Johann Adolph Scheibe and the Passion Tradition in Denmark

If Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–1776) is known at all today, it is as one of the arch-villains of music history. In 1737, as one of the first German music critics, Scheibe issued the first broadside in what has come to be known as the Scheibe–Birnbaum affair. Just twenty-nine years old, he published a thinly disguised account of an “anonymous” musician’s travels through Germany, with candid accounts of several composers. Though he discusses twelve composers—all unnamed except Carl Heinrich Graun and Johann Adolph Hasse, the only two receiving unqualified praise—his remarks about one man, clearly identifiable as J. S. Bach, are well known. Scheibe writes, in part, that “this great man [i.e., Bach] would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more amenity [Annehmlichkeit], if he did not take away from the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid [schwülstig] and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art” (The New Bach Reader, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, rev. by Christoph Wolff [New York: W. W. Norton, 1998], 338). The following year, Johann Abraham Birnbaum, professor of rhetoric in Leipzig, responded with a lengthy rebuttal, also published anonymously (New Bach Reader, 338–48).

Philipp Spitta, the foremost nineteenth-century Bach scholar, took particular offense at these remarks. Unable to consider the possibility of a valid criticism of Bach, he suggested that Scheibe’s remarks must therefore have arisen from some past slight (Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Work and Influence on the Music of Germany, 1685–1750, 3 vols., trans. Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller Maitland [London: Novello; New York: H. W. Gray, 1899], 1:645–47 and 2:252–55). The most likely one, he concluded, was Scheibe’s unsuccessful 1729 audition for the position of organist at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, as its selection panel included Bach himself. Indeed, Spitta went so far as to identify Scheibe with the character of Midas in Bach’s secular cantata Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde, BWV 201. We now know that this is impossible—source evidence proves that Bach’s cantata was also written in 1729, some eight years before the publication of Scheibe’s critical remarks. (See Alfred Dürr, Zur Chronologie der Leipziger Vokalwerke J. S. Bachs, Musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, 26 [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1976], 100.) Furthermore, two years after the audition, Bach would write a testimonial on behalf of Scheibe (New Bach Reader, 153); would he have done so if there were really such animosity between them?

In 1974, George Buelow advanced a more nuanced understanding of Scheibe and his critical writings (“In Defence of J. A. Scheibe against J. S. Bach,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 101 [1974–75]: 85–100). Proceeding through a point-by-point reconsideration of Scheibe’s criticisms, he concludes that “Scheibe was a major figure in the history of music. He was neither small-minded, jealous of, nor disrespectful to the great Bach of Leipzig” (p. 100). And yet negative judgments remain. To give just one example, in the seventh edition of History of Western Music by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, Scheibe is described as one of the contemporaries for whom Bach’s music is “too rich” ([New York: W. W. Norton, 2006], 457). The implication is that Scheibe was part of the reason that Bach was “forgotten” after his death. Burkholder quotes only the portion of Scheibe’s critique that paints a negative view of Bach, omitting the more positive first paragraph, not to...