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As a matter of fact, it is true that, with over 200 pieces, Bach’s organ works are among the most important contributions ever made to that instrument by any composer and that they contain admirable masterpieces, from the formal, poetic and expressive points of view. These pieces constitute a necessary step in any serious organist’s training, as they contain all the major technical difficulties that have to be overcome, while a great many of them are models of composition. The paradox in Dufourcq’s naïve and caricatured way of placing Bach in the history of organ music is that it eventually clouds the issue and fails to shed light on the true critical interest of his contribution. Such an approach draws a smoke screen on the evolution of the instrument and its various styles. It makes one believe that all organ “schools” independent of Bach’s German tradition were necessarily flawed since they had other purposes and means to reach them and it prevents one from considering Bach’s works serenely for what they really represent. Finally, it makes it impossible to grasp what was specific about Bach’s organ by promoting a global conception of the instrument to the detriment of a finer analysis of national, local and chronological variations.
Bach’s music has not always been adulated as it is today. In this respect, it is interesting to read Dr. Burney’s remarks about the German composer. In a diatribe against the fugue, which he considers to be a sterile, artificial and pedantic form of the past, the famous English music historian of the eighteenth century writes:
The very terms of Canon and Fugue imply restraint and labour. Handel was perhaps the only great Fughist, exempt from pedantry. He seldom treated barren or crude subjects; his themes being almost always natural and pleasing. Sebastian Bach, on the contrary, like Michael Angelo in painting, disdained facility so much, that his genius never stooped to the easy and graceful. I never have seen a fugue by this learned and powerful author upon a motivo, that is natural and chantant; or even an easy and obvious passage, that is not loaded with crude and difficult accompaniments.
At the time of writing, Bach had been dead for some thirty years and musical taste had changed. Although Burney acknowledged that Bach was a “learned and powerful” composer, he was obviously not won over by his complex baroque style and, for him, the “great” Bach was not Johann Sebastian but his son Carl Philip Emmanuel. Beyond Bach’s manner, what Burney criticized was the German conception of the organ. During his trip to Germany and the Netherlands undertaken to gather material for his History of Music, Charles Burney was puzzled to see the organists of these countries perform on very large instruments and play complex parts on the pedals. Not without irony, he drew the following picture:
[The organist at the Elector’s chapel, Mr Binder] played three or four fugues in a very full and masterly manner, making great use of the pedals. I did not indeed find him possessed of much fancy; but in the German manner of playing, there is not much opportunity of shewing it. To use the pedals of these huge instruments much, at the same time as two hands are fully employed on the stiff and heavy manuals, is a very laborious business. […] [Mr Binder], when he had done, was in as violent a heat with fatigue and exertion, as if he had run eight or ten miles, full-speed, over ploughed lands in the dog-days.
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