Eighteenth century In 1737, two years before the publication of
Clavier-Übung III,
Johann Adolf Scheibe had made the above notoriously unfavourable comparison between Bach and another composer of the time, now identified as
Georg Frideric Handel. His comments represented a change in contemporary musical aesthetics: he advocated the simpler and more expressive
galant style, which after Bach's death in 1750 would be further developed during the
classical period, in preference to fugal or contrapuntal writing, which by then was considered old-fashioned and out-moded, too scholarly and conservative. Although Bach did not actively participate in the ensuing debate on musical styles, he did incorporate elements of this modern style in his later compositions, in particular in
Clavier-Übung III. Bach's musical contributions, however, could only be properly assessed at the beginning of the 19th century, when his works became more widely available: up until then much of his musical output—in particular his vocal works—was relatively little known outside Leipzig. From 1760 onwards a small group of ardent supporters became active in
Berlin, keen to preserve his reputation and promulgate his
oeuvre. The group centred around his son
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who in 1738 at the age of 24 had been appointed court harpsichordist at
Potsdam to
Frederick the Great, then crown prince before his accession to the throne in 1740. C.P.E. Bach remained in Berlin until 1768, when he was appointed Kapellmeister in
Hamburg in succession to
Georg Philipp Telemann. (His brother
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach moved to Berlin in 1774, although not to general acclaim, despite his accomplishments as an organist.) Other prominent members of the group included Bach's former pupils
Johann Friedrich Agricola, court composer, first director of the
Royal Opera House in Berlin and collaborator with Emanuel on Bach's obituary (the
Nekrolog, 1754), and more significantly
Johann Philipp Kirnberger. Kirnberger became Kapellmeister to the court in 1758 and music teacher of Frederick's niece,
Anna Amalia. Not only did Kirnberger build up a large collection of Bach's manuscripts in the
Amalien-Bibliothek, but with
Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg he promoted Bach's compositions through theoretical texts, concentrating in particular on counterpoint with a detailed analysis of Bach's methods. The first of the two volumes of Marpurg's
Treatise on fugue (, 1753–1754) cites the opening segment of the six-part fugal chorale prelude
Aus tiefer Noth BWV 686 as one of its examples. Kirnberger produced his own extensive tract on composition
Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (The true principles for the practice of harmony), twenty years later, between 1771 and 1779. In his treatise Marpurg had adopted some of the musical theories on the
fundamental bass of
Jean-Philippe Rameau from his
Treatise on Harmony (1722) in explaining Bach's fugal compositions, an approach which Kirnberger rejected in his tract: This led to an acrimonious dispute in which both claimed to speak with Bach's authority. When Marpurg made the tactical error of suggesting that, "His famous son in Hamburg ought to know something about this, too," Kirnberger responded in the introduction to the second volume of his tract: Through Bach's pupils and family, copies of his keyboard works were disseminated and studied throughout Germany; the diplomat
Baron van Swieten, Austrian envoy to the Prussian court from 1770 to 1777 and afterwards patron of
Mozart,
Haydn and
Beethoven, was responsible for relaying copies from Berlin to Vienna. The reception of the works was mixed, partly because of their technical difficulty: composers like Mozart, Beethoven and
Rust embraced these compositions, particularly
The Well-Tempered Clavier; but, as
Johann Adam Hiller reported in 1768, many amateur musicians found them too hard (""). Twenty-one prints of the original 1739 edition of Clavier-Übung III survive today. Because of its high price, this edition did not sell well: even 25 years later in 1764, C.P.E. Bach was still trying to dispose of copies. Because of changes in popular tastes after Bach's death, the publisher
Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, son of
Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, did not consider it economically viable to prepare new printed editions of Bach's works; instead he retained a master copy of Clavier-Übung III in his large library of original scores from which handwritten copies () could be ordered from 1763 onwards. A similar service was provided by the musical publishers Johann Christoph Westphal in Hamburg and
Johann Carl Friedrich Rellstab in Berlin. Before 1800, there are very few reports of performances of Bach's works in England or of manuscript copies of his work. In 1770,
Charles Burney, the musicologist and friend of
Samuel Johnson and
James Boswell, had made a tour of France and Italy. On his return in 1771 he published a report on his tour in
The Present State of Music in France and Italy. Later that year in a letter to
Christoph Daniel Ebeling, the music critic engaged in translating this work into German, Burney made one of his first references to Bach: It was, however, only in the following year, during his tour of Germany and the
Low Countries, that Burney received a copy of the first book of
The Well-Tempered Clavier from C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg; according to his own reports, he was only to become familiar with its contents over thirty years later. He reported on his German tour in
The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces in 1773. The book contains the first English account of Bach's work and reflects the views commonly held at the time in England. Burney compared the learned style of Bach unfavourably with that of his son, whom he had visited: Burney summarised the musical contributions of J.S. Bach as follows: As it is known that at the time Burney knew hardly any of Bach's compositions, it appears that his opinions of Bach came second-hand: the first sentence was almost certainly lifted directly from the French translation of Marpurg's
Treatise on fugue, to which he had referred earlier in the book for biographical details; and in 1771 he had acquired Scheibe's writings through Ebeling. In Germany Burney's book was not well received, infuriating even his friend Ebeling: in a passage that he changed in later editions, he had repeated without attribution comments from a letter of Louis Devisme, British plenipotentiary in Munich, that, "if innate genius exists, Germany is certainly not the seat of it; though it must be allowed, to be that of perseverance and application." Once aware of the offence this might cause to Germans, Burney had marked with pencil the offending passages in the copy of his daughter
