I've recently completed a read of Albert Schweitzer's book on J.S. Bach , and will here offer a brief observation. The Germany of Bach's prime, especially the 1730s and 1740s, had its own music critics. Among these was a fellow named Johann Adolph Scheibe, the son of an organ builder and the kapellneister of the King of Denmark, who edited a magazine called Kritische Musikus. Scheibe saw himself as the literary champion of a distinctively German style of music, one that would break away from the Italian models. The Italian influence was toward artifice and complexity. The German impulse was toward naturalness and simplicity, to Scheibe's way of thinking. This theory made it "impossible for him to do justice to Bach," Schweitzer wrote. Bach was much too complicated, and thus too Italian, for his taste. Although of course acknowledging Bach's talents (because Scheibe was not altogether an idiot) he did conclude that Bach, tragically, had fallen ...