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A single worldly triumph crowned Bach's old age. King Frederick the Great of Prussia, a gifted amateur musician, invited him to the court at Potsdam. When he arrived, Frederick immediately dismissed his minions, exclaiming: "Old Bach is here!" The two then spent an evening together, and Bach delighted Frederick by improvising a fugue on one of Frederick's themes. After returning home, Bach wrote an extensive chamber cycle on the same theme and sent it to Frederick with the title Musical Offering. Soon after this, Bach's overworked eyes as well as his rugged constitution began to fail. Two operations on his eyes only weakened him further. Finally, at 65, just before dying, he lay in bed, totally blind, and dictated his last composition: the chorale Before Thy Throne I Stand.
Veneration and Desecration
Bach was the last great voice of the polyphonic style that had lasted since the early 17th century. The very forms he favored—fugue, church cantata, motet—were outmoded as he used them, and he knew it. "My art," he said, "has become old-fashioned."
The new trend in music moved away from virile counterpoint toward softer melody and simple accompaniment, from rich harmonic modulations toward more basic cadences, and from daring elaboration toward the cultivation of controlled elegance. Bach's composer sons—notably Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian and Wilhelm Friedemann —were all attracted to this style. After his death, Bach was mourned as a fine organist and teacher, but for 70 years his reputation as a composer was kept alive only by a few enthusiasts and composers, notably Mozart and Beethoven.
In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn, then 20, conducted a Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Although severely cut and subjected to a much doctored orchestration, the music awoke the public to Bach. Thereafter, the 19th century treated him with a mixture of veneration and desecration. His choral works were frequently performed, but with muddy-sounding 1,000-voice choirs and thick, brass-bottomed orchestras. His original scores were collected over a period of 50 years for the definitive 60-volume Bach-Gesellschaft edition of his works, completed in 1900 (a new, even more complete edition is now under way). But they contained few indications of tempo, dynamics or phrasing, so many publishers continued to issue altered, expanded and "improved" editions. Gounod thought nothing of using the C Major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier as a mere accompaniment to his saccharine melody for Ave Maria.
The beginning of the modern outlook came in 1905, with the publication of Albert Schweitzer's two-volume musicological study J. S. Bach. Besides illuminating the context of Bach's works and propounding a more scrupulous performing style, Schweitzer showed that many seeming peculiarities in Bach came from his "pictorial" method of wedding music to text: a wiggling melody when a line refers to a Biblical serpent, an upward line when mists rise, and so on.