Fanny Burney, when in 1786 she became lady-in-waiting to
Queen Charlotte, wife of
George III. Later that year, to Fanny's horror, the Queen requested that Fanny show her copy to her daughter Princess Elizabeth. The book was viewed by both the King and Queen, who accepted Fanny's hastily invented explanations of the markings; she similarly managed to excuse herself when Princess Elizabeth later read all the marked passages assuming them to be Fanny's favourites. Burney was aware of George III's preference for Handel when in 1785 he wrote in his account of the 1784
Handel Commemoration that "in his full, masterly and excellent organ-
fugues, upon the most natural and pleasing subjects, he has surpassed Frescobaldi, and even Sebastian Bach, and others of his countrymen, the most renowned for abilities in this difficult and elaborate species of composition." His account was translated into German by Hiller. Writing anonymously in the
Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek in 1788, C.P.E. Bach angrily responded that "there is nothing to be seen but partiality, and of any close acquaintance with the principal works of J.S. Bach for organ we find in Dr. Burney's writings no trace." Undeterred by such comments in 1789, a year after C.P.E. Bach's death, Burney echoed Scheibe's earlier comparison of Bach and Handel when he wrote in his
General History of Music: Burney reflected the English predilection for opera when he added:
Johann Nikolaus Forkel, from 1778 the director of music in the
University of Göttingen, was another promoter and collector of Bach's music. An active correspondent with both of Bach's sons in Berlin, he published the first detailed biography of Bach in 1802, ''Bach: On Johann Sebastian Bach's Life, Art and Works: For Patriotic Admirers of True Musical Art'', including an appreciation of Bach's keyboard and organ music and ending with the injunction, "This man, the greatest orator-poet that ever addressed the world in the language of music, was a German! Let Germany be proud of him! Yes, proud of him, but worthy of him too!" In 1779, Forkel published a review of Burney's
General History of Music in which he criticized Burney for dismissing German composers as "dwarves or musical ogres" because "they did not skip and dance before his eyes in a dainty manner"; instead he suggested it was more appropriate to view them as "giants". Among his criticisms of Bach in the 1730s, Scheibe had written, "We know of composers who see it as an honour to be able to compose incomprehensible and unnatural music. They pile up musical figures. They make unusual embellishments. ... Are these not truly musical Goths!" Until the 1780s, the use of the word "gothic" in music was pejorative. In his entry for "harmony" in the influential
Dictionnaire de Musique (1768),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a fierce critic of Rameau, described counterpoint as a "gothic and barbaric invention", the antithesis of the melodic
galante style. In 1772,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave a fundamentally different view of "gothic" art that would achieve widespread acceptance during the classical-romantic movement. In his celebrated essay on the
cathedral in
Strasbourg, where he was a student, Goethe was one of the first writers to connect gothic art with the sublime: In 1782,
Johann Friedrich Reichardt, since 1775 the successor to Agricola as Capellmeister in the court of Frederic the Great, quoted this passage from Goethe in the
Musicalisches Kunstmagazin to describe his personal reactions to the instrumental fugues of Bach and Handel. He prefaced his eulogy with a description of Bach as the greatest counterpuntalist ("harmonist") of his age: The unfavourable comparison to Handel was removed in a later reprinting in 1796, following adverse anonymous remarks in the
Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek. Reichardt's comparison between Bach's music and the Gothic cathedral would often be repeated by composers and music critics. His student, the writer, composer and music critic
E.T.A. Hoffmann, saw in Bach's music "the bold and wonderful, romantic cathedral with all its fantastic embellishments, which, artistically swept up into a whole, proudly and magnificently rise in the air". Hoffmann wrote of the sublime in Bach's music—the "infinite spiritual realm" in Bach's "mystical rules of counterpoint". Another musician in C.P.E. Bach's circle was his friend
Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, son of the violinist and composer
Johann Friedrich Fasch, who, on the death of Kuhnau in 1722, had turned down the post, later awarded to Bach, of
kantor at the
Thomaskirche, where he himself had been trained. From 1756 Carl Fasch shared the role of harpsichord accompanist to Frederick the Great at Potsdam with C.P.E. Bach. He briefly succeeded Agricola as director of the Royal Opera in 1774 for two years. In 1786. the year of Frederick the Great's death, Hiller organised a monumental performance in Italian of Handel's
Messiah in a Berlin cathedral, recreating the scale of the 1784 London
Handel Commemoration described in Burney's detailed account of 1785. Three years later in 1789, Fasch started an informal group in Berlin, formed from singing students and music lovers, that met for rehearsals in private homes. In 1791, with the introduction of a "presence book", it became officially known as the
Sing-Akademie zu Berlin and two years later was granted its own rehearsal room in the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. As a composer, Fasch had learnt the old methods of counterpoint from Kirnberger and, like the
Academy of Ancient Music in London, his initial purpose in founding the Sing-Akademie was to revive interest in neglected and rarely performed sacred vocal music, particularly that of J.S. Bach, Graun and Handel. The society subsequently built up an extensive library of baroque music of all types, including instrumental music. ,
St James's Palace in
St Paul's Cathedral. The Grand Organ, built by
Father Smith with a case designed by
Christopher Wren, can be seen in the background. Despite Burney's antipathy towards Bach prior to 1800, there was an "awakening" of interest in the music of Bach in England, spurred on by the presence of émigré musicians from Germany and Austria, trained in the musical tradition of Bach. From 1782
Queen Charlotte, a dedicated keyboard player, had as music teacher the German-born organist
Charles Frederick Horn; and in the same year
Augustus Frederic Christopher Kollmann was summoned by George III from the
Electorate of Hanover to act as organist and schoolmaster at the
Royal German Chapel at St James's Palace. It is probable that they were instrumental in acquiring for her in 1788 a bound volume from Westphal of Hamburg containing
Clavier-Übung III in addition to both books of
The Well-Tempered Clavier. Other German musicians moving in royal circles included
Johann Christian Bach,
