On March 21st, 1685, a unique voice was brought into the small world of Eisenach, Germany. Offspring of a humble, yet musical family, his life of travel and fame as an organ virtuoso could hardly have been predicted from so inauspicious birth. Made an orphan at the age of ten, a long series of church and court appointments made for a rather mundane biography: he was born, he lived, he worked, he married, he fathered, he died…hardly the stuff of which legends are made.
Why then, do most educated people recognize the name of J.S. Bach? The answer is once again mundane, yet with a slight twist: he wrote music because he was paid to do so, and his works have come to represent some of the most ethereal, soul-wrenching, intellectually challenging and supremely enjoyable oeuvres in all the western canon of music. His art, described in the Oxford Dictionary of Music as “allied to a tireless industry in the pursuit of every kind of refinement of his skill and technique,” is still the subject of wonderment to the layman listener and doctoral credibility to the professional. Why should one man have so universal an appeal? To borrow a phrase from the vernacular, there is “something in it for everyone.”
There exists the mind-numbing emotional content of the Crucifixus section of the B-minor mass, as well as the unbelievably perfect symmetry employed in the ‘Wedge’ fugue. There is the dour portrait of the composer in full court dress with formal wig as well as the pastoral perfection of ‘Sheep and lambs may safely graze.” He is at once a towering figure of music, and a conundrum in historical perspectives: condemned by his contemporary musical contributors as hopelessly grounded in the past, modern listeners recognize the brilliance of his musical duplicity- to steal and invert from Carl Nielsen, Bach’s music is indeed “new wine poured into old bottles.”
This complicated man, the ne plus ultra of contrapuntalists, brought a clarity and consciousness to the sprawling forms of renaissance music; it is not an insignificant matter that the year of his death, 1750, is considered by many to be the defining moment of the transition between the Baroque and Classical eras of music. While his historical significance and rightful place in the pantheon of musical genius seems to be relatively assured in the long run, his stature continually falls victim to the ebbs and flows of musical taste. One cannot but wonder why…
The answer lies in the timetables of history themselves: for more than 300 years his music has survived the ebbs and flows of ‘tasteful’ disposition, garnering continued accolades from the devoted, surviving the slings and arrows of hopeful PhD. candidates, and rising above the mindless eructation of countless media-friendly, pre-packaged industry creatures. It is my firm hope that those of us who recognize him as a special talent among many will effectively communicate his legacy to the future generations: the survival of music is due both to the importance placed on it by its progenitors and the value attached to it by its inheritors. Mr. Bach’s corporeal form has left us, alas; the music survives. It is the closest thing to the eternal we will ever experience; he is not the sole, dusty province of musical historians- he is the gift to humanity that continues to provide an undeniable thrust into the face of the beyond: humankind has existed and it produced perfection.
The Unrepentant Elitist 
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