Musical Composers and Their Works; For the Use of Schools and Students in Music

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1875 Excerpt: ... CHAPTEB H. Bach, 1685--1750; Handel, 1685--1759; Gluck, 17H--1787; Haydn, 1732--1809. TX7ITH Sebastian Bach we have the beginning of the great cycle of musical composers in whom, according to some authorities, art vindicated her immortality by replacing the great painters, just as the painters succeeded the great architects of the Middle Ages. Sebastian Bach came of not merely a family, but of a race of musicians--a race, too, that more than any other race demonstrates the degree to which music is hereditary in Germany. The Bachs, in Sebastian's day, dated their origin and musical proclivities fully a century and a half back to a Hungarian Bach, who was at once musical and polemical, and who in his quiet calling of a miller and baker was so affected by the religious discords of the time, that he quitted Presburg, and repaired to a village of Saxe-Gotha, where he ground wheat and compounded loaves for his livelihood, and sang to the guitar for his delectation. His sons had musical talents, and his grandsons became musicians in toto; from these sons, living about 1625, down to the grandsons of Sebastian Bach, living in 1760, not a single Bach of the race followed any calling save that of music, and the race was so numerous that there was hardly a town in THE BACHS. 15 Thuringia, Saxony, -or Franconia which had not a Bach for an organist or music teacher. These Bachs had an annual gathering at Eisenach, Erfurt, or Anstadt, where a hundred and fifty kinsmen would meet, and compare notes on the musicians' progress. They preserved their compositions in a collection named solemnly, The Archives of the Bachs, which passed into the hands of Sebastian's second son, Emmanuel, and which is yet preserved in Berlin. The Bachs, still true to the spirit of their common...