Handel and Bach

Extract

This year, on whose threshold we are now standing, is a notable date in musical history, notable by reflection of the past, and let us hope notable in the manner in which that past will be commemorated It is 200 years since Handel and Bach were born. The Greeks, Egyptians, and Chaldeans insisted on the relationship supposed to exist between music and astronomy. They counted the seven planets as representative of the seven notes. Fiction lies at the root of this supposition, since then the earth was regarded as the centre, and the sun as one of the planets revolving round it. But supposing the idea to be metaphorical, it may give license to another figure of the same kind. I will suppose these great men who have been named to be double stars, influencing a planetary system that yielded, on the principle of gravitation, to their attraction and repulsion. The planets which surround those double stars are the men whose works they studied, or they rivalled, or surpassed. George Boehm, an organist and composer for the organ, was resident in the town of Luneberg where the youthful Bach spent three years. Buxtehude, the Dane, who for long resided in Lubeck, was visited by Handel and by Bach. Fuchs lived through their time, and his “Gradus ad Parnassum” was the authority for counterpoint throughout Germany for an entire century.