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168 National Music of the World. |
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the Germans, and there were simple and quiet masters of their art who stayed at home while they looked abroad, and matured their mighty inventions in the strength of their own individuality—such as Sebastian Bach, the greatest master of composition for a peculiar instrument, and the greatest performer on it whom the world has ever seen; a man whose invention was as untiring as his industry, but whose share of melody was smaller than his experimental ingenuity and science; and whose works, though a mass of solid and richly-finished treasure, in one section of them unparagoned, and as fresh to-day as on the day they were made, still indicate the organisation of one slenderly alive to vocal charm.
Almost contemporaneously with this manifestation of a peculiar bias towards instrumental composition in the North, that proclivity towards the fantastic, the descriptive and the mystical, showed itself, which has done so much to determine the bent of national genius. Even Each, the grave fugue-writer, could, in anticipation of Beethoven's 'Adieu' sonata, make up a fantasia on the events of a journey, comprising the 'dissuasion of friends' and ' their representation of dangers to be expected,' the traveller's firmness, and the like. |
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