66 Bach Tributes: Bach Tributes Expressed by Personalities Who Admired Bach’s Musical Works..
Bach quotes: Important persons have commented on Johann Sebastian Bach's work and on him as a person. And what these great figures said has been passed down. Here I have collected such Bach quotes for you and published them in compact form, with the exception of a few statements. At the top, clearly on the left, is the Thomas Cantor, and on the right, King Frederick II of Prussia. “There is only one Bach!” ... he said when Bach arrived in Potsdam. He was referring to the fact that Johann Sebastian Bach's son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, was playing music in the service of the king in Berlin and Potsdam at that time. © Peter Bach, Jr..
Don't want an introduction to Bach quotes? Fine. Click here to go straight to the first quote about Johann Sebastian Bach. And here's also my tip right at the start: Bach quotes can mean two things. First, there are quotes that other people said about the Thomas Cantor. And then there are the statements that Bach himself once made. These have also been passed down..
But if you continue reading here, you will find a little more information ... as always before reaching your actual destination. On this page of my website, you will find only quotes about Bach. Anecdotes, stories, aphorisms, quotations, and other things that Johann Sebastian Bach himself said, can be found in my FAQ section, specifically it is FAQ No. 119..
So, on this page, you will find quotes about Bach from his colleagues, quotes about Bach from politicians, and quotes about Bach from people all over the world. But, do you want to switch quickly to the first quote, now ? Is there any other composer about whom so many prominent humans have expressed such enthusiasm in their quotes? The oldest quote that inspires enthusiasm is certainly the one, handed down by his son Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, who – like all of Johann Sebastian's other sons – only had positive things to say about his father. The youngest person to quote Bach in a way that projects him into the present day is Paul Falk, a musician who also is a member of a family of musicians. Although, his family is not as extensive as that of the Bachs from Thuringia..
Every saying, every piece of wisdom, every statement sheds light on JSB from a wide variety of perspectives. And so, individual quotes become an exciting collection, a description of Bach, so to speak. It has been “created” by around 50 enthusiasts who, over more than 300 years, have paid tribute to the exceptional composer Bach like hardly any other person on earth ... and still do: my research of Bach quotes for you. But again, because it is just important: These are exclusively quotes from celebrities about ( ! ) Johann Sebastian Bach and his work. Sayings and words of wisdom from ( ! ) the Royal Polish Court Composer can be found—again, very gladly—with one click ... here. So, enjoy these many Bach quotes...
Advertisement Start. Wait. Stop, stop, stop ... Please read my suggestion on how you could “consume” Bach's quotes in a completely unusual way and with much more entertainment. For that, I have compiled the most beautiful Bach quotes and have them read by two professional speakers who are known from television and can be heard on the radio. The two take turns. There is also a nine-minute biography about the musical genius, also narrated by one of the two. The whole thing is accompanied, how could it be otherwise, by the music of the Thomas Cantor. And now? Please remember that this little work of mine will no longer be exciting if you read all the Bach quotes in a few minutes. Just listen to it: it's a really cool Bach gem, as I like to call it..
So, was my announcement above a bit over the top? By the way, it's 72 minutes of listening pleasure. You can buy the download at “Bach 4 You.” Click here to get there directly..
Two Bach Quotes and Tributes Calendars..
If you really enjoy Bach quotes, then perhaps you could imagine a Bach calendar on this very topic hanging on a wall in your home. There are two such calendars with different styles of illustration, each featuring twelve Bach quotes. Just like over 18 other Bach calendars, 20 composers calendars, many pipe organ calendars, and finally 20 music calendars. They are available every year. So, also this year and next year. You can get them in three sizes. Click here to get directly to the calendar overview in the “Bach 4 You” shop..
The second Bach quotes calendar. It features watercolors of twelve Bach monuments in Germany and Europe. It is also available this year and next year. Likewise in three sizes. Click here to visit the “Bach 4 You shop” ... and actually, it links to five Bach shops..
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"What I have to say about Bach's life's work: Listen, perform, love and adore it - and shut up!"
"They say, when the angels play for God, they play Bach. For one another they play Mozart."
"The music of my father has higher intensions, it's not supposed to fill the ear but to make your heart move!"
"His name should be Ocean, not Bach."
"Bach is the beginning and the end of all music."
"If Bach would live today, he would be sitting behind the latest state-of-the-art computers and keyboards!"
"Bach is immortal."
"There is only one Bach."
"Sometimes I say for the fun of it: If Bach isn't in heaven, I don't want to get there at all. Bach is probably the only composer whose work is so excellent, so challenging for the musician and so rich of spiritual power for the audience and for the interpreters, that you would love to spend one year alone in his company."
"Bach, this ocean, is endless and unfully utilized in his wealth of ideas and harmonies! He is the father of harmony."
"When I heard this music, I examined something of that, how it would be in God, just before God created the world."
"And it seemed, that I didn't need neither ears, nor eyes even more, and I had no further senses nor would I need them."
"Everything, what is good and is pleasing me - Beethoven, Piaf, Elvis Presley and sometimes Gluck. When it comes to Bach, I often think, everything else is no music, it's rather a confectionery. It all starts with Bach, so arranged is what life has to be, in the jubilation, too."
