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Words
About Bach
| Perfectly
constructed and unique in sound, Bach's compositions offer
the ideal of bringing into congruence original thought,
technical exactitude, and aesthetic beauty. Whatever the
category of music... Bach's works demonstrate the musical
realization of unity in diversity, of musical perfection. |
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Christoph
Wolff,
Bach biographer, 2000
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| A
total performance of the Well-Tempered Clavier
… has some of the characteristics, at once revealing and
disquieting, rich and provocative, rewarding and overwhelming,
of a condensation into a single day of an eternity of
experience. |
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Ralph
Kirkpatrick,
Interpreting Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, 1984
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| Many
a Sunday I began at one o'clock to play at Chopin's, and
only at four or five in the afternoon did he dismiss us.
Then he also played, and how splendidly; but not only
his own compositions, also those of other masters, in
order to teach the pupil how they should be performed.
One morning he played from memory fourteen Preludes and
Fugues of Bach's [from the Well-Tempered Clavier], and
when I expressed my joyful admiration at this unparalleled
performance, he replied: 'Something like this one never
forgets.' |
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Friederike
Streicher,
student of Chopin from 1839 - 1841
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| It
is owing to this genuine spirit of art that Bach united
his great and lofty style with the most refined elegance
and the greatest precision in the single parts that compose
the great whole, which otherwise are not thought so necessary
here as in works whose only object is the agreeable; that
he thought the whole could not be perfect if anything
were wanting in the perfect precision of the single parts;
and, last, that if, notwithstanding the main tendency
of his genius for the great and sublime, he sometimes
composed and performed something gay and even jocose,
his cheerfulness and joking were those of a sage. It is
only through this union of the greatest genius with the
most indefatigable study that Johann Sebastian Bach was
able, whichever way he turned, to extend so greatly the
bounds of his art that his successors have not even been
able to maintain this enlarged domain to its full extent;
and this alone enabled him to produce such numerous and
perfect works, all of which are, and ever will remain,
true ideals and imperishable models of art. |
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Johann
Nicolaus Forkel,
Bach biographer, 1802
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| In
1789, when Mozart traveled from Vienna to Leipzig … he
visited the St. Thomas School [where Bach had worked for
27 years] ... the choir surprised Mozart with a performance
of the double chorus motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues
Leid by Sebastian Bach. Mozart knew this master more
by hearsay than by his works, which had become quite rare;
at least his motets, which had never been printed, were
completely unknown to him. Hardly had the choir sung a
few measures when Mozart sat up, startled; a few measures
more and he called out "What is this?" And now his whole
soul seemed to be in his ears. When the singing was finished
he cried out, full of joy: "Now there is something one
can learn from!" |
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From
The New Bach Reader
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| Forkel
reports that when Bach was "asked how he had contrived
to master the art to such a high degree, he generally
answered: 'I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is
equally industrious will succeed equally well.' He seemed
not to lay any stress on his greater natural talents." |
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