Carl Friedrich Abel,
Johann Christian Fischer,
Frederick de Nicolay,
Wilhelm Cramer and
Johann Samuel Schroeter. More significant for the 19th-century English Bach revival was the presence of a younger generation of German-speaking musicians in London, well versed in the theoretical writings of Kirnberger and Marpurg on counterpoint but not dependent on royal patronage; these included John Casper Heck ( – 1791),
Charles Frederick Baumgarten (1738–1824) and Joseph Diettenhofer ( – ). Heck in particular promoted fugues in his treatise "The Art of Playing the Harpsichord" (1770), describing them later as "a particular stile of music peculiar to the Organ than the Harpsichord"; in his biographical entry for Bach in the 1780s in the
Musical Library and Universal Magazine, he gave examples of counterpoint from Bach's late period (
Canonic Variations,
The Art of Fugue). Diettenhofer prepared
A Selection of Ten Miscellaneous Fugues, including his own completion of the unfinished
Contrapunctus XIV BWV 1080/19 from
The Art of Fugue; prior to their publication in 1802 these were "tried at the
Savoy Church, Strand before several Organists and eminent Musicians ... who were highly gratified and recommended their Publication." The enthusiasm of these German musicians was shared by the organist Benjamin Cooke and his student the organist and composer John Wall Calcott. Cooke knew them through the
Royal Society of Musicians and had himself published a version of
The Art of Fugue. Calcott corresponded with Kollmann about the musical theories of the Bach school. In 1798, he was one of the founding members of the
Concentores Society, a club with a limited membership of twelve professional musicians, dedicated to composition in counterpoint and the stile antico.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany A new printed "movable type" edition of
Clavier-Übung III, omitting the duets BWV 802–805, was produced by
Ambrosius Kühnel in 1804 for the
Bureau de Musique in Leipzig, his joint publishing venture with
Franz Anton Hoffmeister that later became the music publishing firm of
C.F. Peters. Previously in 1802 Hoffmeister and Kühnel and had published a collection of Bach's keyboard music, including the
Inventions and Sinfonias and both books of
The Well-Tempered Clavier, with
Johann Nikolaus Forkel acting as advisor. (The first prelude and fugue BWV 870 from
The Well-Tempered Clavier II was published for the first time in 1799 by Kollmann in London. The whole of Book II was published in 1801 in Bonn by
Simrock, followed by Book I; slightly later Nägeli came out with a third edition in Zürich.) Hoffmeister and Kühnel did not take up Forkel's suggestion of including in their fifteenth volume the four duets BWV 802–805, which were only published by Peters much later in 1840. Nine of the chorale preludes BWV 675–683 were printed in the four volume
Breitkopf and Härtel collection of chorale preludes prepared between 1800 and 1806 by
Johann Gottfried Schicht. Forkel and Kollmann corresponded during this period: they shared the same enthusiasm for Bach and the publication of his works. When Forkel's biography of Bach appeared in Germany in 1802, his publishers Hoffmeister and Kühnel wished to have control over translations into English and French. No complete authorized English translation was produced at the time. In 1812, Kollmann used parts of the biography in a long article on Bach in the
Quarterly Musical Register; and an unauthorized anonymous English translation was published by
Boosey & Company in 1820. In Berlin, on the death of Fasch in 1800, his assistant
Carl Friedrich Zelter took over as the director of the Sing-Akademie. The son of a mason, he himself had been brought up as a master mason, but had cultivated his musical interests in secret, eventually taking composition classes with Fasch. He had been linked to the Sing-Akademie for years and had acquired a reputation as one of the foremost experts on Bach in Berlin. In 1799, he started a correspondence with Goethe on the aesthetics of music, particularly the music of Bach, which was to last until both friends died in 1832. Although Goethe had a late training in music, he considered it an essential element in his life, arranging concerts at his home and attending them elsewhere. In 1819, Goethe described how the organist from
Berka, Heinrich Friedrich Schütz, trained by Bach's student Kittel, would serenade him for hours with the music of the masters, from Bach to Beethoven, so that Goethe could acquaint himself with music from a historical perspective. In 1827, he wrote: Commenting in the same year on Bach's writing for the organ, Zelter wrote to Goethe: Zelter insisted on the pedals as the key to Bach's organ writing: "One might say of old Bach, that the pedals were the ground-element of the development of his unfathomable intellect, and that without feet, he could never have attained his intellectual
height." , 1840 Zelter was instrumental in building up the Sing-Akademie, broadening their repertoire to instrumental music and encouraging the growing library, another important repository for Bach manuscripts. Zelter had been responsible for Mendelssohn's father
Abraham Mendelssohn becoming a member of the Sing-Akademie in 1796. As a consequence, one of the major new forces behind the library became
Sara Levy, the great-aunt of
Felix Mendelssohn, who had assembled one of the most-important private collections of 18th-century music in Europe. An accomplished harpsichordist, Sara Levy's teacher had been
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and she had been a patroness of
C.P.E. Bach, circumstances which gave her family close contacts with Bach and resulted in his music enjoying a privileged status in the Mendelssohn household. Felix's mother Lea, who had studied under Kirnberger, gave him his first music lessons. In 1819, Zelter was appointed as the composition teacher of Felix and his sister
Fanny; he taught counterpoint and music theory according to the methods of Kirnberger. Felix's piano teacher was
Ludwig Berger, a pupil of
Muzio Clementi, and his organ teacher was
August Wilhelm Bach (unrelated to J.S. Bach), who had himself studied musical theory under Zelter. A.W. Bach was organist of the
Marienkirche, Berlin, which had an organ built in 1723 by
Joachim Wagner. Mendelssohn's organ lessons were conducted on the Wagner organ, with Fanny present; they commenced in 1820 and lasted for less than two years. It is probable that he learnt some of J. S. Bach's organ works, which had remained in the repertoire of many Berlin organists; his choice would have been limited, because at that stage his pedal technique was still rudimentary. In autumn 1821 the twelve-year-old Mendelssohn accompanied Zelter on a trip to
