A Composer for All Seasons (But Especially for Christmas)

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Even the creators of new music that points firmly away from Bach cannot escape him. He is too deeply embedded in the curriculum of music conservatories, and he towers too imposingly as an unrivaled craftsman. Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, 35, acknowledges the continuity between Bach and his own St. Luke Passion (1966) by spelling out the master's name in a recurring cantus firmus: B flat, A, C, H (the German notation for B natural). Used by Bach himself in The Art of Fugue, the motif is a traditional tribute that has been paid by composers as diverse as Schumann, Liszt and Webern.

Perpetual Presence

The eternal mystery is that an artist who seemed to his contemporaries so backward-looking should seem to his successors so forward-looking. Compared with Monteverdi or Beethoven or Schoenberg, he was not an innovator. Historically Bach's distinction was to summarize and culminate all the musical developments that led up to him. But he did this with such subtlety and daring, such piety and passion, that he ended up reconciling, completing and extending everything he touched, thereby preparing music for the centuries ahead. It has been said that the history of philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. It might just as easily be argued that the history of music since the 18th century has consisted of a series of variations on Bach. Without knowing it, he divided music history into two basic periods: pre-Bach and post-Bach. The difference between the two is that in the post-Bach era, he is a perpetual presence.

For proof, music lovers have only to look around them and listen this Christmas—in churches and concert halls, on campuses and in record stores, in homes and on the streets. Then they, too, can say with Frederick the Great: "Old Bach is here."