Quote:
Originally Posted by Nik Mikas
Bach never slid into obscurity; his popularity has always been more or less the same, which is to say that those who know, know. . . . but Bach's "popularity" has spiked over the last hundred years particularly.
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I think I agree; my wording was fairly ambiguous. Bach was known (even to Mozart and Beethoven) through only a handful of works, most of which were considered academic rather than musical. The tales about Mozart obsessing over DWK are almost certainly apocryphal - his study of baroque counterpoint was short, consuming and intense, but owed a great deal more to Fux than to Bach. It was really only Bach's keyboard works that were regularly performed after his death, and his sons' fame and influence far exceeded his own - right until the 19th-century. If
any Bach was Mozart's hero, it was J.C. Bach; of this there is a wealth of surviving evidence.
Anyway. All this totally irrelevant, but it's interesting.