rg, where his
beautiful soprano voice obtained him an appointment at the school of St
Michael as chorister. He seems, however, to have worked more at
instrumental than at vocal music. Apart from the choristers' routine, his
position provided only for his general education, and we know little about
his definite musical instructors. In any case he owed his musical
development mainly to his own incessant study of classical and contemporary
composers, such as Frescobaldi (_c._ 1587), Caspar Kerl (1628-1693),
Buxtehude, Froberger, Muffat the elder, Pachelbel and probably Johann
Joseph Fux (1660-1741), the author of the _Gradus ad Parnassum_ on which
all later classical composers were trained. A prettier and no less
authentic story than that of his brother's forbidden organ-volume tells
how, on his return from one of the many holiday expeditions which Bach made
to Hamburg on foot to hear the great Dutch organist Reinken, he sat outside
an inn longing for the dinner he could not afford, when two herring-heads
were flung out of the window, and he found in each of them a ducat with
which he promptly paid his way, not home, but back to Hamburg. At Hamburg,
also, Keiser was laying the foundations of German opera on a splendid scale
which must have fired Bach's imagination though it never directly
influenced his style. On the other hand Keiser's church music was of
immense importance in his development. In Celle the famous _Hofkapelle_
brought the influence of French music to bear upon Bach's art, an influence
which inspired nearly all his works in suite-form and to which his many
autograph copies of Couperin's music bear testimony. Indeed, there is no
branch of music, from Palestrina onwards, conceivably accessible in Bach's
time, of which we do not find specimens carefully copied in his own
handwriting. On the other hand, when Bach, at the age of nineteen, became
organist at Arnstadt, he found Luebeck within easy distance, and there, in
October 1705, he went to hear Buxtehude, whose organ works show so close an
affinity to Bach's style that only their lack of coherence as wholes
reveals to the attentive listener that with all their nobility they are not
by Bach himself. Bach's enthusiasm for Buxtehude caused him to outstay his
leave by three months, and this, together with his [v.03 p.0125] habit of
astonishing the congregation by the way he harmonized the chorales got him
into trouble. But he was already too great an ornament to be