Johanna Carolina Bach was baptised on 30 October 1737 in the midst of a severe professional crisis for her father. It all started on 14 May 1737 when the German-Danish composer, theorist and critic of music Johann Adolf Scheibe published his aesthetic disagreement with Bach’s musical style.
Johann Adolf Scheibe
He writes, “Bach is really the most distinguished among the musicians. He is an extraordinary performer, both on the clavier and on the organ… This great man would be the wonder of all nations if he had a more pleasing style, and if he did not spoil his compositions by bombast and intricacies, and by excess of art hiding their beauty… Bombast has drawn both away from the natural in art, from the sublime to the obscure. The heavy labor is admired, yet the exceptional trouble taken, being contrary to reason, profits nothing.” Bach was clearly incensed and urged his friend Johann Abraham Birnbaum, professor of rhetoric at the University of Leipzig, to reply.
Johann Sebastian Bach: O Jesu Christ, BWV 118
Birnbaum’s article was printed in January 1738, and Bach distributed the writing among his friends and acquaintances. This, in turn, prompted a further Scheibe article on the topic. He stated that Bach had no awareness of the differentiations of style and the proprieties of taste, and that “he is so entirely preoccupied with music and so unfamiliar with the intellectual currents of the time that he has to employ the services of Birnbaum to make his point.”
Elias Gottlob Haussmann: J.S. Bach, 2nd version, 1746 (Bach-Archiv Leipzig)
Clearly, Scheibe disagreed with Bach on how music should function in society. Given that he was a former student of Bach, Scheibe’s criticism might well have been derived from this experience of the composer’s personality as from the music itself. Be that as it may, the whole affair developed into a public controversy and smoldered for several more years with various other writers getting in the act. In the end, Scheibe wrote a conciliatory review of the Italian Concerto in 1745, prefaced by a defacto apology, “I did this great man an injustice.”
For more of the best in classical music, sign up for our E-Newsletter
