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The man opened his lips and blew a wreath of smoke. "There will be more than a hundred Bachs," he said slowly, "and you must play what I have taught you not too slow and not too fast." He looked down at the boy's fat fingers. "Play like a true Bach and no other," he added. The boy nodded. "Will Uncle Christoph be there?" he asked after a pause. "Ja." "And Uncle Heinrich?" "Ja, ja!"
And Uncle Heinrich on the platform, strutting proudly back and forth, conducting the choral his own choral forgot his anger and forgot Reinken, and forgot everything except the Bachs playing there before him playing as only the Bachs, the united Bachs, could play in all Germany or in all the world. The two boys had come to a turn in the road, and stood looking back over the way they had come.
"There shall come of the Bachs one so great that all others shall fade. He only shall be known as Bach he and his sons; and before him the name of Reinken shall be as dust!" With a hiss upon the last word, he threw open his arms. "Come!" he said, "take your instrument and play."
He had only this " He held up the lute again. "Only this and his mill. But he made the greatest music of his time. While you thirty of you this day at the best organs in Germany.... And Reinken defies you.... Reinken!" His lighted eye ran along the crowd. "Before the next festival, shall there be one who will meet him?" There was no response. The Bachs looked into their beer-mugs.
Purcell, in England, Domenico Scarlatti and Sammartini, in Italy, the Bachs, in Germany, and others continued to fashion the sonata form. It ceased to be a mere grouping of dances, the name suite being applied to that, and struck out into independent excursions in the domain of fancy.
We have an abundance of stone masons, but few Phidiases or Angelos; hundreds of organ grinders, but few Beethovens or Webers or Bachs; a full quota of men engrossed in the cold calculus of business, but a scarcity of Homers or Dantes or Virgils.
There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment, such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck, Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years' honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live.
And, bearing it in mind, we can see in Haydn's early attempts much in a style that had been used before or was being used at the time, much that is simply copied from the younger Bachs, from Domenico Scarlatti, Dittersdorf, Wagenseil, perhaps even his Parisian contemporary Gossec. But we see the character of the themes becoming more and more his own.
And speaking of types, what shall we say of this cloud of witnesses, bearing the most honoured name in music, the name of Bach? There were more than twenty-five Bachs, who made themselves names as makers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names as family makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lacking in virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity.
He removed the violin-bag carefully from his back and threw himself on the ground and took from his pocket a great pipe. With a little sigh the boy sat down beside him. The man nodded good-naturedly. "Ja, that is right." He blew a puff of smoke toward the morning clouds; "the Bachs do not hurry, my child no more does the sun." The boy smiled proudly.
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