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Johann Adolph Scheibe
JOHANN ADOLPH SCHEIBE AND THE PASSION TRADITION IN DENMARK
Johann Adolph Scheibe. Passions-Cantata "Vor Harpe er bleven til Sorrig" = Passion Cantata "Our Harp Has Become Sorrow" (1768). Tekst af = Text by Johannes Ewald. Udgivet af = Edited by Peter Hauge. Copenhagen: Dansk Center for Musikudgivelse, 2012. [Introd. in Dan. and Eng., p. v-xvi; libretto in Dan. and Eng., p. xvii-xxii; 3 plates, p. xxiii-xxv; scoring, p. xxvi; score, p. 1-161; crit. commentary in Eng., p. 162-77. ISMN: 979-0-9001827-0-8; pub. no. DCM Oil. DKK400.]
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 andjohann 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...