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Following Schweitzer, Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, Cellist Pablo Casals and Guitarist Andres Segovia joined in a virtual crusade to give Bach's music greater authenticity—and a wider hearing. By contemporary standards, their playing was still impure; Casals always said he interpreted Bach "like any other composer, like Chopin, like Brahms." Their glorious music gave vital impetus to the more scholarly researchers and performers who have succeeded them.
"We are closer to the true Bach today than at any other time since his death," says German Musicologist Friedrich Smend. He may be right, but it all depends on who is meant by "we." The back-to-Bach purists, capitalizing on rediscoveries of Baroque instrumental design and technique, have laudably stressed pared-down choruses and orchestras, lively rhythm and clean, linear texture. They prefer Bach played with recorders rather than flutes, harpsichords rather than pianos, modest 18th century-style organs rather than the ear-boggling supermachines favored by César Franck. Occasionally, the purists have gone too far. One famous incident in music circles concerns an embellishment that an eminent harpsichordist had been playing for years; it turned out to be an ink blot on the score.
The popularizers, on the other hand, claim to be close to what Bach's intentions would be if he were alive today and could avail himself of modern musical resources. They argue, with some justice, that Bach himself was an inveterate transcriber, of both his own works and others'. And they point out that he did not specify the instrumentation for many of his scores—The Art of Fugue is completely abstract in that sense, and the pieces that he wrote for "clavier" could be for any keyboard instrument. Yet the popularizers, too, have sometimes gone too far. In concert halls and in Walt Disney's 1940 film Fantasia, millions of Americans were introduced to Bach through Conductor Leopold Stokowski's lush symphonic transcriptions of the organ preludes and toccatas. The only trouble with them was that they presented Bach draped in the purple robes of Wagner.
Some of the best Bach performances in the world now come from musicians who combine the purists' expertise with an intensely personal and contemporary style—Pianists Tureck and Gould, for example, or Conductor Richter. "All attempts at the 'authentic' derive from a certain snobbishness," says Richter. "This doesn't mean that one shouldn't use approximately the kind of orchestra and instruments that Bach prescribed. But as a whole, properly performed, Bach always will stay right in the spirit of the present." Richter measures his own success by the fact that romantics accuse him of being a purist and purists dismiss him as a romantic.
The argument rages on, and probably always will. It is one more aspect of the limitless fascination Bach exerts. "In the 21st century, there will be other music, other attitudes toward music, and Bach is still going to be there," says Rosalyn Tureck. "He will be influential and meaningful even when he's played on unimaginable instruments and in combinations of sounds beyond the whole electronic movement."