Weimar, stopping on the way in Leipzig where they were shown the cantor's room in the choir school of the Thomaskirche by Bach's successor Schicht. They stayed two weeks in Weimar with Goethe, to whom Mendelssohn played extensively on the piano each day. All Mendelssohn's music lessons stopped by summer 1822 when his family left for Switzerland. In the 1820s, Mendelssohn visited Goethe four more times in Weimar, the last time being in 1830, a year after his resounding success in reviving Bach's
St Matthew Passion in Berlin, with the collaboration of Zelter and members of the Sing-Akademie. On this last trip, again by way of Leipzig, he stayed two weeks in Weimar and had daily meetings with Goethe, by then in his eighties. He later gave an account to Zelter of a visit to the church of St Peter and St Paul where Bach's cousin
Johann Gottfried Walther had been organist and where his two eldest sons had been baptized: , 1836: watercolour of the
Gewandhaus in the courtyard of the
Gewandhaus In 1835, Mendelssohn was appointed director of the
Gewandhaus Orchester in
Leipzig, a post he held until his death in 1847 at the age of 38. He soon met other Bach enthusiasts including
Robert Schumann, one year his junior, who had moved to Leipzig in 1830. Having been taught piano by J.G. Kuntsch, organist at the Marienkirche in
Zwickau, Schumann seems to have started developing a deeper interest in Bach's organ music in 1832. In his diary he recorded sightreading the six organ fugues BWV 543–548 for four hands with
Clara Wieck, the twelve-year-old daughter of his Leipzig piano teacher
Friedrich Wieck and his future wife. Schumann later acknowledged Bach as the composer who had influenced him most. In addition to collecting his works, Schumann started with Friedrich Wieck a new fortnightly music magazine, the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in which he promoted the music of Bach as well as that of contemporary composers, such as Chopin and Liszt. One of the main contributors was his friend
Carl Becker, organist at the
Peterskirche and in 1837 the
Nikolaikirche. Schumann remained as editor-in-chief until 1843, the year in which Mendelssohn became the founding director of the
Leipzig Conservatory. Schumann was appointed professor for piano and composition at the conservatory; other appointments included
Moritz Hauptmann (harmony and counterpoint),
Ferdinand David (violin) and Becker (organ and music theory). in 1900 One of Mendelssohn's regrets since 1822 was that he had not had sufficient opportunity to develop his pedal technique to his satisfaction, despite having given public organ recitals. Mendelssohn explained later how difficult gaining access to organs had already been back in Berlin: "If only people knew how I had to plead and pay and cajole the organists in Berlin, just to be allowed to play the organ for one hour—and how
ten times during such an hour I had to stop for this or that reason, then they would certainly speak differently." Elsewhere, on his travels, he had only sporadic opportunities to practice, but not often on pedalboards matching the standard of those in northern Germany, especially in England. The English organist Edward Holmes commented in 1835 that Mendelssohn's recitals in
St Paul's Cathedral "gave a taste of his quality which in extemperaneous performance is certainly of the highest kind ... he has not we believe kept up that constant mechanical exercise of the instrument which is necessary to execute elaborate written works." In 1837, despite having performed the St Anne prelude and fugue in England to great acclaim, on his return to Germany Mendelssohn still felt dissatisfied, writing that, "This time I have resolved to practice the organ her in earnest; after all, if everyone takes me for an organist, I am determined, after the fact, to become one." It was only in the summer of 1839 that an opportunity arose when he spent six weeks on holiday in Frankfurt. There he had daily access to the pedal piano of his wife Cécile's cousin Friedrich Schlemmer and, probably through him, access to the organ in the
Katharinenkirche built in 1779–1780 by Franz and Philipp Stumm. In August 1840 August 1840 saw the fruits of Mendelssohn's labour: his first organ recital in the
Thomaskirche. The proceeds from the concert were to go towards a statue of Bach in the vicinity of the Thomaskirche. Most of the repertoire in the concert had been played by Mendelssohn elsewhere, but nevertheless as he wrote to his mother, "I practised so much the previous eight days that I could barely stand on my own two feet and walked along the street in nothing but organ passages." The concert was wholly devoted to Bach's music, except for an improvised "free fantasy" at the end. In the audience was the elderly
Friedrich Rochlitz, founding editor of the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a journal that had promoted the music of Bach: Rochlitz is reported to have declared afterwards, "I shall depart now in peace, for never shall I hear anything finer or more sublime." The recital started with the St Anne prelude and fugue BWV 552. The only chorale prelude was
Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele BWV 654 from the
Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, a favourite of both Mendelssohn and Schumann. Until that time very few of these or the shorter chorale preludes from the
Orgelbüchlein had been published. Mendelssohn prepared an edition of both sets that was published in 1844 by Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig and by Coventry and Hollier in London. At about the same time the publishing house of Peters in Leipzig produced an edition of Bach's complete organ works in nine volumes edited by
Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl and Ferdinand Roitzsch. The E flat prelude and fugue BWV 552 appears in Volume III (1845), the chorale preludes BWV 669–682, 684–689 in Volume VI and VII (1847) and BWV 683 in Volume V (1846) with chorale preludes from the Orgelbüchlein. at the age of 20 in a drawing made in 1853 at Schumann's home in Düsseldorf by the French organist-artist
Jean-Joseph Bonaventure Laurens in Vienna At the end of September 1853, having been recommended by the violinist and composer
Joseph Joachim, the twenty-year-old
Johannes Brahms appeared on the doorstep of the Schumann's home in
Düsseldorf, staying with them until early November. Like Schumann, perhaps even more so, Brahms was deeply influenced by Bach's music. Shortly after his arrival he gave a performance on the piano of Bach's organ toccata in F BWV 540/1 in the house of
Joseph Euler, a friend of Schumann. Three months after Brahms' visit, Schumann's mental state deteriorated: after a
suicide attempt, Schumann committed himself to the sanitorium in
Endenich near
Bonn, where, after several visits from Brahms, he died in 1856. From its inception, Brahms subscribed to the Bach-Gesellschaft, of which he became an editor in 1881. An organist himself and a scholar of early and baroque music, he carefully annotated and analysed his copies of the organ works; he made a separate study of Bach's use of parallel fifths and octaves in his organ counterpoint. Brahms' Bach collection is now preserved in the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in
