The Steward of Unmeaning Art

Two principal themes are engaged in this chapter: the recent history of Bach reception in which the composer’s autonomy is drastically reconfigured, and the nature of Bach’s pursuit of the musical subject as a primary signature of that autonomy nevertheless. The first of these themes, which takes its cue from Charles Burney’s reading of Bach in 1789, entails a reading of Susan McClary, Lydia Goehr, Richard Taruskin, and John Butt, in which Bach is (respectively) deconstructed in terms of contemporary political discourse, denied the autonomy of a work-based practice, construed as a dogmatic agent of anti-Enlightenment beliefs and identified as the fountainhead of an ultimately inhumane musical and cultural absolutism, and reconstructed as a composer of works that passionately mediate between his world and ours. This reading establishes a context for the second theme, in which Bach’s emancipation of the musical subject from “the very church composer against whose office his music rebelled” (Adorno) is identified by means of his late instrumental collections.