Bach culminated in the performance of the St Matthew Passion by the Sing-Akademie in 1829, with Mendelssohn conducting. This was the decisive turning-point in Bach’s reputation, for it swiftly transformed the revival from a cult of intellectuals into a popular movement. Zelter had allowed a copy of the autograph to be made in 1823; with commendable self-effacement he turned over the honour of conducting the performance to his pupil. Mendelssohn, though at first hesitant, eventually agreed to attempt the formidable task. He made his own arrangement of the music from Zelter’s copy; cuts, changes and additions were made (see illustration). After nearly two years of rehearsals, the performance took place on 11 March 1829, and was far more successful than the first performance exactly a century earlier. The audience was deeply moved; Hegel, who was present, later wrote of ‘Bach’s grand, truly Protestant, robust and erudite genius which we have only recently learnt again to appreciate at its full value’. Two more performances followed, the last conducted by Zelter. Mosewius, who also heard the work at Berlin, conducted it in 1830 at Breslau, an important centre of the Protestant religious revival and the home of Winterfeld. Königsberg was the next city to hear the Passion; it was not performed at Leipzig until 1841. Meanwhile the Berlin Sing-Akademie produced the St John Passion in 1833, and a truncated version of the Mass in B minor in 1835 (the Credo had been revived by Schelble at Frankfurt in 1828). A growing number of the cantatas were added to the choral repertory at this period.
The first half of the 19th century saw extensive efforts to preserve Bach’s oeuvre. With the deaths of his sons and pupils, there was a danger that the cultivation of Bach’s music, nurtured largely by oral traditions in the 18th century and based on private collections, would gradually fade away. In 1801 the Leipzig firm of Hoffmeister & Kühnel began publishing the keyboard works in a collection entitled Oeuvres complettes. It was subsequently supervised by Forkel, and concluded in 1804 with the appearance of the 16th volume. The publication of Forkel’s biography of Bach by the same firm in 1802 was influential in advertising this ‘complete edition’.
Further selections of Bach’s music appeared soon after 1800, published in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel (the motets, a four-volume edition of chorale preludes for organ and the spurious mass bwv Anh.167), by Simrock in Bonn (Das wohltemperirte Clavier) and in the series Musikalische Kunstwerke im strengen Style, edited by Hans Georg Nägeli (the sonatas for violin and harpsichord, the Goldberg Variations, Das wohltemperirte Clavier and The Art of Fugue). These editions emphasized the instrumental works, and with few exceptions paid little attention to Bach’s vocal compositions. Significantly, music historians of the Romantic period saw Bach as a composer of instrumental music, and Forkel’s biography takes the same line.
The editions mentioned above had a crucial effect on the image of Bach in the first four decades of the 19th century. At the same time there was an increasing demand for a complete edition of Bach’s compositions. In many respects the London Handel Society editions, which began in 1843, were regarded as a model for the practicality of the project. The Bach-Gesellschaft was founded in 1850, on the 100th anniversary of Bach’s death, to promote the complete edition of his works, and the society devoted itself to the task for the next 50 years. As a result the full range of Bach’s achievement, particularly as a composer of vocal music, gradually became apparent to a larger audience. A companion-piece to the edition is Philipp Spitta’s monumental Bach biography, published in two volumes in 1873 and 1880, which superseded all previous biographical writings on the composer. Yet while all of Bach’s known music became available between 1850 and 1899, there was no immediate increase in the number of performances; indeed, during the 1870s, when the number of subscribers to the Bach-Gesellschaft dropped to little more than 300, it was doubtful for some time whether the edition could be completed. Nevertheless, the volumes, though they varied in scholarly precision, were a remarkable achievement, and established the basic principles for scholarly musical editions that have been followed ever since. They completed the Bach Revival, and made it possible for Bach to take his place in public esteem beside or above other great composers.
England lacked the group of pupils and descendants who formed the nucleus of the German Bach Revival; but historicism and antiquarianism were more advanced than in Germany. The music of Handel, Corelli, Domenico Scarlatti and other late Baroque composers continued to be popular throughout the 18th century, while such bodies as the Academy of Ancient Music (1710–92), the Madrigal Society (founded 1741) and the Concert of Ancient Music (‘Ancient Concerts’, 1776–1848) cultivated a taste for the music of the remoter past. Burney and Hawkins, though they failed to appreciate Bach’s importance, gave him due mention in their histories of music – books of a kind that did not yet exist on the Continent.
