Bach also composed a great number of Cantatas, chiefly for the choir of St. Thomas’ School, Leipzig.(169) The choir ordinarily numbered fifty singers, and sometimes more, over whose musical training Bach presided like a father. He practised them so hard in Cantatas for single and double chorus that they became excellent singers. Among these works are some which, in profundity of conception, magnificence, richness of harmony and melody, and animation, surpass everything of their kind. But, like all Bach’s works, and in common with other masterpieces, they are difficult to perform and need a numerous orchestra to produce their full effect. Such are Bach’s most important vocal compositions. (170) In minor forms of the art, morceaux for social entertainments and the like, he wrote little,(171) though he was of a most sociable disposition. For instance, he is said never to have composed a song.(172) And why should he? They produce themselves so spontaneously that there is little call for genius to aid their gestation. [Johann Sebastian Bach. From the picture discovered by Professor Fritz Volbach] Johann Sebastian Bach. _From the picture discovered by Professor Fritz Volbach_ CHAPTER VII. BACH AS A TEACHER It not infrequently happens that talented composers and players are incapable of imparting their skill to others. Either they have never troubled to probe the mechanism of their own facility, or, through the excellence of their instructors, have taken the short cut to proficiency and allowed their teacher and not their own judgment to decide how a thing should be done. Such people are useless to instruct beginners. True, they may succeed in teaching the rudiments of technique, assuming that they have been properly taught themselves. But they are certainly unqualified to teach in the full sense of the word. There is, in fact, only one way to become a good teacher, and that is to have gone through the discipline of self-instruction, a path along which the beginner may go astray a thousand times before attaining to perfection. For it is just this stumbling effort that reveals the dimensions of the art. The man who has adventured it learns the obstacles that obstruct his path, and how to surmount them. To be sure, it is a lengthy method. But if a man has patience to persevere he will reap a sure reward after an alluring pilgrimage. No musician ever founded a school of his own who has not followed such a course, and to his experience his teaching has owed its distinctive character. This is so with Bach, who, only gradually discovering his full stature, was thirty years old before unremitting application raised him above the difficulties of his art. But he reaped his reward. Self-discipline set him on the fairest and most alluring path that it has ever been given to a musician to tread.