Johann Sebastian Bach - booksnow.scholarsportal.info

44 JOHANJJ SEBASTIAN BACH.influence of the Italian opera during the seventeenthcentury. Still, Bach could not be false to his ownProtestant style. This, which was founded on the firmbasis of German organ music, had, with careful eclecticism,grasped every other form worthy to survive, and nowproved itself capable of absorbing that element whichdistinguishes the B minor mass from all the rest of Bach'schurch music. Wherever the Protestant liturgy requiredit, Bach has deviated from the main lines of the Catholicmass. Thus the B minor mass is scarcely less essentiallyProtestant than the rest of Bach's church music, but itsroots strike deeper. Luther's purer creed was born in thelap of the Catholic church, and it was only the ill-foundedpretensions of the Mother Church, which had nothing incommon with her original constitution, which forced Protestantismto fight for an independent position. Thepolitical exigencies of Princes, and the antagonism ofnations and races, roused a hostile fury which led to themost terrible religious war ever waged, and left an enduringbitterness, even late in the eighteenth century. Nowherewas this bitter spirit stronger or more stubborn, on theProtestant side, than in Saxony, and it was precisely therethat the great work of art was destined to be created whichshowed Protestantism no longer as the antagonist and foeof Catholicism, but as an inevitable outcome and developmentfrom it, grown from the same soil. The B minormass plainly reveals how immeasurably deeper and broaderBach's church feeling was than that of his age. In himdwelt the true spirit of the Reformation-epoch, with allits assertiveness and its personal meditative sentiment,but also with its comprehensive and assimilative power.When Luther arose, all the most cultured and honest mindswere agreed as to the necessity for the self-examination andreconstruction of the church ; and all the nobler souls, eventhough they might not go over to Protestantism., were of onemind with Luther in this. Almost all Germany was at oncedevoted to the new doctrine, and in the enlightened classesthroughout Europe it found numerous adherents. Thereformers themselves were far from purposing a breach