"It might be, that a composer doesn't believe in God. In Bach, however, they all believe!"
"For me, there is only one concrete proof for the existence of God: the music of Johann Sebastian Bach."
"Now, let us see what a world this intangible great Johann Sebastian Bach built from these elements. I just like to point out on this creation, because it is impossible, to designate her wealth, her dignity, and her meaning in just any comparison. It is the most amazing musical wonder of all times."
"So Johann Sebastian Bach has too, although a Protestant Christian, created the incomparable work of the H-Minor-Mass, which is definitely composed as an inner unity, which lets us feel the power of a faith, by which the inner presence of God touches us from the inside."
"This is something, we all might learn from. Bach is the father, we are the boys. All of us, who are capable to do something serious, have learned it from him."
"His great genius, which embraced everything, which united everything in itself, what is necessary for an accomplishment of one of the exhaustless arts, he brought the art to play the organ that much to a perfection, as nobody prior to him and hardly will be after him."
"Be proud of him, fatherland, be proud of him: However, be worth him, too!"
"The preservation of the memory to that great man isn't just an issue of art, it is a national issue."
"Johann Sebastian Bach - the greatest musical poet and the greatest musical disclaimer, who has ever existed and who will probably remain forever."
"Never ... have I felt the beauty of this music in this dimension. It arose unbelievably from this simple four strings, like an angel of Michelangelo from a marble block."
"You can just say the same thing about Bach again and again, while all real musicians have the same opinion: He has been the greatest, most universal composer of all time, a world wonder, of which mankind has to be proud."
"In music, there is one God. That is Bach."
"Study Bach. There you will find everything!"
"Bach is still a sanctuary for me, which I don't dare to touch. Although there were many competent composers before him, but it seems to me that Bach was the founding of all Classical Music. My admiration for him is till bigger than my art to play. Bach for me just is located higher as all others, he is universal."
"Those who haven't heard him, haven't heard very much."
"I stop now and don't say more, as those seem to be right, who have heard many artists, but all of them confess, there has only been one Bach in the world."
"... to listen to music ... for instance Glenn Gould. Not Beethoven, but Bach."
Helmut Schmidt ... answering
the question, what kind of activity
he loved most in life.
"Bach is the fifth evangelist. He preaches his gospel with his perfect music."
Hans-Ruedi Schütz
"His H-Minor Mess is the Mont Blanc of church music - you can't get higher in the occidental music."
"His feet flew over the pedals, as if they had wings, and mighty sounds rumbled and filled the whole church."
Friedrich II., Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel
"Let's look at Bach, the Good Lord of music, to which all composers should address a prayer, before they start their work, so he can keep them from the mean. If we look on his considerable works, in which we meet things at every turn, which are so alive, as if they would have been created yesterday, starting with the capricious arabesque until the religious exudation, which we weren't able to put something better aside. Tough judges render hard judgments in the name of classical rules of construction, while they didn't have any clue of the most elementary mechanism. Do they realize at all, that nobody pushed the freedom and the richness of fantasy of the movement and the form more forward than Bach, one of their givers?!"
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"What a Bach does musically, has to darken everything around him necessarily ... I don't want to speak of heritage in the most real sense. This, his music, is settled in all of our mind like almost none of any other master's work ... So, it is the most valuable, what we have inherited with Bach's music: the show until the end of a human's possible perfection; and the awareness of the way, that leads to it: the inescapable, dutiful completion of the necessary identified, which is however, to reach a perfection, finally has to rise beyond every necessity. Has a music accomplished, that we arrange our whole nature to the nobleness, it has done its very best. If a composer has conquered music so much, so that it could do its best, so he has reached the peak. Bach has reached this peak."
"This Leipzig cantor is an appearance of God, clear but unexplainable."
"Actually, I am occupied with Bach every day, for 40 years. A day without Bach is not thinkable. Bach is a secret, which you almost can't fathom, an epiphany, the depth by d
"His music is just timeless."
"If, by a treacherous wonder, would have been taken away everything, what the works of the greatest musical genius of mankind built in us, we couldn't even recognize ourselves in that devastation."
"Johann Sebastian Bach is the Albrecht Dürer of German music."
"Johann Sebastian Bach represents the best and the noblest of our people. Emotion and admiration catches us, if we consider, how from the narrow, mean circumstances of a through the barbarism of the Thirty Year War pauperized and discordant Germany this wonderful genius has upraised. The great national significance of Bach persists in the fact that he was not just the great accomplisher of the art of the feudal epoch, but at the same time the creator of a new development of music. With Bach, the great epoch of the Classical German Music. The revolutionary act of Bach was that he unleashed the music from her bonds of the medieval scholasticism and broke all ties ... Bach was in his whole works a herald of peace ... Bach's work is in the most beautiful and truest sense a work of peace and friendship among the peoples."
"All music is just an order of strain, which meet at a certain point of rest. This is true for the Gregorian melodic and for the Fugue of Bach, for the music of Brahms and for the music of Debussy."
