It was no doubt partly because of its complexity and technical difficulty that Bach’s music was not more widely disseminated during his lifetime, and was to some extent neglected after his death. The story of its rediscovery and revival has been told many times,but the romantic picture of a self-effacing genius whose music was unrecognized during his lifetime and neglected after his death, only to be rediscovered by a much later generation, is one that persists. Even had this been the case, it would have meant only that Bach, after his death, shared the fate of still better-known composers, such as Vivaldi and Telemann, whose music fell into even deeper oblivion and for a longer time. Handel was in this respect exceptional, his music kept alive after his death because of its accessibility (in every sense), because of the conservatism of English tastes, and because the king found it to his liking. But even Handel’s fame was perpetuated by a relatively small number of major works.
Popular notions about Bach’s reputation stand in need of revision in a number of respects. First, it is not true to say that his contemporaries admired him only as an executant. Certainly there are numerous accounts that stress his extraordinary skill as an organist and keyboard player, but the earliest reference to Bach in print—a passage in Mattheson’s Das beschu ̈tzte Orchestre (Hamburg, 1717)—extols the music, not the playing, of the ‘famous organist at Weimar’. By the time the publication of the Clavier-U ̈ bung was complete, in 1741–2, Bach was widely recognized as one of the finest composers of his time. Writing from Bologna to a correspondent in Fulda only three months before Bach’s death, the great Italian musician Padre Martini, who had certainly never heard him play, could say: ‘I consider it unnecessary to describe the singular merit of Sig. Bach since it is too well known and admired not only in Germany but all over Italy. I will say only that I hold it difficult to find a better Professore since every day he can claim to be among the finest in Europe.’ Bach may never have enjoyed the popular success that could come to an opera composer of international repute, such as Handel and Hasse, but his music was eulogized in terms similar to Padre Martini’s throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. Mozart and Beethoven knew and admired it, and by the time Beethoven died, in 1827, Bach had taken his place in the German consciousness alongside Handel, Haydn, and Mozart as one of music’s immortals, as Grillparzer’s funeral oration makes clear.
在贝多芬去世时,巴赫已经和亨德尔,海顿,莫扎特一样成为德国音乐中不朽的人物。 作者: alma 时间: 2013-11-24 23:18 本帖最后由 alma 于 2013-11-24 23:19 编辑