Programs · Episode

Bach Better

Aired: Friday, May 25, 2018 @ 9:00 am
Hosted by Miles Hoffman

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote sonatas, concertos, suites, preludes and fugues, overtures, oratorios, and cantatas—music in all the major forms of the Baroque era, with the exception of opera.

Full Episode:

A colleague and I were listening to a Bach violin concerto on the radio some years back. After a while my colleague said, “You know, there are a thousand Baroque violin concertos. Why is it that this one is just…better?” Johann Sebastian Bach wrote sonatas, concertos, suites, preludes and fugues, overtures, oratorios, and cantatas—music in all the major forms of the Baroque era, with the exception of opera.

But Bach himself didn’t invent any of the forms he used. He used the forms he inherited, but he transformed them – with a kind of fearless creativity… with passion, and expressive genius. “It was not given to [Bach’s predecessors] to quicken the forms with the spirit,” wrote Albert Schweitzer. “If all their struggles toward the ideal were not to be in vain, a greater man had to come… Bach is thus a terminal point. Nothing comes from him; everything merely leads up to him.”

Playlist