By REGINALD LANE POOLE, M.A. BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY Limited St. Dunstan’s House Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E.C....

No one will expect a life of Bach to be amusing, but it will be my own fault if the present Essay does not offer an interest of a high and varied character. If it labours under a disadvantage, as the first biography of the master written in this country, on the other hand it is only now that, thanks to the devotion of Professor Spitta, we can congratulate ourselves on the possession of absolutely all the attainable facts. Hitherto, three translations or abridgements of German works have appeared

It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius in a great man’s forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which we have to do. In no family, perhaps, is it of greater moment than in that of Sebastian Bac

Johann Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach on the 21st March, 1685. 4 The Thuringian town had been a home of the Bachs ever since the two sons of Johann Bach had found their wives there. Two of the family, and no less men than Johann Christoph and Johann Bernhard, had successively filled the post of organist in the town church. The death of his parents, however, before he had completed his tenth year removed Sebastian from the surroundings that seemed so fitted for the training of his genius. Al

Passing from Muehlhausen to Weimar was to Bach as the step from school to a university. The nine years of his life there produced works in which almost any other musician might glory as the perfect consummation of his powers; but when we range them beside the performance of Bach’s middle life, we see that all this time was still a period of preparation. Wonderful indeed is this strenuous preparation, carried on with increasing earnestness to his thirty-second year; this prelude to a life-long st

The reasons which determined Bach to leave Weimar are not quite clear. He was in fact one of those quick-tempered men whom a small irritation might kindle to a resolve of disproportionate gravity. In the present case he had a real grievance in the appointment of a son as successor to the old capellmeister, whose work Bach had done for a long time and the reversion of whose office he might reasonably have counted upon. Leopold, the reigning prince of Anhalt-Coethen was no stranger at Weimar. A fa

For near forty years Bach’s history had followed the common course of the musicians of his generation, and he had reached what was then held the most dignified rank in his craft. He had passed through the stages of chorister, orchestral violinist, and organist: he was now capellmeister in a ducal palace, and, measured by conventional standards of success, he had nothing further to look for or to desire. Least of all was it to be expected that he would descend from this dignity to the position of

Bach’s appeal to Erdmann in the winter of 1730, to try and find him a more congenial post than he had at Leipzig, was without result. In fact, little as he suspected it, events had already begun to take a favourable turn for him. The year before, the organist of the New Church had left, and Bach had followed him as director of the Musical Society, which had hitherto furnished the choir at that church, instead of the boys of the Thomasschule. It was a good thing for Bach in every way to break dow

Bach is stated to have written a Passion music in five different shapes. Two of these are the familiar Passions according to S. Matthew and S. John , which are the truest reflexion of the master’s genius in his ripest years. The other three were long supposed to have been lost, unless a S. Luke Passion , which exists in Bach’s autograph, might possibly be claimed as his work. Lately, however, the acute study of Dr. Rust has discovered part of a S. Mark Passion to lie hid under the guise of the D

We quitted the direct narrative of Bach’s life at the point when the arrival of the new rector of the Thomasschule gave it an interval of peace and quietness, an interval of which we took advantage to review the great ranges of church-music which fell as an official task to the cantor. The four years of Gesner’s rule are the ripest and busiest in Bach’s life; not that they include his greatest individual works, with the notable exception of the High Mass , but that they are the most productive,

The fact of Bach’s death was registered by the Town Council in the following terms: The Cantor at the Thomasschule, or rather the Capelldirector, Bach, is dead . They proceeded to resolve that the school needed a Cantor, and not a Capellmeister, although he must understand music too . Such was the public recognition of Leipzig’s greatest man. His widow was suffered to live on in need, and to die a pauper ten years after her husband. The youngest daughter was at last relieved by a public subscrip

( Composers are distinguished by spaced type )...

(An obelus indicates that the date to which it is affixed is not absolutely certain. The numbers following the titles are those of the edition published by the Bach-Gesellschaft; those to which no number is attached remain in manuscript, with few exceptions, at Berlin.)...