Vienna, of which he became musical director and conductor in 1872. In 1875, he conducted a performance in the
Musikverein of an orchestral arrangement by
Bernhard Scholz of the prelude in E flat BWV 552/1. In 1896, a year before he died, Brahms composed his own set of
eleven chorale preludes for organ, Op.122. Like Schumann, who turned to Bach counterpoint as a form of therapy in 1845 during his recovery from mental illness, Brahms also viewed Bach's music as salutory during his final illness. As Brahms' friend and biographer
Max Kalbeck reported:
Max Reger was a composer whose dedication to Bach has been described as a "monomaniacal identification" by the musicologist Johannes Lorenzen: in letters he frequently referred to "Allvater Bach". During his life, Reger arranged or edited 428 of Bach's compositions, including arrangements of 38 organ works for piano solo, piano duet or two pianos, starting in 1895. At the same time he produced a large number of his own organ works. Already in 1894, the organist and musicologist
Heinrich Reimann, reacting to modernist trends in German music, had encouraged a return to the style of Bach, stating that, "Beyond this style there is no salvation ... Bach becomes for that reason the criterion of our art of writing for the organ." In 1894–1895 Reger composed his first suite for organ in E minor which was published in 1896 as his Op.16 with a dedication "To the Memory of Johann Sebastian Bach". The original intention was a sonata in three movements: an introduction and triple fugue; an
adagio on the chorale
Es ist das Heil uns kommen her; and a
passacaglia. In the final version, Reger inserted an
intermezzo (a scherzo and trio) as the third movement and expanded the adagio to contain a central section on the Lutheran hymns
Aus tiefer Not and
O Haupt voll Blut und Bunden. In 1896, Reger sent a copy of the suite to Brahms, his only contact. In the letter he asked permission to dedicate a future work to Brahms, to which he received the reply, "Permission for that is certainly not necessary, however! I had to smile, since you approach me about this matter and at the same time enclose a work whose all-too-bold dedication terrifies me!" The overall form of the suite follows the scheme of the eighth organ sonata Op.132 (1882) of
Joseph Rheinberger and the symphonies of Brahms. The final passacaglia was a conscious reference to Bach's organ
passacaglia in C minor BWV 582/1, but has clear affinities with the last movements of both Rheinberger's sonata and
Brahms' fourth symphony. The second movement is an
adagio in
ternary form, with the beginning of the central section directly inspired by the setting of
Aus tiefer Not in the pedaliter chorale prelude BWV 686 of
Clavier-Übung III, paying homage to Bach as a composer of instrumental counterpoint. It has a similarly dense texture of six parts, two of them in the pedal. The outer sections are directly inspired by the musical form of the chorale prelude
O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß BWV 622 from the
Orgelbüchlein. The suite was first performed in the
Trinity Church, Berlin in 1897 by the organist
Karl Straube, a student of Reimann. According to a later account by one of Straube's students, Reimann had described the work as "so difficult as to be almost unplayable", which had "provoked Straube's virtuosic ambition, so that he set about mastering the work, which placed him before utterly new technical problems, with unflagging energy." Straube gave two further performances in 1898, in the cathedral at
Wesel, where he had recently been appointed organist, and prior to that in
Frankfurt, where he met Reger for the first time. In 1902, Straube was appointed organist at the Thomaskirche and in the following year cantor; he became the main proponent and performer of Reger's organ works.
England constructed in 1834 in
St Paul's Cathedral, 1852, with the Father Smith organ in the background Apart from prevailing musical tastes and the difficulty in acquiring manuscript copies, a fundamental difference between the design of English and German organs made Bach's organ output less accessible to English organists, namely the absence of
pedalboards. Handel's principal works for organ, his
organ concertos Op. 4 and
Op. 7, with the possible exception of op.7 No.1, all appear to have been written for a single manual
chamber organ. Until the 1830s, most church organs in England did not have separate pedal pipes and before that the few organs that had pedalboards were all
pull-downs, i.e. pedals that operated pipes connected to the manual stops. Pedalboards rarely contained more than 13 keys (an octave) or exceptionally 17 keys (an octave and a half). Pull-down pedalboards became more common from 1790 onwards. The pedaliter chorale preludes in
Clavier-Übung III require a 30-key pedalboard, going from CC to f. It is for this reason that the Bach awakening in England started with clavier compositions being played on the organ or organ compositions being adapted either for piano duet or for two (or sometimes three) players at an organ. The newfound interest in Bach's organ music, as well as the desire to reproduce the grand and thunderous choral effects of the 1784
Handel Commemoration, eventually influenced organ builders in England. By the 1840s, after a series of experiments with pedals and pedal pipes starting around 1800 (in the spirit of the
Industrial Revolution), newly constructed and existing organs started to be fitted with dedicated diapason pipes for the pedals, according to the well-established German model. The organ in
St Paul's Cathedral commissioned in 1694 from
Father Smith and completed in 1697, with a case by
Christopher Wren, had exceptionally already been fitted with a 25-key pedalboard (two octaves C-c') of pull-down German pedals in the first half of the 18th century, probably as early as 1720, on the recommendation of Handel. By the 1790s, these had been linked to separate pedal pipes, described with detailed illustrations in ''
Rees's Cyclopædia'' (1819). The four-manual "monster" organ in
Birmingham Town Hall, constructed in 1834 by William Hill, had three sets of pedal pipes connected to the pedalboard, which could also be operated independently by a two-octave keyboard to the left of the manual keyboards. Hill's experiment of installing gigantic 32-foot pedal pipes, some currently still present, was only partially successful, as their scale did not permit them to sound properly. , 1830:
Hanover Square Rooms , 1812: Watercolour of
Christ Church, Newgate, designed by
Christopher Wren The organist, composer and music teacher
Samuel Wesley (1766–1837) played a significant role in awakening interest in Bach's music in England, mostly in the period 1808–1811. After a lull in his own career, in the first half of 1806 he made a hand copy of Nägeli's Zürich edition of