"When I think of Bach's music, I have the feeling that God owes Bach a lot. Without him, many humans wouldn't know that God is existing."
"Bach is so versatile, his shadow is relatively long. He inspired musicians from Mozart so Stravinsky. He is universal, I believe - Bach is the composer of the future."
"Bach's music seems to be eternal, like a natural phenomenon, like the nature herself. In that, the unbelievable vitality of Bach's art is embedded her magnitude and immutability in time."
"The H-Minor Mess is the greatest musical art work of all time and peoples."
"This music is key to all music, which followed her. I see in Johann Sebastian Bach the accomplished epiphany of creature in the sense of all that, what provides human life with content, target, power, and pleasure."
"My love for Bach lets me become a musician. All that I was interested in was minted by him. It is not imaginable, that the greatest musician of history, whose work attracts us still today and which is the measurement of musical art of the last two centuries, did not produce any impact, on musicians and audience, in his time ... Bach was the greatest dissenter in music history."
"He is writing tonally, but without any
"Johann Sebastian Bach means the true middle of music. His work unites in the spirit of the North, the sense of the South, the power of the East and the safety of the forms of the West."
"For me, Bach is the greatest preacher. His cantatas and passions appear like an emotion of the soul, in which a human is accessible for all true and uniting and will be soared above the little and the separating."
"The first jazz musician in the world has been Bach."
"For many music lovers, in particular for music professionals, Johann Sebastian Bach is the greatest composer of all time."
"To see how brilliant he is, how versatile, how colorful, how unbelievable, he reaches your heart. and above all: how joyful he could be in a time when he had lost children and his wife. You have to consider, that a child often has died as late as at age three or four - at that time it was a personality already, sat on the lap and said mum and dad. We know the data and we know when a child was born or died. Bach fell in love in music to survive all that, and I find you can hear that. On the second hand he has such a deep melancholia, but on the other hand there is such a honest joy and a deep belief: There is One, who knows when our time has come, and you have to trust that. I find, we have lost that today. and if you follow such a composer according to his music through his life, you win unimaginably much."
Ton Koopman ... answering the question, what fascinates him most about Johann Sebastian Bach.
"With unique creativity, Bach has accomplished a wealth of musical works of the most different species. You may consider his art as one of the most considerable expressions of the occidental spirit."
"This week I heard the St. Matthew Passion of godly Bach three times, each time with the same feeling of boundless admiration. Somebody who has unlearned Christianity completely, really hears it here like a gospel, this is the music of the denial of the will without the remembrance of the askesis."
"For Bach, all in music was religion, to write music was a religious denomination, to play was a church service. Every not was only addressed to God. That is as well true for parts of his work, how secular their intended use might have been (...)."
"Bach's artistry and personality are resting on his godliness. If you understand him at all, it's from this angle of view. For him the sounds don't fade, but they rise aloft as a nameless praise of God."
"To play Bach is extremely complicated, you don't need just intuition and logical thinking, but as well heart, blood and tears."
"For me, Bach was the first great composer who has a historic meaning. There are many who left beautiful and perfect music, but they are strictly speaking insignificant. In reverse, there are composers whose music isn't perfect, but they created path breaking."
"Although my love for music does not have to mean love for all composers of all times, without love for Bach no real love for music is existing."
Dimitri Borissowitsch Kabalewski
"That what Bach loved and studied, Leonhardt surely loves and studies, too."
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"The answer to the depressive state in Central Europe is Johann Sebastian Bach. His music opens a high space above the hardship."
"He was so obsesses with sonority, that he - aside of his ongoing excessive play of the pedals - pressed down those keys with a stick in his mouth, which he couldn't reach in the very moment, not with his hands nor with his feet."
Charles Burney quoted Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
"What Newton was as a world pointer, Bach was as a musician."
Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart
"These are miracles, which a human brain can not generate: The artist is just the organ of a power which dictates what he is supposed to do. Because he was born in that language, Johann Sebastian Bach transferred the will of this power in definitions of the human counterpoint."
"Bach is Bach, like God is just God."
"If in the midst of a flash flood, all music would perish and just the one of Bach would be saved, so you still would have all elements of musical arts."
"He exposes the human nature to show her godly attributes. He awards the everyday things a spiritual attraction. He awards wings of eternity to things which are transient. He makes the godly things human and the humans things godly - that is how Bach ist, the greatest and purest moment in music of all times."
"Bach's music is just universal. Every person does not make this accessible in the sense of an easy common denominator, but it addresses humans in the depth."
"Bach's individual shape remains enclosed by the veil of secrecy, all personal disappears behind the magnitude of his work, which visions lift our hearts so wonderful in a sphere that we can only adore in believing the intangible. Bach knew about the things of eternity, his works bear witness of that. Nor history, but a wake up call of spirit is what war are demanding."
"Passion, hardened in the fire of technique, has become sounding word in this music, and we who are living today, musicians and non musicians, mirror ourselves, we identify with these sound patterns, with this dry, unemotional language."
"It's like geometry has learned singing and dancing."
"So sleep! Your name remains free from doom ..."
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