On the morning of March 11, 1829, a twenty-year-old conductor named Felix Mendelssohn stood before an orchestra and chorus in the Berlin Singakademie and prepared to perform a work that had not been heard in public for nearly a century. The piece was Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and Mendelssohn had spent months preparing for the occasion, tracking down the parts, rehearsing the performers, and persuading a skeptical musical establishment that a work by a composer most of his contemporaries regarded as a dry historical curiosity was worth the effort. What followed that evening was one of the most consequential concerts in the history of Western music. The audience, which included Hegel and the philosopher's circle, was transfixed. The performance sold out immediately and had to be repeated. Mendelssohn conducted it again, then again. Within a decade, Bach had been transformed from a footnote in music history into a towering canonical figure, his works being performed, published, and studied across Europe with an intensity that has never since diminished. The composer who had died in 1750, largely forgotten outside Leipzig, was resurrected in Berlin by a twenty-year-old who understood, before almost anyone else, what had been lost and what could be recovered.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest classical composers of all time, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a German composer, organist, and violinist whose output, produced across a lifetime of service to churches, courts, and municipal councils, encompasses some of the most technically demanding and spiritually profound music ever written. During his lifetime, he worked as a teacher and organist, was frequently undervalued by his employers, and died in relative obscurity, his manuscripts scattered and his reputation confined largely to specialists who admired his contrapuntal mastery without fully grasping its depth. The Bach revival that Mendelssohn ignited in 1829 did not merely restore a reputation. It revealed a body of work so vast and so inexhaustible that musicians and scholars have been making new discoveries in it ever since.
To explore that body of work and the extraordinary story of its rediscovery requires an exceptional guide with musical intelligence. The late American pianist and author Charles Rosen wrote voluminously on classical music across a long and distinguished career, producing several acclaimed books, including the National Book Award-winning The Classical Style, which remains one of the finest works of musical criticism in the English language. His engagement with Bach combined the performer's intimate understanding of the music with the scholar's grasp of its historical context, making him one of the most illuminating voices on how Bach was lost, how he was found, and why the finding mattered so much.
In the conversation that follows, Rosen guides us through the Bach revival and its significance, reflecting on what the rediscovery of a great composer reveals about the relationship between musical genius, historical memory, and the capacity of great art to outlast the indifference of its own time.
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