The Well-Tempered Clavier. In early 1808 Wesley visited
Charles Burney in his rooms in Chelsea where he played for him from the copy of Book I of the '48' that Burney had received from
C.P.E. Bach in 1772. As Wesley later recorded, Burney "was very delighted ... and expressed his Wonder
how much abstruse Harmony & such perfect & enchanting Melody could have been so marvelously united!" Wesley subsequently consulted Burney, now a convert to the music of Bach, on his project to publish his own corrected transcription, stating, "I believe I can fairly securely affirm that mine is now the most correct copy in England." This project was eventually undertaken in with
Charles Frederick Horn, published in four installments between 1810 and 1813. In June 1808 after a concert the
Hanover Square Rooms during which Weseley performed some excerpts from the '48', he commented that, "this admirable Musick might be
played into Fashion; you see I have only risked one modest Experiment, & it has electrified the Town just in the way that we wanted." Further concerts took place there and in the Surrey Chapel with
Benjamin Jacob, a fellow organist with whom Wesley corresponded copiously an effusively about Bach. The musicologist and organist
William Crotch, another advocate of Bach, lectured on Bach in 1809 in the Hanover Square Rooms prior to publishing his edition of the E major fugue BWV 878/2 from
The Well-Tempered Clavier II. In the introduction, after commenting that Bach fugues were "very difficult of execution, profoundly learned and highly ingenious", he described their "prevailing style" as "the sublime". By 1810, Wesley had stated his intention to perform the E flat fugue BWV 552/2 from
Clavier-Übung III in
St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1812, in the Hanover Square Rooms he performed an arrangement of the E flat prelude for organ duet and orchestra with the arranger
Vincent Novello, founder of the music publishing firm
Novello & Co, that would later bring out an English edition of Bach's complete organ works. In 1827, the E flat fugue had been arranged for organ or piano duet by Jacob and was even performed by three players two years later on the organ in St. James, Bermondsey, where the pedal could be played on a supplementary keyboard. It had also been used for auditions for organists: Wesley's son
Samuel Sebastian Wesley himself played it in 1827, when seeking employment (unsuccessfully). The chorale preludes from
Clavier-Übung III were also performed during this period: in his letters to Benjamin, Wesley mentions in particular
Wir glauben BWV 680, which had become known as the "giant fugue", because of the striding figure in the pedal part. By 1837, pedal technique on the organ had developed sufficiently in England that the composer and organist Elizabeth Stirling (1819–1895) could give concerts in
St Katherine's, Regent's Park and
St. Sepulchre's, Holborn containing several of the pedaliter chorale preludes (BWV 676, 678, 682, 684) as well as the St Anne Prelude BWV 552/1. (These were the first public recitals in England by a female organist; in 1838 she performed BWV 669–670 and the St Anne fugue BWV 552/2 at St Sepulchre's.) In the same year Wesley and his daughter were invited to the organ loft of
Christ Church, Newgate for a Bach recital by
Felix Mendelssohn. As Mendelssohn recorded in his diary, A week later, Mendelssohn played the St Anne prelude and fugue BWV 552 on the organ in Birmingham Town Hall. Prior to the concert, he confided in a letter to his mother: Wesley died the following month. Mendelssohn made a total of 10 visits to Britain, the first in 1829, the last in 1847. His first visit, when he stayed with his friend the pianist and composer
Ignaz Moscheles, had been a resounding success and Mendelssohn had been embraced by all strata of British musical society. On his fourth trip to Britain in 1833 he was accompanied by his father and heard the seventeen-year-old pianist-composer
William Sterndale Bennett performing his first piano concerto. A musical prodigy like Mendelssohn, at the age of 10 Sterndale Bennett had entered the
Royal Academy of Music, where he had been taught by Crotch. He was also an accomplished organist, familiar with the works of Bach. (After brief appointments as organist, he subsequently practised on the organ in Hanover Square Rooms, later surprising his son with his mastery of the harder pedal passages on a pedal-piano.) Mendelssohn immediately invited him to Germany. Reportedly when Sterndale Bennett asked to go as his student, Mendelssohn replied, "No, no, you must come to be my friend." Sterndale Bennett eventually visited Leipzig for 6 months from October 1836 to June 1837. There he made friends with Schumann, who became his soul mate and drinking partner. Sterndale Bennett made only two further trips to Germany during the lifetimes of Mendelssohn and Schumann, in 1838–1839 and 1842, although he retained their friendship and helped arrange Mendelssohn's visits to Britain. He became a firm proponent of Bach, organising concerts of his chamber music in London. He was one of the founders in 1849 of the original
Bach Society in London, devoted to the performance and collection of Bach's works, principally choral. In 1854, he staged the first performance in England of the
St. Matthew Passion in the Hanover Square Rooms. Already in 1829, Mendelssohn had become friends with
Thomas Attwood, who had studied with Mozart and since 1796 had been organist of St Paul's Cathedral. Through Attwood Mendelssohn gained access to the organ at St Paul's, which was suitable for Bach, despite the unusual alignment of the pedalboard. In 1837, however, during a recital at St Paul's, just before playing to Wesley, the air supply to the organ had suddenly been interrupted; in a later account, that he had to retell annoyingly often, Mendelssohn related that George Cooper, the sub-organist, playing the organ in the Old Library in
Buckingham Palace in the presence of
Queen Victoria and
Felix Mendelssohn Cooper's son, also called George, became the next sub-organist at St Paul's. He promoted the organ music of Bach and in 1845 produced the first English edition of the chorale prelude
Wir glauben BWV 680 from
Clavier-Übung III, published by Hollier & Addison, which he dubbed the "Giant Fugue" because of its striding pedal part. In the second half of the 19th century, this became the best-known of all the pedaliter chorale preludes from
Clavier-Übung III and was republished separately several times by Novello in organ anthologies at an intermediate level. Mendelssohn's eighth visit occurred in 1842 after the accession of
Queen Victoria to the throne. Her husband
Prince Albert was a keen organist and, under his influence, the music of Bach started to be performed at royal concerts. On the second of his two invitations to
