ABSTRACT
In "Bach the Progressive" I question the conventional view of Bach as the quintessential musical conservative—the "culmination of an era," "the terminal point"—a view that portrays the composer as so exclusively devoted to the sublime and timeless in his art as to be virtually "beyond" history: unaffected by, and if concerned at all, merely disdainful of the music of his contemporaries—especially that of his younger contemporaries, and, even more especially, that of his younger Italian contemporaries. This traditional understanding of the phenomenon Johann Sebastian Bach is clearly the product, in equal measure, of nineteenth-century German romanticism and nineteenth-century German nationalism, with its propensity to regard the artistic genius as a hero of mythological proportions suited to serve as a symbol of national pride and a model worthy of emulation.1
