Little, if any, information of value, therefore, had been added to the _Nekrolog_ of 1754 when Forkel, in 1802, produced his monograph on Bach and his music. Nor, viewed as a biography, does Forkel much enlarge our knowledge of the conditions of Bach’s life. He had the advantage of knowing Bach’s elder sons, but appears to have lacked curiosity regarding the circumstances of Bach’s career, and to have made no endeavour to add to his imperfect information, even regarding his hero’s life at Leipzig, upon which it should have been easy for him to obtain details of utmost interest. His monograph, in fact, is not a “Life” in the biographic sense, but a critical appreciation of Bach as player, teacher, and composer, based upon the Organ and Clavier works, with which alone Forkel was familiar. It would be little profitable to weigh the value of Forkel’s criticism. We are tempted to the conclusion that Bach appealed to him chiefly as a supreme master of technique, and our hearts would open to him more widely did not his appreciation of Bach march with a narrow depreciation of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the last of whom, he declared ex cathedra, had not produced “a single work which can be called a masterpiece.” Gluck he frankly detested. But Forkel’s monograph is notable on other grounds. It was the first to claim for Bach a place among the divinities. It used him to stimulate a national sense in his own people. Bach’s is the first great voice from out of Germany since Luther. Of Germany’s own Kisorgimento, patently initiated by Goethe a generation after Johann Sebastian’s death, Bach himself is the harbinger. In his assertion of a distinctive German musical art he set an example followed in turn by Mozart, Weber, and Wagner. “With Bach,” wrote Wagner, “the German Spirit was born anew.” It is Forkel’s perpetual distinction that he grasped a fact hidden from almost all but himself. In his Preface, and more emphatically in the closing paragraph of his last Chapter, he presents Bach as the herald of a German nation yet unformed.