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The greatness of Bach has been recognized for more than a century. But in all likelihood no prior age has better appreciated the true nature of his gifts. Musicologists have brought his works into clearer focus by editing his scores and clarifying their historic and esthetic background. Today's performers, heirs to the Baroque revival of recent decades, have a better sense of 18th century style, and instinctively reject the romantic excesses of the past. The advent of the LP has created a vast new audience for Bach, as it has for other composers; but Bach is a special beneficiary because his many intimate, complex compositions generally sound better in the home than in a large concert hall. In 1949, there were 15 Bach albums on the market; today there are more than 500—including 24 rival versions of the complete Brandenburg Concertos, and 12 interpretations of the B-Minor Mass. Says Pianist Rosalyn Tureck, founder of the International Bach Society for specialized study of the composer: "The great fire under all of this is the direct meaning that Bach has for us as contemporary persons. He is a phenomenon of our time."
Never does he seem more so than at Christmas. A devout Lutheran who spent much of his life in the service of the church, Bach wrote more than 1,000 works, according to the definitive Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalogue. Nearly three-quarters of these were intended to be performed at Christian worship—including a Magnificat and 41 Christmas cantatas (plus six more that make up the famed Christmas oratorio). Even in the secularist atmosphere of the 20th century, his music rings with what Toronto Choral Conductor Elmer Iseler calls a positive, "D-major feeling about life." From the evidence of the 1968 holiday season, more and more listeners are trying to get into the same key.
This week West Berlin's Singakade-mie performs the Christmas oratorio with members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra. In London, Composer Benjamin Britten conducts three cantatas for the BBC from St. Andrew's Church in Holborn. In Manhattan, Violinist and Conductor Alexander Schneider completes a two-concert series of cantatas and concertos at Carnegie Hall. And in New York, as in other major capitals, the coming weeks will see a performance of Bach's undoubted masterpiece, the B-Minor Mass—a work that he began as a tribute to the Catholic King of Poland, but which in its final form did not fit either the Catholic or the Lutheran liturgy. In English-speaking countries, the wide-ranging appeal of such performances threatens even Handel's oratorio Messiah as a holiday staple. "If you want a full house now," says the London Times Critic William Mann, "you put on Bach's St. Matthew Passion."
Perhaps more significant than such major concerts by well-known artists are the thousands of more modest Bach performances, ranging down to the smallest towns and the merest amateur level. Here Bach is pervasive. Following the pattern set by the present-day chorus at Bach's own St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, church and community choirs throughout the Western world are marking Christmas by singing something of Bach's, even if only a two-minute chorale. And what church organist will let Christmas—or any other week—go by without playing at least one Bach prelude or perhaps an entire recital?