Buckingham Palace, Mendelssohn improvised on Albert's organ and accompanied the queen in two songs by Fanny and himself. Between these two visits, he once more performed the St Anne prelude and fugue, this time before an audience of 3,000 in
Exeter Hall in a concert organized by the
Sacred Harmonic Society. In London there were few church organs with German pedal boards going down to CC: those which did included
St. Paul's Cathedral,
Christ Church, Newgate and
St. Peter's, Cornhill, where Mendelssohn frequently performed solo recitals. During his last visit in 1847, he once more entertained Victoria and Albert in Buckingham Palace in May before playing a few days later the prelude and fugue on the name of "BACH" BWV 898 on the barely functional organ in Hanover Square Rooms during one of the
Ancient Concerts organized by Prince Albert, with
William Gladstone in the audience. , with organ built by
Henry Willis in 1855 (1826–1897) In the late 1840s and early 1850s, organ building in England became more stable and less experimental, taking stock of traditions in Germany and innovations in France, particularly from the new generation of organ builders such as
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. One of the main names in organ building in England in the second half of the 19th century was
Henry Willis. The manner in which the organ for
St. George's Hall, Liverpool was planned and constructed marks the transition from what Nicholas Thistlethwaite calls the "insular movement" of the 1840s to the adoption of the established German system. Planning formally started on the organ in 1845: the main advisor to
Liverpool Corporation was
Samuel Sebastian Wesley, son of Samuel Wesley and an accomplished organist, particularly of Bach. He worked in consultation with a panel of university professors of music, who often disagreed with his eccentric suggestions. When Wesley tried to argue about the range of manual keyboards, justifying himself by the possibility of playing octaves with the left hand, he was reminded by the professors that the use of octaves was more common among pianists than first-rate organists and moreover that when he had been organist at Leeds Parish Church, "the dust on the half-dozen lowest keys on the GG manuals remained undisturbed for months." Willis was commissioned to build the organ only in 1851, after he had impressed the committee with the organ for
Winchester Cathedral he had on display at
The Crystal Palace during the
Great Exhibition. The completed organ had four manual keyboards and a thirty key pedalboard, with 17 sets of pedal pipes and a range from CC to f. The instrument had unequal temperament and, as Wesley had stipulated, the air supply came from two large underground bellows powered by an eight horse-power steam engine. Among the innovations introduced by Willis were the cylindrical pedal-valve, the pneumatic lever and the
combination action, the latter two features being adopted widely by English organ builders in the second half of the 19th century. The organ was inaugurated in 1855 by
William Thomas Best, who later that year was appointed resident organist, attracting crowds of thousands to hear his playing. In 1867, he had the organ retuned to equal temperament. He remained in his post until 1894, giving performances elsewhere in England, including at the Crystal Palace,
St James's Hall and the
Royal Albert Hall. The St Anne prelude and fugue BWV 552 was used by Best to start off the series of
Popular Monday Concerts at St James's Hall in 1859; and later in 1871 to inaugurate the newly built Willis organ in the Royal Albert Hall, in the presence of Queen Victoria.
France in his studio in 1893, playing his
Cavaillé-Coll organ in a drawing by her future husband
Wilhelm Hensel In France, the Bach revival was slower to take root. Before the late 1840s, after the upheaval caused by the
French Revolution, Bach was rarely performed in public concerts in France and it was preferred that church organists play operatic arias or popular airs instead of counterpoint. One exception was a public performance in the Paris Conservatoire in December 1833, repeated two years later in the Salons Pape, of the opening
allegro of Bach's concerto for three harpsichords BWV 1063, played on pianos by
Chopin,
Liszt and
Hiller.
Berlioz later described their choice as "stupid and ridiculous", unworthy of their talents.
Charles Gounod, having won the
Prix de Rome in 1839, spent three years in the
Villa Medici in
Rome, where he developed a passionate interest in the polyphonic music of Palestrina. He also met Mendelssohn's sister Fanny, herself an accomplished concert pianist and by then married to the artist
Wilhelm Hensel: Gounod described her as "an outstanding musician and a woman of superior intelligence, small, slender, but gifted with an energy which showed in her deep-set eyes and in her burning look". In response Fanny noted in her diary that Gounod was "passionately fond of music in a way I have rarely seen before." She introduced Gounod to the music of Bach, playing from memory fugues, concertos and sonatas for him on the piano. At the end of his stay in 1842, the twenty-five-year-old Gounod had become a confirmed Bach devotee. In 1843, after a seven-month stay in Vienna, with a letter of introduction from Fanny, Gounod spent 4 days with her brother in Leipzig. Mendelssohn played Bach for him on the organ of the Thomaskirche and conducted a performance of his Scottish Symphony by the
Gewandhaus orchestra, specially convened in his honour. Back in Paris, Gounod took up an appointment as organist and music director in the Église des Missions Étrangères on the rue de Bac, on condition that he would be allowed to have autonomy over the music: Bach and Palestrina figured strongly in his repertoire. When churchgoers initially objected to this daily diet of counterpoint, Gounod was confronted by the Abbé, who eventually yielded to Gounod's conditions, although not without commenting "What a terrible man you are!" In the late 1840s and 1850s a new school of organist-composers emerged in France, all trained in the organ works of Bach. These included
Franck,
Saint-Saëns,
Fauré and
Widor. In the aftermath of the
French Revolution, there had already been a revival of interest in France in choral music of the baroque and earlier periods, particularly of Palestrina, Bach and Handel:
Alexandre-Étienne Choron founded the
Institution royale de musique classique et religieuse in 1817. After the
July Revolution and Choron's death in 1834, direction of the institute, renamed the "Conservatoire royal de musique classique de France", was taken over by
Louis Niedermeyer and took his name as the . Along with the
Conservatoire de Paris, it became one of the main training grounds for French organists. The Belgian composer and musicologist
François-Joseph Fétis, a contemporary and colleague of Choron in Paris, shared his interest in early and baroque music.
