Bach’s clavier-music is a complete world, a mirror of his music as a whole. As Nature is her whole self in every leaf, so in every piece or group of pieces Bach is the whole Bach. Thus for the first time it came about that the clavier became capable of interpreting the whole nature of a great man. With the early Englishmen it was the embodiment of the whole tone-poet; with Couperin the whole man, indeed, but a man who was nothing but a dancer; with Scarlatti a whole clavier-player; but with Bach the whole nature of a man of whom it is impossible to say whether the musician or the intellect in him was the greater. This was the first outstanding peak attained by the clavier. The natural creative principle from which Bach works, that which gives unity to his being, is the conception of counterpoint. Music can be written in which every single voice is treated as an independent line, and in which the art of combining these lines reaches the highest possible development, as in a picture of Holbein--and this is counterpoint. Or music could be written, in which an upper melody, clearly illuminated, runs on an advancing basis of accompanying harmony without much attention to purity of voice, as in a work of Ribera--and this is the style resting on “accompaniment.” Bach’s essence lies in the contrapuntal method. He conceives the voices _over against_ one another; and at the very moment in which he interjects a motive, there is a second or third motive introduced, embracing the other in contrapuntal wise. [Illustration: Konrad Pau(l)mann, the first German writer for keyed instruments, blind. Died 1473. After a modern drawing by Wintter.] Yet he has taken the accompaniment-style also into himself. Just as little as he can ever be censured for defect in melody, so little has he ever neglected the newer “secular” harmony--rather, he has carried on his counterpoint in accordance with its laws. He has of course as little respect as any other first class musician for the common Italian accompaniment with its singing melody alone. If he adopts it, it is in very discreet fashion; the richly decorated arioso soaring above the vigorously moving _basso continuo_ in such delicate arrangement that we think rather of an ornamented contrapuntal passage than of a light singing voice accompanied by the cembalo with _figured_ bass. In this secularisation of counterpoint by means of the contrasting features of an arioso, the foundation of a bass, and the modern system of a network of harmony, he exhibits the characters of both musical styles in one, and gives us the unification of two epochs, which necessarily opened a boundless prospect into the future.