appealed to him chiefly as a supreme master of technique, and our hearts would open to him more widely did not his appreciation of Bach march with a narrow depreciation of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the last of whom, he declared ex cathedra, had not produced “a single work which can be called a masterpiece.” Gluck he frankly detested.

But Forkel's monograph is notable on other grounds. It was the first to claim for Bach a place among the divinities. It used him to stimulate a national sense in his own people. Bach's is the first great voice from out of Germany since Luther. Of Germany's own Kisorgimento, patently initiated by Goethe a generation after [pg xvii] Johann Sebastian's death, Bach himself is the harbinger. In his assertion of a distinctive German musical art he set an example followed in turn by Mozart, Weber, and Wagner. “With Bach,” wrote Wagner, “the German Spirit was born anew.” It is Forkel's perpetual distinction that he grasped a fact hidden from almost all but himself. In his Preface, and more emphatically in the closing paragraph of his last Chapter, he presents Bach as the herald of a German nation yet unformed.

It is a farther distinction of Forkel's monograph that it made converts. With its publication the clouds of neglect that too long had obscured Bach's grandeur began to melt away, until the dizzy altitude of his genius stood revealed. The publication of the five Motets (1803) was followed by that of the Magnificat in 1811, and of the Mass in A in 1818. A beginning was made with the Cantatas in 1821, when Breitkopf and Haertel published “Ein' feste Burg” (No. 80), commended in an article written (1822) by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (1769-1842), the champion of Beethoven, as now of Bach. Another enthusiastic pioneer was Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832), conductor of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, who called Bach “a sign of God, clear, yet inexplicable.” To him in large measure was due the memorable revival of the St. Matthew Passion at Berlin, which the youthful Mendelssohn, Zelter's pupil, [pg xviii] conducted in March 1829, exactly one hundred years after the first production of the mighty work at Leipzig. In the following years it was given at Dresden and many other German towns. Leipzig heard it again after a barren interval in 1841, and did tardy homage to its incomparable composer by erecting (1843) the statue that stands in the shadow of St. Thomas's Church, hard by the Cantor's home for a quarter of a century.

Meanwhile, in 1830 and 1831 the St. Matthew Passion and St. John Passion had been engraved, and by 1845 the B minor Mass was in print. The credit of having revived it belongs to Johann Nepomuk Schelble (1789-1837), conductor of the Frankfort Caecilienverein, though the Berlin Sing-Akademie was the first to give a performance, considerably curtailed, of the whole work in 1835. A little later, in the middle of the forties, Peters began to issue his “kritisch-korrecte” edition of the Organ works, which at length made Bach widely known among organists. But the publication of the Cantatas proceeded slowly. Only fourteen of them were in print in 1850, when the foundation of the Bachgesellschaft, on the centenary of Bach's death, focused a world-wide homage. When it dissolved in 1900 its mission was accomplished, the entire works2 of Bach were published, [pg xix] and the vast range of his genius was patent to the world.

It remains to discuss the first English version of Forkel's monograph, published in 1820, with the following title-page:

The book was published in February 1820; it was announced, with a slightly differently worded title-page, in the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register for March 1820 (p. 341), and the Scots Magazine for the same month ( vol. lxxxv. p. 263). The New Monthly states the price as 5s., the Quarterly Review (vol. xxiii. p. 281) as 6s. The book contains xi+116+3 pages of Music Figures, crown octavo, bound in dark unlettered cloth. It has neither Introduction, notes (other than Forkel's), nor indication of the translator's identity. Much of the translation is so bad as to suggest grave doubts of the translator's comprehension of the German original; while his rendering of Forkel's critical chapters rouses a strong suspicion that he also lacked technical equipment adequate to his task. It is, in fact, difficult to understand how such an unsatisfactory piece of work found its way into print.

[pg xx]

The character of the 1820 translation has a close bearing upon its authorship. In the article on Bach in the new Grove it is attributed to Samuel Wesley (1766-1837), an attractive suggestion, since Wesley was as enthusiastic a Bach pioneer in this country as Forkel himself was in Germany. But the statement is not correct. In Samuel Wesley's Letters to Mr. Jacobs relating to the Introduction into this Country of the Works of J. S. Bach (London, 1875) we find the clue. On October 17, 1808, Wesley writes: “We are (in the first place) preparing for the Press an authentic and accurate Life of Sebastian, which Mr. Stephenson the Banker (a most zealous and scientific member of our Fraternity) has translated into English from the German of Forkel.”

Unfortunately, it is impossible to identify Stephenson precisely, or to detect his activities in the musical circle in which Wesley includes him. In 1820 there was in Lombard Street a firm of bankers under the style of “Remington, Stephenson, Remington, and Toulmin,” the active partner being Mr. Rowland Stephenson, a man of about forty in that year. The firm was wound up in bankruptcy in 1829, Stephenson having absconded to America the previous year. He appears to have been the only banker of that name holding such a recognised position as Wesley attributes to him, though it remains no more than a