Choosing an Influence, or Bach the Inexhaustible: The Heterophony of the Voices of Twentieth-Century Composers

Abstract

The famous theory of the “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom) seems to be insufficient to explain the admiration and reverence for Bach which highly different composers such as Mahler and Reger, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, and Webern and Schnittke have expressed through their work. Despite all their differences and possible anxieties, each of these composers consciously and specifically chose Bach as his desired partner in an imaginary dialogue with the past. At the same time, the image of Bach that each composer created was very different, as is typical in interpreting the abstract drawings of a Rorschach test; therefore, each ‘portrait’ of Bach was also, in a way, a self-reflection of the composer. The main question to be investigated in this article is the reason(s) for the unique persistence of Bach’s influence into the 20th century, incomparable even to that of other major composers of the past. Several crucial points connected with this Bach-renaissance will be examined in an attempt to understand why.