for chorus and orchestra; Clavier Concertos, and many Sonatas and Variations for the Harpsichord.

In 1802, for reasons which he explains in his Preface, Forkel published from Hoffmeister and Kühnel's “Bureau de Musique” his Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke. Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst, of which a new edition was issued by Peters in 1856. The original edition bears a dedication to Gottfried Baron van Swieten1 (1734-1803), Prefect of the Royal Library, Vienna, and sometime Austrian Ambassador in Berlin, a friend of Haydn and Mozart, patron of Beethoven, a man whose age allowed him to have seen Bach, and whose career makes the association with Bach that Forkel's dedication gives him not undeserved. It was he, an ardent Bach enthusiast, who introduced the youthful Mozart to the music of the Leipzig Cantor. “I go every Sunday at twelve o'clock to the Baron van Swieten,” Mozart writes in 1782, “where nothing is played but Handel and [pg xiii] Bach, and I am now making a collection of the Fugues of Bach.” The merit and limitations of Forkel's book will be considered later. For the moment the fact deserves emphasis that, inadequate as it is, it presented a fuller picture of Bach than so far had been drawn, and was the first to render the homage due to his genius.

In an illuminating chapter (xii.), Death and Resurrection, Schweitzer has told the story of the neglect that obscured Bach's memory after his death in 1750. Isolated voices, raised here and there, acclaimed his genius. With Bach's treatise on The Art of Fugue before him, Johann Mattheson (1681-1664), the foremost critic of the day, claimed that Germany was “the true home of Organ music and Fugue.” Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718-95), the famous Berlin theorist, expressed the same opinion in his preface to the edition of that work published shortly after Bach's death. But such appreciations were rare. Little of Bach's music was in print and available for performance or critical judgment. Even at St. Thomas's, Leipzig, it suffered almost complete neglect until a generation after Forkel's death. The bulk of Bach's MSS. was divided among his family, and Forkel himself, with unrivalled opportunity to acquaint himself with the dimensions of Bach's industry, knew little of his music except the Organ and Clavier compositions.

[pg xiv]

In these circumstances it is not strange that Bach's memory waited for more than half a century for a biographer. Forkel, however, was not the first to assemble the known facts of Bach's career or to assert his place in the music of Germany.

Putting aside Johann Gottfried Walther's brief epitome in his Lexikon (1732), the first and most important of the early notices of Bach was the obituary article, or “Nekrolog,” contributed by his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, and Johann Friedrich Agricola, one of Bach's most distinguished pupils, to the fourth volume of Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, published at Leipzig in 1754. The authors of this appreciation give it an intimacy which renders it precious. But Mizler's periodical was the organ of a small Society, of which Bach had been a member, and outside its associates can have done little to extend a knowledge of the subject of the memoir.

Johann Friedrich Agricola contributed notes on Bach to Jakob Adlung's Musica mechanica Organoedi, published in two volumes at Berlin in 1768. The article is valuable chiefly for Agricola's exposition of Bach's opinions upon Organ and Clavier building.

With the intention to represent him as “the coryphaeus of all organists,” Johann Adam Hiller, who a few years later became Cantor at St. Thomas's, Leipzig, published there in 1784 a [pg xv] brief account of Bach in his Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neuerer Zeit.

Four years after Hiller's notice, Ernst Ludwig Gerber published at Leipzig, in two volumes, 1790-92, his Historisch-biographische Lexikon der Tonkünstler. As in Hiller's case, Gerber, whose father had been Bach's pupil, was chiefly interested in Bach as an organist.

Coincidently with Gerber, another of Bach's pupils, Johann Martin Schubart, who succeeded him at Weimar in 1717, sketched his characteristics as a performer in the Aesthetik der Tonkunst, published at Berlin by his son in the Deutschen Monatsschrift in 1793.

In 1794 appeared at Leipzig the first volume of a work which Spitta characterises as fantastic and unreliable, so far as it deals with Bach, Friedrich Carl Gottlieb Hirsching's Historisch-literarisches Handbuch of notable persons deceased in the eighteenth century.

Last of Forkel's forerunners, A. E. L. Siebigke published at Breslau in 1801 his Museum deutscher Tonkünstler, a work which adds nothing to our knowledge of Bach's life, but offers some remarks on his style.

Little, if any, information of value, therefore, had been added to the Nekrolog of 1754 when Forkel, in 1802, produced his monograph on Bach and his music. Nor, viewed as a biography, does [pg xvi] Forkel much enlarge our knowledge of the conditions of Bach's life. He had the advantage of knowing Bach's elder sons, but appears to have lacked curiosity regarding the circumstances of Bach's career, and to have made no endeavour to add to his imperfect information, even regarding his hero's life at Leipzig, upon which it should have been easy for him to obtain details of utmost interest. His monograph, in fact, is not a “Life” in the biographic sense, but a critical appreciation of Bach as player, teacher, and composer, based upon the Organ and Clavier works, with which alone Forkel was familiar.

It would be little profitable to weigh the value of Forkel's criticism. We are tempted to the conclusion that Bach