His art was untouched by the strange,
suggestive colours of modern harmony; it was pure, unemotional,
and serene. One instinctively thinks of Bach, on the other
hand, as a kind of musical reflection of Protestantism. His
was not a secluded art which lifted its head high above the
multitude; it was rather the palpable outpouring of a great
heart. Bach also represents all the pent-up feeling which
until then had longed in vain for utterance, and had there
been any canvas for him to paint on (to use a poor simile),
the result would have been still more marvellous. As it was,
the material at his disposal was a poor set of dance forms,
with the one exception of the fugue, the involved utterance
of which precluded spontaneity and confined emotional design
to very restricted limits. It is exactly as if Wagner had
been obliged to put his thoughts in quadrille form with the
possible alternative of some mathematical device of musical
double bookkeeping. As it is, Bach's innovations were very
considerable. In the first place, owing to the lack of the
system of equal temperament, composers had been limited to
the use of only two or three sharps and flats; in all the
harpsichord music of the pre-Bach period we rarely find
compositions in sharp keys beyond G, or flat keys beyond
A[flat]. To be sure, Rameau, in France, began at the same time
to see the necessity for equal temperament, but it was Bach
who, by his forty-eight "Preludes and Fugues," written in all
the keys, first settled the matter definitely.

In the fugue form itself, he made many innovations consisting
mainly of the casting aside of formalism. With Bach a fugue
consists of what is called the "exposition," that is to say,
the enunciation of the theme (subject), its answer by another
voice or part, recurrence of the subject in another part which,
in turn, is again answered, and so on according to the number
of voices or parts. After the exposition the fugue consists
of a kind of free contrapuntal fantasy on the subject and its
answer. By throwing aside the restraint of form Bach often
gave his fugues an emotional significance in spite of the
complexity of the material he worked with.

[13] Pier Luigi, born in Palestrina, near Rome.

XIV

THE MERGING OF THE SUITE INTO THE SONATA

In the previous chapter it was stated that the various dances,
such as the minuet, sarabande, allemande, etc., led up to
our modern sonata form, or, perhaps, to put it more