Bach's Legacy

This book examines how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Edward Elgar—engaged with the legacy of the music of J. S. Bach. It investigates the various ways in which these individuals responded to Bach’s oeuvre, not as composers per se, but as performers, conductors, scholars, critics, and all-around ambassadors. In its detailed analyses of both musical and epistolary sources, the book sheds light on how Bach’s works were received within the musical circles of these composers. The book’s narrative also helps humanize these individuals as it reconstructs, with touching immediacy, and often by recounting colorful anecdotes, the intimate social circumstances in which Bach’s music was performed and discussed. Special emphasis is given to Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s reception of Bach’s organ works, Schumann’s encounter with the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Wagner’s musings on the Well-Tempered Clavier, and Elgar’s (resoundingly negative) thoughts on Bach’s vocal works.