251.—DELAYED APPRECIATION.
At a recent auction sale of autographs and original manuscripts in Berlin, the sixteen-page score of a cantata by J. S. Bach sold for £80, and two others by the same composer for £70 and £65, respectively. For the three manuscripts £215! During his lifetime Bach hardly received so much for all the compositions he disposed of. In fact many were never printed at all.
So slight was the recognition given him that the publishers would issue but few of his works. In order to save some of them from oblivion, Bach engraved them with his own hands, and the extra strain this made on his eyes caused him to lose his sight. His "Art of Fugue," which appeared two years after his death, i.e., in 1752, though having a flattering preface from Marpurg, then the foremost critic of Germany, did not meet with sufficient sale to cover the cost of the plates on which the music was engraved; and as there seemed to be no chance of more income from the work, the plates were sold by his heirs for old copper.
Posterity is atoning for this neglect of genius. The Bach Society is issuing in large handsome volumes all of his works. He is now regarded as the fountain head of instrumental music. To have the firmest foundation, a musical education must be based on the study of his compositions.
This revival of interest, or, rather, creation of interest in Bach, must be largely accredited to Mendelssohn, who admitted that his own fluency and versatility m composition, especially in contrapuntal forms, had much of its origin in a careful study of the scores of the old Leipzig cantor. Mendelssohn was also very prominent in bringing the music of Bach before the public of his day, and securing for it its proper recognition by the musical world.
Bach was a very religious man, and is doubtless enjoying the reward of a well-spent life. But while the recognition of to-day cannot save him the poverty and trials of his years of painstaking composition, who can say that it may not even now afford him pleasure to know that the century succeeding the one in which he lived has awarded him the olive wreath which was then withheld.