'Choral Symphony,' 'The Magic Flute,' and • The Tempest' have their being.

Shakespeare and Bach appear to have been satisfied with the existence of their works as matter for performance, and to have taken no care to secure for them the perpetuity of print. When Shakespeare died sixteen of his plays had been printed, but not, apparently, with his consent or co-operation. The rest remained in some manuscript form at the theatres, and were published by the piety of friends in the Folio of 1623. No attempt was made to separate the work of other men from Shakespeare's own, or even to indicate mixed authorship; and to-day we have no certainty that all of Shakespeare's work is included in the collection called by his name, and considerable certainty that some of the work included is not his. The new taste imported from France in the 17th century made Shakespeare seem archaic or uncouth, and though he was never forgotten, he became old-fashioned and increasingly difficult to read. For stage use it was found necessary to re-write or adapt him, and it was in mangled versions that the contemporaries of Davenant and Dryden knew his plays. Not till the edition of Rowe appeared in 1709 did Shakespeare begin to pass regularly into the intellectual life of later generations, and even then he was presented with editorial conjectures, well-meant and even necessary, but nevertheless departures from the old texts. On the stage the adapter still held sway. Cibber and Tate altered Shakespeare to the taste of the 18th century, and actors like Charles Kean and Henry Irving presented to the 19th such selections from certain plays as appeared compatible with their ideas of a successful entertainment. In the ordinary way, no one ever attempted to put on the stage a plain unaltered version of any play by the man who received general lip-homage as our greatest poet and dramatist.

How did Bach fare? He died in 1750 and was speedily forgotten by all but a few. He had trodden the earth unguessed-at even by the sons he had laboriously trained. Three of them, William Friedemann, Charles Philip Emmanuel, and John Christian, became considerable musicians, but they were less concerned for their father's fame than for their own. The last, the

old man's Benjamin, became in later years a feature of London musical life, but he troubled little about his father, and always referred to him as 'the old perruque.' When Burney visited Germany in 1772 it was Emmanuel, not Sebastian, who was then the great Bach. The 18th century wanted a Dryden in music, and found him in Handel, a great but lesser musician, whose works had more obvious qualities of popularity than Bach's. In Germany the worship of Handel ran a normal course; in England it became a grave musical calamity. The extent to which Handel mania could paralyse the English musical intelligence can be seen in the author of Erewhon,' who may be called the last of the Handelians.

But the music of Handel was at least available; the music of Bach was not. Very few of his compositions had been printed, the bulk of them being still in manuscript, and liable to the gradual attrition that is the universal lot of such music. Thus, the Necrology, confirmed by Forkel, declares that Bach wrote five complete cycles of cantatas for the ecclesiastical year. As the cycle numbered fifty-nine, there should be nearly three hundred compositions. We actually possess a hundred and ninety. One great organ work survives only in a copy made by a pupil; another was recovered from the hands of a shopkeeper. That we have so much is almost a miracle. Bach, like Shakespeare, left no instructions about his manuscripts, and those in his possession were shared by Friedemann and Emmanuel, who lent them for a fee to those desirous of studying or performing them. Friedemann, an able but dissolute person, soon disposed of his share, and what remained at St Thomas's

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The only works of Bach engraved in his lifetime were these: Clavierübung,' in four parts, 1731, 1735, 1739, 1742, containing the Par titas, the Italian Concerto, the Goldberg Variations, and some Chorale Preludes for organ; 'Six Choral Melodies for Organ,' about 1748; 'Canonic Variations on a Christmas Hymn for Organ,' about 1746; A Musical Offering,' 1747, a set of pieces engraved for presentation to Frederick the Great, who had set Bach the subject here variously treated; The Art of Fugue,' an elaborate set of fugal variations, the engraving of which was begun in 1749, but not completed till after the composer's death. The parts of one Cantata had been published by the Mülhausen Town Council in 1708, and one Partita had been engraved in 1726. Thus, of Shakespeare's work nearly half had been printed before his death; of Bach's about & twentieth !

may or may not have been carefully preserved, for J. A. Hiller, who became Cantor in 1789, endeavoured (according to Zelter) to fill the Thomaner boys with horror at the crudities of Bach,' and may therefore have viewed the pile of Cantatas without special kindness. Barely one of the works we associate with the name of Bach was in print. The Well-tempered Clavichord,' the great organ compositions, the concertos, the Passions, the Mass, were all unprinted, and apparently dead for ever. But slowly the work of revival went on, and we should hold in special honour the names of the first pioneers, Forkel, Rochlitz, and Zelter, the last of whom builded better than he knew when he fired the old Goethe and the young Mendelssohn with his enthusiasm. Perhaps the crucial date in the history of the Bach revival is 1829, when, exactly a hundred years after its birth, the Matthew Passion' was performed at Leipzig under the direction of Mendelssohn, who, with Edward Devrient,

had

wrung a growling consent from old Zelter, the owner of the manuscript, which he had bought at the price of waste paper. The impression made by the work was tremendous, the hushed silence, as Fanny Mendelssohn tells us, being broken only by the ejaculations of people under the stress of deep emotion. Two other performances rapidly followed, and thus, by strange but not inappropriate irony, a Jew and an actor gave back to Christendom for ever the one imperishable setting of its central tragedy.

