rs of
the _Bach-Gesellschaft_ have occupied more than fifty years, during which
about four-fifths of Bach's choral works have been published for the first
time; and it would be surprising if another fifty years sufficed to make
these adequately known to the world at large. It is difficult to make an
anthology of such bulky works as church-cantatas, nor does an anthology
meet the purpose where the whole work so constantly attains that excellence
for which the anthologist seeks. Except for practical difficulties (as when
Bach writes for obsolete instruments) the only reason why some cantatas are
better known than others is that a beginning must be made somewhere.
Indeed, a cantata was recently selected, on the ground of its popularity,
for a choral competition in a small English country town the year before it
was performed as a novelty in Berlin!

It is clear, then, that the influence of Bach's art as an understood whole
is still undeveloped. In the past history of music his part was hardly
suspected except by the great composers themselves; and, to any one
contemplating the art of the generation after him, it might have seemed
that both he and Handel had worked in vain. Yet his was the most subtle and
universal force in the development of music, even when his musical language
seemed hopelessly forgotten. Mozart, when rapidly advancing to the height
of his mastery, had but to read the Baron von Swieten's manuscript copies
of the motets and of the _Wohltemperirtes Klavier_, and his style, quite
apart from his immediate essays in the old art-forms, and apart also from
the influence of his study of Handel, developed a new polyphonic richness
and depth of harmony which steadily increased until his untimely death.
Beethoven studied all the accessible works of Bach profoundly, and
frequently quoted them in his sketch-books, often with a direct bearing on
his own works. His rendering of the _Wohltemperirtes Klavier_ is said to be
recorded in the marks of expression and _tempo_ given in Czerny's edition;
and if that record is true, Beethoven must have been completely in the dark
as to Bach's meaning in many important respects; but art is full of such
illustrations of the way in which great minds influence each other in spite
of every barrier which diversity of language and time can set. Beethoven's
great Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli were actually
described in the publisher's puff as worthy of their kinship with t