Johann Nikolaus Forkel. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Göttingen, 1802. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the university’s director of music, an organist, a scholar with a mania for catalogues, publishes a little book of a hundred pages: On Johann Sebastian Bach’s Life, Art and Works. It is the first biography of Bach ever written, fifty-two years after his death, and also one of the first modern biographies of any musician. The motive, declared in the preface, is not academic but patriotic, and must be read in its year: while French armies redraw Germany, Forkel presents Bach’s work as a national treasure, an inestimable heritage that the nation must know in order not to lose it. German musicology is born this way, with a gesture of cultural defence.
The documentary value of the book is unrepeatable for a reason of dates: Forkel had managed to correspond with Bach’s sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and above all Carl Philipp Emanuel, the one behind the Versuch, and from them had gathered what no archive preserves: the way the father played, taught, fingered, judged. The chapters on Bach the harpsichordist and teacher are second-hand testimony but of first quality, and from there come half the anecdotes still in circulation, from the youthful journey on foot to hear Buxtehude onwards. Of course, Forkel writes as defence counsel: his Bach is already a monument without shadows, and later philology has spent two centuries correcting dates and legends. But without that little book, the chain of memory would have broken: the witnesses died within a few years, and what Forkel did not ask we will never know.
The book was a slow fuse. When, twenty-seven years later, the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, reigniting the public cult of Bach, the ground had been prepared by those hundred pages and by the circle of readers they had formed. It is the purest example of a mechanism this magazine has already met while taking apart the myth of the Big Bang: founding fathers are not found, they are built, and someone has to make the first move. Forkel did it with the tools of his time, erudition and nationalism, and the result outgrew both.
You can read Forkel’s book in full in the Melos Library, our digital library: 62,597 volumes of music, treatises, correspondence and biographies, to browse, search word by word and download. There is the original Leipzig edition of 1802, printed by Hoffmeister and Kühnel, and there is Charles Sanford Terry’s English translation of 1920. You will find them here, next to the correspondence between Forkel and his publishers. Modern biographies have corrected it in a hundred places, and all of them begin by citing it: it is the best possible fate for a history book, to be superseded by everyone and indispensable to each.