nality; and Gluck's training practically deprived
him of Bach's direct influence, useful as that would have been to the
attainment of his aims in harmonic and choral expression. The indirect
influence no one could escape, for whatever in modern music is not
traceable to Sebastian Bach is traceable to his sons, who were encouraged
by their father in the cultivation of those infant art-forms which were so
soon to dazzle the world into the belief that his own work was obsolete.

Bach's place in music is thus far higher than that of a reformer, or even
of an inventor of new forms. He is a spectator of all musical time and
existence, to whom it is not of the smallest importance whether a thing be
new or old, so long as it is true. It is doubtful whether even the forms
most peculiar to him (such as the arpeggio-prelude) are of his invention.
Yet he left no form as he found it,--not even that most conventional of
all, the Da Capo Aria, which he did not outwardly alter in the least. On
the other hand, with every form he touched he said the last word. All the
material that could be assimilated into a mature art he vitalized in his
own way, and he had no imitators. The language of music changed at his
death, and his influence became all-pervading just because he was not the
prophet of the new art, but an unbiassed seeker of truth. Whether so great
a man becomes "progressive" or "reactionary" depends on the artistic
resources of his time. He will always work at the kind of art that is most
complete and consistent in all its aspects. The same spirit of truthfulness
that makes Sebastian Bach hold himself aloof from the progressive art which
he encourages in his sons, drives Beethoven to invent new forms and new
means of expression with every work he writes. Gluck abolished the Da Capo
Aria, because it was unfit for dramatic music. Bach did not abolish it,
because he did not intend to write dramatic music in the strict sense of
the term. Mature musical art in Bach's time could not be dramatic, except
in the loose sense in which the term may be applied to an epic poem.
Dramatic expression, properly so called, can only be attained in music by
the full development of resources that do not blend with those of Bach's
art at all. Meanwhile there are many things unsuitable for the stage which
are nevertheless valuable on purely musical grounds; and the Da Capo Aria
was one. Bach [v.03 p.0127] developed it in a great variety of ways, while
ret