Bach’s Works and the Listener’s Viewpoint

Abstract

This chapter attempts to review the status of Bach’s compositions in relation to emerging concepts of musical works in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certain pieces might seem problematic in the face of the notions of originality and uniqueness that became essential to the high status of artworks. The Christmas Oratorio, as a sequence of cantatas largely borrowed from preexisting works honoring royalty, could therefore be seen as secondhand. But a more nuanced view might emerge from the ways in which metaphysical and hermeneutic theory of Bach’s age could reflect how a musical construction might have been conceived, and how such developments themselves might have influenced emerging narratives about art music. The crucial issue might be the accommodation of the notion of viewpoint into how music is composed, heard, and judged. It is unlikely that Bach paid any consistent attention to the cutting edge of critical thought. But at least the latter may function as evidence of what it was possible to think within Bach’s environment, something that might provide a bridge toward later beliefs about what music represented or rendered actual.