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The John Passion' was performed at Berlin in 1823, and part of the Mass in the following year. In 1835 the people of Berlin were privileged to hear what Bach himself had never heard, a performance of the 'B minor Mass' as a whole-though, of course, serious cuts were made, as in the Passion at Leipzig. The 'Christmas Ora▪torio' (really a series of six cantatas) was not performed until 1858. After several publishers had made attempts to bring out editions of certain works, the Bach-Gesellschaft was formed in 1850, a hundred years after the master's death, for the purpose of producing a complete edition. The first volume appeared in 1851, the sixtieth and last in 1900. Much revision still remains to be done, for in the corpus of Bach, as of Shakespeare, there are works of questionable authenticity. Like Shakespeare,

too, Bach has suffered from his friends. Editorial performing directions have been scattered as freely over the text of Bach as editorial stage directions have been scattered over the text of Shakespeare. Even the faithful Forkel and Zelter felt bound to re-write Bach as Dryden and Davenant, or Tate and Cibber, had felt bound to re-write Shakespeare; and, to complete the parallel, as the star actor adapted Shakespeare for the better exhibition of his own magnificence, so Liszt and Bülow adapted Bach for virtuoso display at the piano. It is quite remark- as able that, in the present generation, the real Bach and Shakespeare have seemed to come back together, for the one is as generally popular at the Queen's Hall as the other at the 'Old Vic.'

How rapidly things have changed may be seen from such a book as Schweitzer's, a monumental tribute to the great musician, though written as if Bach's English predecessors from Byrd to Purcell had never lived, and as if the considerable part played in the later Bach revival by Englishmen, from Samuel Wesley to Henry Wood, had no existence. Thus he writes:

'As regards our public music the conditions are not so satisfactory. To expect to hear the complete Bach in our concert-rooms would be to experience many disappointments. Our pianoforte virtuosi give us transcriptions of the organ works rather than original piano compositions-on what grounds is not apparent. Why must it always be the A minor prelude and fugue that is given to the public? Even in Liszt's arrangement they are merely makeshifts on the piano. Where can we hear, except rarely, performance of the Suites, the Well-tempered Clavichord, the Italian Concerto, the Chromatic Fantasia, the Piano Concerto in A minor, the C major Concerto for two pianos? Where are the Brandenberg orchestral concertos and the orchestral suites securely fixed in our programmes ?'

An answer to these impassioned questions is easily given all these things (and more) can now be heard regularly in London, thanks to the late E. H. Thorne, to Miss Dorothy Silk, to Mr Harold Samuel, and to Sir Henry Wood and other enthusiasts. Recent English books have also contributed to the growing interest. Parry's volume is a model of its kind. Dr Sanford Terry has not only given us a new and definitive edition of

Forkel, but has made most valuable researches into the = Chorales, which are the foundation of Bach's organ and vocal works. Mr Harvey Grace's volume is an admirably well-written handbook to the organ works, and especially to the Chorale Preludes, still comparatively unknown, but as essentially Bach as the Etudes and Ballades are essentially Chopin. Mr Grace has a passage very appropriate to our purpose:

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'Never was there so astonishing a revival. Obscure in his life, though acclaimed by the limited circle to whom his gifts were known, Bach was so forgotten by the next generation that it seemed almost as if he and his music had never been. Yet to-day there is no composer whose future is more assured.'

Shakespeare was not forgotten so completely as Bach; but he was neglected, misunderstood, mishandled, misinterpreted, and has survived all the injuries done to him. The fate of his work seems such a mystery that twisted minds have been moved to ask whether this prosaic and somewhat litigious actor can have been the writer of great plays to which he appears, by modern standards, to have been indifferent. The limited and uneventful life of Bach from the organ stool at Arnstadt to the Cantor's seat at Leipzig offers a curious parallel. The letters that survive reveal nothing of the great musician, but something of a man with certain personal touchiness. They provide evidence to show that Bach contended vigorously for his rights as a man and his precedence as a public servant, and was as solicitous of a titular honour from the King of Prussia as Shakespeare was to establish his right to a grant of arms; but they offer no evidence to show that he cared about the fate of his works or even recognised their supreme greatness. The mystery of Shakespeare is no greater than the mystery of Bach.

As usual, the real mystery is not that which is generally assumed. The mind that doubts whether this provincial Englishman or that provincial German, selftaught, self-developed, without advantage of high culture or easy station, could so have passed the bounds of space and time in works of which no praise can be too extravagant, inevitably makes the blunder of trying to find reasons for that which is above all reason. The spirit of great creative genius lights upon whom it will, and