Bach is in very truth the Musician's musician, the touchstone of his training. When for himself one has conquered the technicalities of fugal composition, he is in fair way to estimate Bach at par value, for, to his own discomfiture, he has discovered that the construction of a fugal theme, pronounced and pliant as even the briefest bearing the impress of Bach, is one of the great doings of musical skill and imagination. These qualities Bach further shows in the treatment of subject and counter-subject by means of the stretto, and all devices of Canon and polyphonic counterpoint, moving in broad and stately volume to the final cadence and the organ point. In their highest and most eloquent efforts, vocal or instrumental, the composers of the Contrapuntal School had recourse always to the fugue whose every voice part is rendered individually prominent as in no other form of musical expression, ancient or modern; nor can anything more adequate in this respect be constructed or conceived of. But the attainment of a perfect, fugal style is fraught with difficulties insurmountable to many composers, and almost so to some whom we rightly deem among the greatest. Beethoven himself was not by natural bent a fuguist; his genius led him far afield. Notwithstanding the strength and boldness of his figures, the distinctiveness of his basses, and the melodic flow of the intermediate parts of his harmony, the not many examples of fugue, found in the bulk of his collected works, show chiefly the ambition of the explorer; and this in one the monarch of many another domain of music. As constructor of vocal fugues, Mendelssohn was all that scholarship could make him, but his themes, when compared with those of Bach and Handel, are deficient in the quality of boldness. The theme is the soul of the fugue, its center and source of life, and boldness is one of the chief requirements of the theme. Individualized, it attracts instant attention and is easily recognized throughout its augmentations, diminutions, and inversions. Among the leading composers of every land, from Italy to Poland and from France to Scandinavia, may be named many divinely inspired melodists, and also many noble harmonists, whose classic or romantic measures abound in felicitous modulations and every beauty of the free style; but how the great masters of Fugue narrow one by one as we eliminate those fallen short of its chiefest requirements! Finally there remain but two. Kings are they. Sovereigns indeed. Contemporary rulers born in the selfsame years. George Frederic Handel is one, and Johann Sebastian Bach is the other.