LDV302

26 BACH_TE DEUM / DE PROFUNDIS The musical outcome is well known, particularly in the most accomplished achievements of Bach’s consummate artistry – the very achievements that may be said to have perverted the Reformation’s objectives of simplicity. For in this sphere, as in others, Bach transfigured a genre that was in fact rather commonplace (Scheidt, Reinken, Boehm, Pachelbel and Buxtehude, amongst others, had distinguished themselves in the genre before him), imbuing it with creativity and with a beauty that was both absolute and complex – a beauty that was sometimes cultivated to the detriment of clarity of timbre – and therefore to the prejudice of an ordinary participative relationship with the congregation, which was instead captivated by his music (‘motionless with admiration’). 1 Thus, in the art of ‘fostering feelings of fervour in the congregation by means of preludes and improvisations [on the organ],(…) he no longer appears to us as a man, but as a detached spirit, soaring high above our perishable world’. 2 For Bach was not Mozart – posterity has often made the comparison in this domain: the one concerned only with man’s salvation, the other speaking only to man’s heart. 1. C.F.D. Schubart : Autobiographie , Hohenasperg, avant 1779, in Bach en son temps , présenté par Gilles Cantagrel, Paris, 1982, p.270 2. J.N. Forkel, Sur la vie, l’art et les œuvres de Johann Sebastian Bach, Leipzig, 1802, in Bach en son temps , op.cit., p.386