The earliest extant copies of Bach’s music in England come from the collection of Richard Fawcett and probably date from around 1750. According to Forkel, Bach composed his ‘English’ Suites for an English nobleman, but no documentation for this claim has been found. A note on a now lost manuscript containing excerpts from the Goldberg Variations stated that the copy was presented to the owner ‘J.H.’ (probably James Hutton) by Bach in 1749. There is evidence that a good deal of Bach’s music was circulating in manuscript in England during the last three decades of the 18th century. J.C. Bach probably had little interest in his father’s music, but he may have possessed some copies. Burney received a copy of book 1 of the ‘48’ from C.P.E. Bach in 1772, while Clementi possessed a partly autograph copy of book 2. Queen Charlotte owned a manuscript volume dated 1788, containing the ‘48’, Clavier-Übung, iii, and the Credo from the Mass in B minor. This music may have reached the queen through either of two German musicians recently arrived in London: C.F. Horn (1762–1830), her music teacher from 1782, or A.F.C. Kollmann (1756–1829), organist at the German chapel in the court of St James’s from 1784.
Clementi, Horn and Kollmann are the most important early figures in the English Bach Revival. Clementi is said to have practised Bach for hours on end during his time at Peter Beckford’s house in the early 1770s. His own music shows early traces of Bach’s influence which become much stronger in the late sonatas and the Gradus ad Parnassum. He incorporated several of the keyboard pieces in his didactic works. He must have passed on his love of Bach to his two most famous pupils, J.B. Cramer, whose studies of 1804 and 1810 show an obvious influence of the ‘48’, and Field, who astonished audiences with his playing of Bach during his European tour of 1802–3 and who taught Bach’s music to his Russian pupils. Kollmann consistently stressed the importance of Bach in his theoretical works in English, beginning with the Essay on Musical Harmony (1796), which offered a detailed analysis of the F minor fugue from book 2 of the ‘48’. In 1799 he advertised a plan to issue an analytical edition of the entire ‘48’, but the scheme was anticipated by the three continental editions of 1801, two of which were reissued in London. He published the Chromatic Fantasia in 1806, with ‘additions’ by himself, analysed 12 Bach fugues in his Quarterly Musical Register (1812) and translated excerpts from Forkel’s life of Bach into English, possibly assisting in a complete translation of the work (1820). Horn arranged 12 organ fugues for string quartet – with figured bass – and published them in 1807, and later collaborated with Wesley in the first English edition of the ‘48’. His son, C.E. Horn, another Bach enthusiast, included part of a fugue from the ‘48’ in the overture to his comic opera Rich and Poor (1812).
The movement quickly spread to native English musicians. William Shield’s Introduction to Harmony (1800) gave due place to Bach, and incorporated the D minor prelude from book 1 of the ‘48’. George Frederick Pinto, a close friend of Field’s, tried to imitate Bach in his C minor Fantasia and Sonata (published posthumously, c1808), and it was he who first introduced Samuel Wesley to Bach’s preludes and fugues, according to Wesley’s memoirs. Wesley took up the cause with feverish intensity, shown in his well-known letters to Benjamin Jacob, another English Bach enthusiast. Wesley edited, with Horn, the six organ trios, published (for the first time anywhere) in 1809–10 in instalments, and a ‘new and correct edition’ of the ‘48’ in 1810–13. In 1808 he began a series of concerts of Bach’s music at Surrey Chapel, with Jacob, who was organist there; and soon afterwards he began a similar series at the Portuguese Embassy chapel, where his friend Vincent Novello was organist and soon became a Bach convert. Because of the lack of pedals on most English organs, Wesley often played Bach’s organ music as duets with Jacob or Novello assisting him on a second manual (in some cases Dragonetti played the pedal parts on his double bass). He also played fugues from the ‘48’, which he regarded as organ music.
Wesley saw Bach as a superhuman genius, even though there is a touch of whimsy in the nicknames he used for him – ‘Saint Sebastian’, ‘The Man’, ‘Our Apollo’ and so on. He felt that militant propaganda was needed to persuade the English that any musician could be superior to Handel. He found that his brother Charles was an unrepentant Handelian. But he won many converts, including even the aged Burney who at last recanted his earlier criticism of Bach. William Crotch was recruited to the cause, and was the first to play the ‘St Anne’s’ fugue in public (on the piano). Both Wesley and Crotch gave prominence to Bach in lectures on the history of music. In later life Wesley’s enthusiasm was unabated, and he converted Henry John Gauntlett and his own son S.S. Wesley, who played the ‘St Anne’s’ fugue as an organ duet at St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, in 1827.
