Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The historical context: society, beliefs and world-view
- Part II Profiles of the music
- 6 The early works and the heritage of the seventeenth century
- 7 The mature vocal works and their theological and liturgical context
- 8 The instrumental music
- 9 The keyboard works: Bach as teacher and virtuoso
- 10 Composition as arrangement and adaptation
- 11 Bachian invention and its mechanisms
- Part III Influence and reception
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- General Index
- Index of works
6 - The early works and the heritage of the seventeenth century
from Part II - Profiles of the music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The historical context: society, beliefs and world-view
- Part II Profiles of the music
- 6 The early works and the heritage of the seventeenth century
- 7 The mature vocal works and their theological and liturgical context
- 8 The instrumental music
- 9 The keyboard works: Bach as teacher and virtuoso
- 10 Composition as arrangement and adaptation
- 11 Bachian invention and its mechanisms
- Part III Influence and reception
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- General Index
- Index of works
Summary
Johann Sebastian Bach's earliest compositions have long occupied an ambiguous position within his oeuvre. On the one hand, many musicians and scholars have compared them unfavourably with the masterpieces of his later years. As early as 1802 Johann Nicolaus Forkel wrote that, despite ‘undeniable evidences of a distinguished genius’, at the same time Bach's early works contain ‘so much that is useless, so much that is one-sided, extravagant, and tasteless that they are not worth preserving (at least, for the public in general)'. Nearly 200 years later, Malcolm Boyd has stated his opinion that ‘few, if any, of the works [Bach] wrote before leaving Mühlhausen at the age of twenty-three would be remembered to-day if they had been composed by anyone else’. On the other hand, even if Bach's earliest efforts do sometimes disappoint, they nonetheless possess a certain inherent interest because of what he subsequently accomplished, and they have therefore spawned a large body of research. As Peter Williams has eloquently put it, ‘the stages by which the world's most gifted step beyond the confines of local art must always be of great interest and importance’.
The early works have not yielded their secrets willingly, however. On the contrary, although several discoveries have greatly increased what is known about them, many fundamental questions remain unresolved. For this reason, the present chapter must be regarded as a report of an on-going discussion. There has not even been general agreement about what constitutes Bach's ‘early’ period. Although Alfred Dürr included the Weimar works (1714-16) in his monograph on Bach's 'early' cantatas, Christoph Wolff subsequently advocated limiting this classification to the instrumental and vocal works composed up to c. 1708, when Bach began his tenure as court organist in Weimar and simultaneously' left behind the truly formative stages [of composition] and established his own stylistic personality'.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Bach , pp. 73 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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