Fétis exerted a similar influence in
Brussels, where he was appointed director of the
Royal Conservatory of Brussels in 1832, a position he held until his death in 1871. organ in
St. Sulpice, Paris , rebuilt in 1989 in the original case designed by
Victor Baltard At the same time, French organ builders most notably
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll were starting to produce new series of organs, which with their pedalboards, were designed both for the music of Bach as well as modern symphonic compositions. The change in traditions can be traced back to the inauguration in 1844 of the organ for
St Eustache, built by Doublaine and Callinet. The German organ virtuoso
Adolf Friedrich Hesse was invited with five Parisians to demonstrate the new instrument. As part of his recital Hesse played Bach's
Toccata in F major, BWV 540/1, allowing the Parisian audience to hear pedal technique far beyond what was known in France at that time. While impressed by his pedal playing, French commentators at the time gave Hesse mixed praise, one remarking that, while he might be the "king of the pedal ... he thinks of nothing but power and noise, his playing astonishes, but does not speak to the soul. He always seems to be the minister of an angry God who wants to punish." Another commentator, however, who had heard Hesse playing Bach on the organ at an industrial exhibition beforehand, noted that "if the organ of the Doublaine-Callinet firm is perfect from bottom to top, Monsieur Hesse is a complete organist from head to feet." The new organ had a short life: it was destroyed by fire from a falling candle in December 1844. Two Belgian organist-composers, Franck and
Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, participated in the inauguration in 1854 of the new organ at St Eustache. Lemmens had studied with Hesse and Fétis; already in the early 1850s he had started giving public concerts in Paris, featuring Bach's organ music and using the brilliant foot technique he had learnt in Germany. At the same time Lemmens had published 18 installments of an organ manual for the use of "organistes du culte catholique", giving a complete introduction to the Bach tradition of organ playing, henceforth adopted in France. There were further indications of changes in taste in France: Saint-Saëns, organist at the
Madeleine from 1857 to 1877, refused to perform operatic arias as part of the liturgy, on one occasion replying to such a request, "Monsieur l'Abbé, when I hear from the pulpit the language of the Opéra Comique, I will play light music. Not before!" Saint-Saëns was nevertheless reluctant to use Bach's music in services. He regarded the preludes, fugues, toccatas and variations as virtuosic pieces for concert performance; and the chorale preludes as too Protestant in spirit for inclusion in a Catholic mass. The St Anne prelude and fugue was often used by Saint-Saëns for inaugurating Cavaillé-Coll organs; in Paris; he played for the inaugurations at
St Sulpice (1862),
Notre Dame (1868),
Trinité (1869), the chapel in
Versailles (1873) and the
Trocadéro (1878). , built in 1878 The last two decades of the 19th century saw a revival of interest in Bach's organ music in France. There were public concerts on the new Cavaillé-Colle organ in the concert hall or
Salle des Fêtes of the old
Palais du Trocadéro, built for the
third Paris exhibition in 1878. Organized by the organist
Alexandre Guilmant, a pupil of Lemmens, in conjunction with
Eugène Gigout, these started as six free concerts during the exhibition. Attracting huge crowds—the concert hall could seat 5,000 with sometimes an extra 2,000 standing—the concerts continued until the turn of the century. Guilmant programmed primarily the organ music of the two composers whom he referred to as "musical giants", Bach and Handel, still mostly unknown to these mass audiences, as well as the works of older masters such as Buxtehude and Frescobaldi. The St Anne prelude and fugue featured in the concerts, Saint-Saëns playing it in one of the first in 1879 and Guilmant again in 1899, in a special concert to mark the twentieth anniversary of the series. The concerts represented a new
fin de siècle cult of Bach in France. It was not without its detractors: the music critic Camille Bellaigue (1858–1930) described Bach in 1888 as a "first-rate bore": On Widor's recommendation, Guilmant succeeded him as professor of organ in the conservatory in 1896. In 1899, he installed a three manual Cavaillé-Coll organ in his home in
Meudon, where he gave lessons to a wide range of pupils, including a whole generation of organists from the United States. Among his French students were
Nadia Boulanger,
Marcel Dupré and
Georges Jacob. Dupré started lessons with Guilmant at the age of eleven, later becoming his successor at the conservatoire. In two celebrated series of concerts at the conservatoire in 1920 and at the
Palais du Trocadéro the following year, Dupré performed the complete organ works of Bach from memory in 10 concerts: the ninth concert was devoted entirely to the chorale preludes from
Clavier-Übung III. Dupré also taught in
Meudon, having acquired Guilmant's Cavaillé-Coll organ in 1926. The funeral service for Guilmant at his home in 1911, prior to his burial in Paris, included a performance by Jacob of
Aus tiefer Noth BWV 686. ==Historic transcriptions==