As well as the keyboard works, Wesley endeavoured to promote other music of Bach. The motet Jesu, meine Freude was sung at his concert in the Hanover Square Rooms on 3 June 1809, and the following year he presented to the Madrigal Society a score of the same work (with text translated into Latin). He played the sonatas for violin and keyboard many times with Jacob, and on 6 June 1814 he played one with Salomon at the latter’s benefit. Nevertheless, for many years Bach was known in England more by reputation than by experience. John Sainsbury’s Dictionary of Musicians (1824) gave twice as much space to J.S. Bach as to all his sons and relatives put together – in itself a surprising fact; yet as late as 1849, at the opening of the Bach Society, he was still called ‘this great and comparatively unknown master’. After Wesley’s early efforts there was a period when little new progress was made. Mendelssohn’s visits of 1829 and 1832 were a fresh stimulus, and his performances of organ works at St Paul’s Cathedral, with pedals, and played with a degree of confidence and understanding that no English musician could equal, were undoubtedly a revelation to English audiences. Moscheles also played his part: he performed the D minor keyboard concerto (with additional orchestral parts of his own) at the King’s Theatre on 13 May 1836, and the following year included preludes and fugues from the ‘48’ at several concerts. Monck Mason announced Bach’s Passion oratorios for the 1832 season of oratorio concerts at the King’s Theatre, but nothing came of this. Parts of the St Matthew Passion, B minor Mass and Magnificat were given at the Birmingham Festival (1837) and at the Ancient Concerts. Prince Albert, after his marriage to Victoria in 1840, introduced music by Bach into concerts at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle and at aristocratic musical societies in which he was concerned. Sterndale Bennett was another champion of Bach, performing keyboard and chamber works at many of his concerts and editing some of the music, including the St Matthew Passion, for publication. At Cambridge in the 1840s T.A. Walmisley lectured on Bach and taught his students to revere him above all other composers.
The English Bach Revival culminated in the formation of the Bach Society, founded by Sterndale Bennett. The first meeting, on 27 October 1849, at Bennett’s house in Russell Place, formulated the objects of the society, which included the collection and promotion, but not publication, of the works of the master (though the society did publish a volume of the motets, with English text added, in 1851). A number of concerts were given, and at last the St Matthew Passion had its first English performance (with English words) at the Hanover Square Rooms on 6 April 1854, Bennett conducting. Several other important works were revived before the society disbanded in 1870. The popularization of Bach was completed when his choral masterpieces were accepted alongside Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s. The St Matthew Passion was introduced at the Three Choirs Festival in 1871, and the Bach Choir undertook the regular performance of the larger choral works, beginning with the Mass in B minor in 1876.
J.F. Reichardt: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, iv (1782), 196–7; repr. in H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs, 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972), 357–60
J.A. Hiller: ‘Bach (Johann Sebastian)’, Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit (Leipzig, 1784/R), i, 9–29; repr. in H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs, 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972), 395–403
[C.P.E. Bach]: comparison between Bach and Handel, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, lxxxi (1788), 295–303; repr. in H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs, 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972), 437–445
J.N. Forkel: Über Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst, und Kunstwerke (Leipzig, 1802; Eng. trans. in David and Mendel)
A.F.C. Kollman: ‘Of John Sebastian Bach and his Works’, QMR, i (1812), 28–40
M. Mason: Announcement of plans for opera season, Harmonicon, x (1832), 29–31
E. Wesley, ed.: Letters of Samuel Wesley to Mr. Jacobs (London, 1875)
M. Schneider: ‘Verzeichnis der bis zum Jahre 1851 gedruckten (und der geschrieben im Handel gewesenen) Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach’, BJb, iii (1906), 84–113
J.R. Sterndale Bennett: The Life of William Sterndale Bennett (Cambridge, 1907), 202–17, 232–5
H.T. David and A. Mendel, eds.: The Bach Reader (New York, 1945, rev.3/1998 as The New Bach Reader by C. Wolff)
F. Blume: Johann Sebastian Bach im Wandel der Geschichte (Kassel, 1947; Eng. trans., 1950, as Two Centuries of Bach)
W. Emery: ‘The London Autograph of “The Forty-eight”’, ML, xxxiv (1953), 106–23, esp. 114
S. Grossman-Vendrey: Felix -Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und die Musik der Vergangenheit (Regensburg, 1969)
W. Wiora, ed.: Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik (Regensburg, 1969)
L. Plantinga: ‘Clementi, Virtuosity, and the “German Manner”’, JAMS, xxv (1972), 303–30
H.-J. Schulze, ed.: Bach-Dokumente, iii: Dokumente zum Nachwirken Johann Sebastian Bachs 1750–1800 (Kassel, 1972)
H.-J. Schulze: Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig and Dresden, 1984)
L. Finscher: ‘Bach in the Eighteenth Century’, Bach Studies, ed. D.O. Franklin (Cambridge, 1989), 281–96
G. Stauffer: The Forkel – Hoffmeister & Kühnel Correspondence: a Document of the Early 19th-Century Bach Revival (New York, 1990)
C. Wolff: ‘On the Recognition of Bach and “the Bach Chorale”: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives’, Bach: Essays on his Life and Music (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 382–90
R. Kaiser: ‘Palschaus Bach-Spiel in London: zur Bach-Pflege in England um 1750’, BJb 1993, 225–9
P. Wollny: ‘Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's Halle Performances of Cantatas by his Father’, Bach Studies 2, ed. D. Melamed (Cambridge, 1995), 202–28
P. Wollny: ‘Zur Überlieferung der Instrumentalwerke Johann Sebastian Bachs: der Quellenbesitz Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs’, BJb 1996, 7–21
M. Heinemann and H.-J. Hinrichsen, eds.: Johann Sebastian Bach und die Nachwelt (Laaber, 1997)