Interpreting Bach in Romanticism – the rediscovery of Johann Sebastian Bach's music in the 19th century
- Théo Amon
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
After his death in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach's music fell into relative obscurity, being revived in the 19th century by names such as Mendelssohn, Liszt, Busoni and other giants of Romanticism.
This is the second text in our series dedicated to the "historically informed" performance of Bach's music. The series was written by Théo Amon, a translator and literary critic passionate about classical music, at the request of the Bach Society Brazil. Read more articles. Get notified by email about upcoming articles
Summary
After his death in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach ’s music fell into relative obscurity, seen as outdated in the face of new trends in classicism and romanticism. It was only in the mid-19th century that Bach was rediscovered and elevated to the status of a timeless genius, a pillar of Western music. However, this rediscovery was accompanied by a profound transformation: his music began to be interpreted according to romantic values, with modernized instruments, expanded orchestrations, and an expressive approach that had little to do with baroque aesthetics. In this post, we will examine how Mendelssohn , Liszt , Busoni , and other giants of romanticism shaped our perception of Bach.
19th century: change in audience and instruments
Between Bach's time and our own was the thriving 19th century, proud of its technological achievements and with completely different expectations regarding musical performance. In the meantime, for example, the public concert had already been invented , to which one had to pay a ticket—quite different from the soirees of the Baroque aristocracy, reserved for a lucky few. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, the increasing secularization of public life transferred much of the musical activity from churches to “profane buildings,” such as opera houses and theaters.
With the enormous multiplication of the listening public (and consumers, since in the meantime music had also become a commodity, with the sale of printed scores, mass-produced instruments, paid tickets and fees), the physical space where music was made had to expand. This also had intrinsically musical reasons, as well as social ones: the increasingly complex and saturated harmony required larger and more varied ensembles and orchestras.
As a consequence, the preference for more homogeneous sound masses within each section of instruments (violins, violas, cellos, double basses, horns and many others) also required more accurate accuracy and reproducibility in the manufacture of instruments, which had been causing strong changes in their structure since at least the middle of the 18th century.
In fact, it was there that our familiar piano, or, in fact, its grandfather, the fortepiano, supplanted the harpsichord as the main keyboard instrument (listen here to a piece by Mozart performed by Fernando Cordella on a fortepiano).
Reforms in instruments
One of the harmful, almost catastrophic, effects of this was a huge wave of instrument refurbishments. Extremely invasive operations were carried out on countless high-quality instruments to give them more volume, projection, timbre homogeneity , extra strings/keys, supporting accessories and much more.
The few 17th and 18th century instruments that have remained intact are those that were already safely stored in a museum or collection, without being actively used. Even church organs, those lead monsters, had their pipes, registers and other things turned inside out. Fortunately, there were some that survived unscathed or that were magnificently restored (listen below to a beautiful Bach chorale prelude played by Gustav Leonhardt on the baroque Hagerbeer-Schnitger organ in the Church of St. Lawrence in Alkmaar, Holland — an instrument that was started in 1639!).
The (temporary) death of the baroque
And it wasn’t just the material arsenal of music that changed a lot in the meantime. Musical evolution never stops, and soon after his death (or even during the twilight of his life), Bach’s musical language was considered very old-fashioned . The mid-18th century had already turned its back on the strict forms of the High Baroque, with its emphasis on counterpoint, intricate structures, rhetorical gestures, rich chromatic harmony, works with a large number of movements, etc. Now, a more slender and flexible style was preferred, with fewer emotional pretensions and a very strong emphasis on elegance, unpretentiousness, clarity of contours, self-explanatory structures, fewer architectural units and even a certain irony of expression. All these traits suited the Age of Enlightenment, the Enlightenment, which set itself the mission of once and for all dispelling the still “medieval” obscurity of what had come before. Thus, the Rococo and Classicism trends ended up throwing a symbolic “spade of lime” on Baroque music, whose compositional complexity and immense emotional range only returned to the surface in brief spasms.
To give the reader an example of two of these “ returns of baroque ” during the 18th century: the aesthetics of “ sensibility ” ( Empfindsamkeit ) had as one of its greatest figures a son of whom? Bach, of course — listen below to a movement from a symphony by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788).
The “ storm and rush ” ( Sturm und Drang ), which was a kind of gloomy pre-romanticism of the 1770s, seduced even such solar personalities as Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) — listen below to his Symphony No. 45 , nicknamed the Farewell Symphony , also on period instruments.
But to return: the result of all this was that, until late in the 19th century, Bach was “household” music : apprentice pianists studied preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier , perhaps yawning; aspiring composers took arduous lessons in counterpoint by analyzing or rearranging Bachian fugues; but Bach was definitely music of the past.
In fact, as early as the late 1700s, anyone who said simply “Bach” was probably referring to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , and not to his father, our Johann Sebastian! He had come to be regarded more with veneration than with true admiration: he had become that emblematic but distant figure who is called a “tutelary figure”, almost a patron saint.
The Bach revival
But the Bach revival was not long in coming, and it was at the hands of a wonderful composer: Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). In 1829, he conducted a spectacular production of the St. Matthew Passion , almost 80 years after Bach's death. It was the beginning of a gradual but cumulative rapprochement with the music of "Bach the Elder", which spread from the sacred music sector to all areas of his production that had been cruelly neglected. This included the great music for the Clavier (a word from Bach's time that indistinctly encompassed several keyboard instruments of his time), now played on the piano itself; the solo pieces for violin, cello, flute and lute; all of Bach's wonderful chamber music output; the works for organ; the orchestral suites and the concertos.
By the end of the 19th century, Bach's position in the musical canon and in the active repertoire was already an indisputable reality. The great pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow (1830-1894) even spoke of a holy trinity of the “three Bs”: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms , combining baroque, classicism and romanticism in a grand line, without any break in continuity (which also brought its problems, as we will see in the next post). In addition to him, great sacred monsters of musical performance, such as Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni , Joseph Joachim , Pablo Casals , Wanda Landowska , Edwin Fischer , George Enescu , Yehudi Menuhin , Andrés Segovia and many others, as varied as those mentioned, passed the torch on. This new interpretative tradition ensured a safe transition from the fame and appreciation of 19th-century Bachian music, which did both good and bad for musical practices and philosophy, to the more open-minded 20th century.
Especially from the 1950s onwards, a huge range of academic studies, commercial recordings, new aesthetic approaches and even the incorporation of classical music into mass culture opened up (who has never heard an excerpt from a Bach cantata in a TV commercial?), resulting in a truly worldwide appreciation for our composer's music.
Conclusion: Towards historically informed performance
The 19th century rescued Bach from oblivion, but it did so in its own way. Romanticism adapted Bach’s music for large theaters, monumental orchestras, and robust pianos, often moving away from the original sonority of his works. This process, while ensuring the immortality of his music, also created an image of Bach that was, in many ways, a Romantic invention. But in the 20th century, a movement sought to reverse this trend and rescue the authenticity of the Baroque sound: the movement of historically informed performance, which we will discuss in the next post .
Théo Amon Translator , researcher and literary critic. PhD in Literature from UFRGS
Contact the author here .
Read the other posts in the "Interpreting Bach" series:
Interpreting Bach in the Baroque
Interpreting Bach in Romanticism
Interpreting Bach Today (premieres May 10)
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