Bach’s eyesight had long been failing. The strain to which he had
mercilessly subjected it all his life, copying music as well as
engraving elaborate compositions of his own, was now telling on it.
By the end of 1749 his vision was in such a state that an English eye
specialist, John Taylor, who later treated Handel but at this time
chanced to be touring the continent, was summoned and operated on
Bach about the beginning of 1750. It was of little avail. Prolonged
confinement in a dark room, medicines and dressings told on the
master’s ordinarily robust constitution. When his condition permitted
and his sight temporarily improved he recklessly returned to his
creative labors and also prepared for the engravers a set of eighteen
choral-preludes for organ. But the end was at hand. Calling to his
side his son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnikol, Bach dictated to
him the variation on the chorale _When We Are in Our Deepest Need_,
prophetically bidding him alter the title to _With This Before Thy
Throne I Come_. On July 18 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and lay for
ten days in a desperate state. At nine in the evening on July 28, 1750,
he passed from a world that could barely discern the shadow of his
greatness.
It is excessive, perhaps, to maintain that for over three quarters
of a century after his death Bach went into total eclipse. But he
was disregarded if not forgotten. A handful of musicians, indeed,
remembered him, among them some of his talented pupils. From time
to time a few scattered works of his gained a limited circulation
and came into worthy hands. Thus, in the seventeen-eighties several
became known in Vienna, and at the Baron Van Swieten’s Mozart had
occasion to acquaint himself with a few specimens, which powerfully
stimulated his genius. Afterwards, in Leipzig, being shown the parts
of one of the motets he exclaimed after closely studying them: “Here,
at last, is something from which one can learn!” Beethoven, too, knew
the _Well-Tempered Clavier_ and even went so far as to ask someone to
procure him the _Crucifixus_ from the _B minor Mass_. His exclamation
is well known: “Not Bach (brook) but Ocean should be his name!”
Yet, in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was chiefly
Philipp Emanuel, not his father, to whom one referred when the mighty
name was invoked. For the sons of Bach, not the mighty parent, embodied
“the spirit of the time.” Even prior to his death Johann Sebastian
had passed for outmoded and rather hopelessly “old hat.” Philipp
Emanuel went so far as to call his father “a big wig stuffed with
learning”; and such was the opinion shared by many of the young bloods
in Leipzig and elsewhere. In a way this was not surprising. Bach
represented a type of music whose complex profundities were giving
place to homophony, entertainment and the graceful superficialities
of the so-called “gallant style.” The new age was concerned with the
problems of the sonata and the opera. Even if Bach’s scores—most of
them unpublished—had been accessible, it is questionable whether the
epoch we call “classical” would have been able to see him in a just
perspective.
In due course the wheel was to turn full-circle and surely none would
have been more amazed than Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and
Johann Christian could they have known that one day their own works
would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the
“learned old perruque” had become the fountain of musical youth,
the perpetual source of strength and of illimitable, self-renewing
wonder. With Mendelssohn’s revival of the _St. Matthew Passion_ in
1829 there began that resurrection which went on increasingly through
the nineteenth century, headed by the redemptive labors of the
_Bach-Gesellschaft_, and which continues to gain momentum right through
our own day. Boundless as the universe, timeless as eternity, modern as
tomorrow, Bach remains from decade to decade what Richard Wagner once
called him—“the most stupendous miracle in all music.”
* * * * *
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
BY THE
PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK