To certain musicians far less endowed than was Bach, the act of teaching has been but semblance of labor, and, at times, the merest farce. Behold the modern, world-flattered, fashion-sought Virtuoso of the Pianoforte, accessible only to the highest aspirant to musical renown! Behold that awe-struck aspirant ushered into the presence of the august one! He listens to the embarrassed player, yes, he the lofty deigns to listen! Ah! but will he, the great Jove of modern music, look down in kindness from his Parnassus, or will he utterly blast with the lightning of his eyes, and dumfound with the angry thunders of his mouth? Who can tell? Surely none but the great Jove himself, for his pleasure or his displeasure, like that of the ancient deity, is but matter of caprice dependent wholly upon his present mood. How the conditions which hampered the life of Bach contrast with those favoring the musical celebrity of our day! But then, the world abounds with incongruities even to the placing of the beggar on the throne and the king on the dunghill. The poet bards of long ago, the Ossians of the North and the Homers of the South, declaimed their epics of love and war to a harp accompaniment which often must have approached free improvisation. The complex recitative of Wagner, for example, the endless melody of his «Tristan and Isolde,» purports to be the attained ideal of those elder singers; but, between the bald freedom of the old and the luxuriant freedom of the new, have obtained what Wagner considered two grave, musical mistakes: first, the evolution of fixed form originating in the primitive dance tune and eventuating in the Bach Fugue, and, second, largely due to the labors of Bach, the individualizing of instrumental music apart from vocal music once deemed its indispensable auxiliary. Speaking without bias, it should be said that although to Bach we justly render every encomium due unto one of the most gifted masters of music, we give with full knowledge that his art, notwithstanding its beauty and excellence, is but a facet of the gem whose all of resplendence these later days are privileged to behold. Probably the perfection of contrapuntal writing was to Bach the perfection, the entirety, of great music. He would doubtless have condemned as vague and discursive much in the pianoforte and orchestral works which characterized Beethoven's middle and last period.