Sebastian Bach Author:Reginald Lane Poole Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII. We quitted the direct narrative of Bach's life at the point when the arrival of the new rector of the Thomasschule gave it an interval of peace ... more »and quietness, an interval of which we took advantage to review the great ranges of church-music which fell as an official task to the cantor. The four years of Gesner's rule are the ripest and busiest in Bach's life; not that they include his greatest individual works, with the notable exception of the High Mass, but that they are the most productive, and of works attaining a more uniform level of first-rate excellence than any others. After 1735 Bach was content to relax somewhat, and he employed his time, less in composing new cantatas or the like, than in revising, solidifying, and balancing his earlier works. He must also have retired more into the quiet of his family life, and devoted himself to his private pupils, after the blow struck at his influence in the school by Gesner's successor, Ernesti. Ernesti, a young man of great learning and a good teacher, was as incapable as his father, the old rector under whom Bach first taught, of grasping the primary conditions of the school, namely, its combination ofmusical with general education. He was jealous of the predominance of the former, and therefore started with a bias against Bach. He succeeded in winning a victory for his own schemes, but at the expense of the ruin of the music. Bach was not the only sufferer; the same dispute was going on elsewhere in Germany at the time, and was in fact one of the incidents of a transitional period in the history of education. The Thomasschule from its double government, the cantor having an equal supremacy in musical matters with the rector's in secular, was peculiarly liable to such a conflict. Unless the two heads were joi...« less