Bach

"Many people feel that he floats outside history altogether. That's why listening to Bach confers a mysterious sense of coming home, as if he's both the origin and the centre of classical music. All the great composers who come after him acknowledge that." Thus writes Ivan Hewitt, the Daily Telgraph's brilliant music critic (but I wish they wouldn't show his face above the feature - turns me off my gruel).
I have a slight problem with Bach. It's not quite the same problem Bernard Levin had when he wrote that all his music was in the minor key; this assertion was soundly confuted by a prominent music critic of the day (?) who called Levin's statement bunk. Well, replied Levin, it always sounded like minor key music. I know what he means about some of the music, especially the religious music, the Passions, the Masses and so on - Hewitt mentions his own music professor grumbling that "Bach is always on his knees". But surely not the concertos, the suites, the Brandenburg concertos for example. What's more lively than the last movement of the double concerto for violins and orchestra?
Hewitt mentions "all the great composers who came after him" held him in high esteem - not Stravinsky early  in his career, though he later praised him. I'm not so sure about that; many of them seemed to despise anything that smacked of classical form, rather like modern poets dislike rhyme. I can't imagine Schoenberg liking or even approving of Bach since Schoenberg developed a form that defied the classical form.
I have done my best with Schoenberg - and Berg and Webern - and I'm not going to waste any more of my time on him. I feel in sympathy with the music critic who listened to Schoenberg for a while before getting to his feet and leaving the room with the words: "Enough, enough, enough".
Quite!