he
"Goldberg Variations" of Bach; and that kinship is revealed in its truest
light by a comparison between Beethoven's 31st variation and Bach's 25th;
for here, just where the resemblance is most obvious, each composer utters
his most intimate expression of feeling.

In the same way, Chopin is nowhere more characteristic than where he shows
his love of the _Wohltemperirtes Klavier_ in his Etudes and Preludes; and
so subtle is the influence of polyphonic style even over a writer so little
apt to make direct use of it as Chopin, that one of Schumann's few
plagiarisms occurs in his use of a phrase from Chopin's F minor Etude
(written for the _Methode des methodes_) as the subject of a fugue (Op. 72,
No. 3). And, apart from fugues, which Schumann cultivated assiduously at a
late stage in his career, the influence of Bach pervades the texture and
rhythm of his work in more ways than can easily be followed.

In a more external, but not less significant way, the _Passion according to
St Matthew_ made its mark on Mendelssohn from the time when he discovered
it at the age of twelve, and suggested to him many features in the general
design of oratorios, by means of which he rescued that branch of art from
the operatic influences that ruined Beethoven's _Mount of Olives_. Without
the example of Bach, Wagner's schemes of _Leitmotif_ would never in his
lifetime have become woven into that close polyphonic texture which secures
for his music a flow as continuous as that of drama itself:--and intimately
connected with this is the whole subject of Wagner's harmonization, which
in many of its boldest characteristics was foreshadowed by Bach. A close
study of the texture of Brahms's work shows that he develops Bach's and
Beethoven's artistic devices _pari passu_, and that the result is a
complete unification of that opposition between polyphony and form which in
the infancy of the sonata (as in every transitional stage in musical
history) threatened to wreck the art as a false antithesis wrecks a
philosophy. Perhaps the only great composers who escaped the direct
influence of Bach are Gluck and Berlioz. Even Gluck reproduced in every
detail of harmony and figure the first twelve bars of the _Gigue_ of Bach's
B flat Clavier-Partita in the aria "Je t'implore et je tremble" in
_Iphigenie en Tauride_. But plagiarism, however unconscious, is a very
different thing from that profound indebtedness which makes a great man
attain his truest origi