organically developed unity that clearly foreshadowed Bach’s more solid and compact form. III Between the sturdy schools of North and South Germany there grew the Saxon or Thuringian, in which the best influences of both schools interlocked. Here in central Germany, especially in Thuringia where ‘every peasant knows music’ (as an old proverb runs), there flourished a school that ultimately was the greatest of them all and that gave to the world Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), not only the greatest master of organ music, but one of the greatest master-minds of all time. An analysis of the special qualities of mind and heart that raised Bach to such a lofty pinnacle of inspired effort will be found in another volume of this series. Our present purpose is concerned only with his organ works. These are both numerous and epoch-making. They carry to the highest point of perfection in workmanship and expression all the instrumental forms that had been in the making for a century and a half before his hand of magic touched them with its transforming power; and their naturalness, spontaneity, grandeur, and nobility of content and form have been at once the despair and inspiration of nearly every great musician since his time. The organ was the central point in Bach’s art, as the orchestra was in Beethoven’s; it was his natural voice, his most sympathetic medium of expression. No matter what form he chose to write in, the organist’s mode of thought and expression is apparent--as much in his choral works as in those for clavier. Robert Schumann says: ‘Most wonderful and bold in his primal element is Bach at his organ. Here he knows no bounds and works for centuries ahead. The majority of his fugues are characteristic pieces of the highest order, often truly poetic creations, each one demanding its own characteristic expression and its own color and light.’ Goethe ventures the bold assertion that ‘in listening to Bach’s music it seems as if divine harmony were intercoursing with itself, as might have happened in the bosom of God before the creation of the world.’