After all, this is the fellow who, at 20, walked hundreds of miles to hear Buxtehude play the organ. Verdi once referred to the “northerners” - the Germans and Austrians - as “the sons of Bach.” The “southerners,” such as himself, were “the sons of Palestrina.” The northerners, he seemed to say, were the better off.īach was not indifferent to his forebears - far from it. In Italy, you have Palestrina (born around 1525) and Monteverdi (born in 1567). If you want to go back 500 years before Schütz, you got Hildegard (of Bingen). There has been music ever since man grunted, in some interesting fashion.
There was music before Bach, needless to say. Wagner called Bach “the most stupendous miracle in all of music!” (Even the Wagnerian ego, apparently, did not prevent the man from giving the earlier master his due.) “There you will find everything.” “Bach is the beginning and end of all music,” said Max Reger. Said Mozart, “Now there is something one can learn from!”īrahms was of similar mind. Amazed by what he was hearing, Mozart cried out, “What is this?” It was Bach, naturally. One day, Mozart, from Salzburg, was visiting Leipzig. Beethoven did learn them, to historically fruitful effect. Learn them, he told the boy, and you will know music. He presented those books as a kind of Bible. In Bonn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, the music master in that town, gave his student Ludwig van Beethoven the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach has been a lodestar to composers ever since.
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