ABSTRACT
The late 1980s marked a significant stage in the development of scholarship on the composer, with the first major biography in modern times, by Hans-Gunter Ottenberg, published in English translation in 1987. The first English-language collection of critical essays on Bach, edited by Stephen Clark as a Festschrift for Eugene Helm on his sixtieth birthday, appearing in the bicentenary year that followed. Arising partly from the monothematic approach to the secondary material, and also from Bach's habit of reintroducing his opening theme in a non-tonic key immediately after the double bar, people find several features reminiscent of ritornello procedure. Among the musical 'languages' that Bach employs so fluently is that of the galant style. While commentators on Bach's keyboard style have, reasonably, shown a reluctance to construct an over-determined chronological pattern of development, connections can be made at the level of genre in relation to stages in the composer's career.
