Great German Composers | Page 3

by the king, known under the name of "A Musical Offering." But he
could not be persuaded to remain long from his Leipsic home.
Shortly before Bach's death, he was seized with blindness, brought on
by incessant labor; and his end was supposed to have been hastened by
the severe inflammation consequent on two operations performed by an

English oculist. He departed this life July 30, 1750, and was buried in
St. John's churchyard, universally mourned by musical Germany,
though his real title to exceptional greatness was not to be read until the
next generation.
III.
Sebastian Bach was not only the descendant of a widely-known
musical family, but was himself the direct ancestor of about sixty of the
best-known organists and church composers of Germany. As a master
of organ-playing, tradition tells us that no one has been his equal, with
the possible exception of Handel. He was also an able performer on
various stringed instruments, and his preference for the clavichord * led
him to write a method for that instrument, which has been the basis of
all succeeding methods for the piano. Bach's teachings and influence
may be said to have educated a large number of excellent composers
and organ and piano players, among whom were Emanuel Bach,
Cramer, Hummel, and Clementi; and on his school of theory and
practice the best results in music have been built.
* An old instrument which may be called the nearest prototype of the
modern square piano.
That Bach's glory as a composer should be largely posthumous is
probably the result of his exceeding simplicity and diffidence, for he
always shrank from popular applause; therefore we may believe his
compositions were not placed in the proper light during his life. It was
through Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, that the musical world learned
what a master-spirit had wrought in the person of John Sebastian Bach.
The first time Mozart heard one of Bach's hymns, he said, "Thank God!
I learn something absolutely new." Bach's great compositions include
his "Preludes and Fugues" for the organ, works so difficult and
elaborate as perhaps to be above the average comprehension, but
sources of delight and instruction to all musicians; the "Matthäus
Passion," for two choruses and two orchestras, one of the masterpieces
in music, which was not produced till a century after it was written; the
"Oratorio of the Nativity of Jesus Christ;" and a very large number of
masses, anthems, cantatas, chorals, hymns, etc. These works, from their

largeness and dignity of form, as also from their depth of musical
science, have been to all succeeding composers an art-armory, whence
they have derived and furbished their brightest weapons. In the study of
Bach's works the student finds the deepest and highest reaches in the
science of music; for his mind seems to have grasped all its resources,
and to have embodied them with austere purity and precision of form.
As Spenser is called the poet for poets, and Laplace the mathematician
for mathematicians, so Bach is the musician for musicians. While
Handel may be considered a purely independent and parallel growth, it
is not too much to assert that without Sebastian Bach and his matchless
studies for the piano, organ, and orchestra, we could not have had the
varied musical development in sonata and symphony from such
masters as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Three of Sebastian Bach's
sons became distinguished musicians, and to Emanuel we owe the
artistic development of the sonata, which in its turn became the
foundation of the symphony.

HANDEL.
I.
To the modern Englishman Handel is almost a contemporary. Paintings
and busts of this great minstrel are scattered everywhere throughout the
land. He lies in Westminster Abbey among the great poets, warriors,
and statesmen, a giant memory in his noble art. A few hours after death
the sculptor Roubiliac took a cast of his face, which he wrought into
imperishable marble; "moulded in colossal calm," he towers above his
tomb, and accepts the homage of the world benignly like a god. Exeter
Hall and the Foundling Hospital in London are also adorned with
marble statues of him.
There are more than fifty known pictures of Handel, some of them by
distinguished artists. In the best of these pictures Handel is seated in the
gay costume of the period, with sword, shot-silk breeches, and coat
embroidered with gold. The face is noble in its repose. Benevolence is
seated about the finely-shaped mouth, and the face wears the mellow

dignity of years, without weakness or austerity. There are few
collectors of prints in England and America who have not a woodcut or
a lithograph of him. His face and his music are alike familiar to the
English-speaking world.
Handel came to England in the year 1710, at the age of twenty-five.
Four years