Psychotherapy is an overarching term for any type of professional treatment for psychological and physical distress using verbal and nonverbal communication. Talking together, the patient and therapist engage collaboratively to understand the source of a dysfunction or suffering in order to reverse either maladaptive self-regulatory processes or to adapt and develop psychological strengths to cope with pathological conditions, developmental concerns, or trauma. Psychotherapy addresses multiple levels of functioning, including the neurobiology of the brain itself, the perception of the self to itself, the relationship of the self to others, the role of the individual in the social world, and the conceptual frameworks and beliefs that also may affect emotions and behavior.

When Mozart died at 12:55 on the morning of December 5, 1791, the score of the Requiem lay unfinished on his desk. In addition, the torsos of over 150 further unfinished works were scattered in his Vienna apartment. Some were the briefest jottings; others represented substantial portions of incipient masterpieces. Among them one finds virtually every musical genre of the late eighteenth century: composi-tions for the church, German and Italian operas, concert arias, Lieder, symphonies, chamber music, concertos, sonatas, and pieces for a colorful variety of instrumental combinations and soloists. Many of these works would certainly have been com-pleted had Mozart lived longer.

Mozart's remarkably long list of unfinished works reflects the poignant fact that his life itself was unfinished—cut off at the height of his powers at the age of not quite thirty-six. It is hard to disagree with the common view that Mozart's early death was probably the most tragic single event in the history of music. And it is understandable that music lovers in their more morbid and whimsical moments wonder: What if he had lived longer? For obvious reasons scholars and biographers are less likely to permit themselves to entertain speculations on a question of this kind. But what if one were to take the question seriously for a moment? Doing so not only has its idle fascination but also its share of surprises and ironies.

To get things started, let us first consider another intriguing hypothetical proposi-tion—in fact the exact converse of our chosen question—namely, what if Mozart had died even earlier, say, when he was Franz Schubert's age? Here there is no need for speculation. Franz Schubert (January 31, 1797, to November 19, 1828) died two months before his thirty-second birthday. If Mozart had died at Schubert's age, he would have departed this world in November 1787. His last work would have been Don Giovanni, K. 527, completed October 28, 1787. This means that the last hundred-plus compositions listed in the Köchel catalog would never have been writ-ten: among them the operas Così fan tutte, La clemenza di Tito, and Die Zauberflöte, and also the Clarinet Quintet, the Clarinet Concerto, the last two piano concertos, the “Prussian” string quartets, the last three symphonies, and, of course, all of the Requiem.

Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart represent the antipodes of eighteenth-century musical genius. According to the traditional view, Bach's music was the culmination of the so-called Baroque era during the first half of the century; Mozart's, conversely, was the culmination of the antithetical Classical style, during the second half. The antithesis is not just a technical matter of the contrast between the late Baroque and high Classical styles. It extends into their personal lives as well. We know almost nothing about Bach's private life; we know almost too much about Mozart's. Bach was an orphan; Mozart was all-too-much the son of an autocratic father. Bach was the product of the Lutheran tradition of northern Germany. Mozart was born into the Catholic tradition of Austria; but he clearly belonged even more to the secular, aesthetic, tradition that had its origins in Renaissance Italy. These starkly contrasting personal backgrounds inevitably affected their existential values: their understanding of their “purpose in life,” their artistic missions. This understanding, in turn, inevitably touched on the purpose and, ultimately, the meaning of their music. Why did Bach and Mozart bother to compose at all? What did the effort and the resulting work mean to them? What were their fundamental objectives as artists?

I should like to begin exploring these issues somewhat indirectly. Rather than talking immediately about Bach or about Mozart, let us consider Mozart's Bach—a matter we shall consider even more extensively in chapter 14. As it turns out, Mozart instinctively understood a great deal about the creative impulse informing the music of Bach. In April of 1789, on the occasion of his visit to Leipzig (and his perfor-mance on the organ of the Thomaskirche—Bach's own organ), Mozart experienced a close encounter of the revelatory kind with the church music of J. S. Bach. The event was recorded by Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842), a pupil at the Thomasschule at the time of Mozart's visit, and later the founding editor of the influential Leipzig journal Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. Rochlitz writes:

During his lifetime, and for sometime thereafter, Bach was a contemporary com-poser. That means, among other things, that he had not yet acquired the status of immortality and was not beyond criticism. In the year 1737, at the very pin-nacle of his career, and only six months after having been conferred the lofty title of “Composer to the Court Chapel of His Royal Majesty in Poland” (Compositeur bey der Königlichen HofCapelle), Bach was taken severely to task, in print, by his former pupil, Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–76), in the following terms:

Scheibe's critique, of course, is one of the most famous documents of its kind in the history of music, not least because it was far more than simply one man's opin-ion. It was also an ideological manifesto to which we shall return in due course.

Bach himself was by no means unaware of the unusual difficulty his music posed. Referring to his church compositions in an official document written less than a year before Scheibe's attack, Bach described them as “incomparably more difficult and more intricate” (ohngleich schwerer und intricater) than those by other composers.

In his provocative essay, “Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the Aesthetics of Patricide,” Richard Kramer remarks, “Everywhere, Emanuel felt the need to speak of his father. In his music, he fails to do so. The patrimony is not acknowledged there.” Kramer demonstrates this in a perceptive analysis of one of Emanuel's challenging keyboard compositions, the Sonata in C Major, H. 248 (1775).

Coping with that patrimony could not have been a picnic for the male offspring of Johann Sebastian Bach. The towering shadow cast by J. S. Bach on the lives, careers, and ambitions of all five of them was undoubtedly overwhelming. Kramer's comment invites us to ponder the various tactics and strategies these uniquely privi-leged—and uniquely challenged—offspring developed to come to terms with that intimidating legacy. He has also offered an intriguing way to assess and understand the meaning of the careers of the Bach sons: namely, by determining the degree to which—and the manner in which—they succeeded in emerging from their father's shadow. Much of what follows will be conjectural; but very little is not conjectural in historical or biographical writing concerned with comprehending the meaning of events centuries old. On the other hand, much of it will be a matter of reasonably “connecting dots”—that is, documented facts—which we may have become overly reluctant to connect or account for in rather obvious ways.

Bach and His Sons

According to at least one eighteenth-century author, there was an abundance of mutual disdain between Johann Sebastian Bach and his musical sons. Carl Friedrich Cramer (1752–1807), the editor of the important Magazin der Musik, personally knew both Philipp Emanuel and Friedemann. In his autobiography, written in 1792–93, Cramer mentions: “The old Sebastian had three sons. He was satisfied only with Friedemann, the great organist. Even about Carl Philipp Emanuel he said (unjustly!): ‘’Tis Berlin blue! It fades!’—Regarding the London Chrétien, [Sebastian] Bach was wont to cite the verse by Gellert: ‘The boy is sure to thrive owing to his stupidity!’ In fact, among the three Bach sons this one had the greatest success.—I have these opinions from Friedemann himself.”

Johann Sebastian Bach's reputation as one of the supreme figures of Western musical history rests primarily on the legacy of his keyboard music. Whereas the composer's church music and ensemble compositions, including such masterpieces as the Mass in B Minor, the Passions, and the Brandenburg Concertos, fell virtually into oblivion after his death, the Inventions and Sinfonias, the harpsichord suites, the Goldberg Variations, the chorale settings, and the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier have been the objects of unbroken study, veneration, and emulation by gen-erations of musicians—amateur and professional—from Bach's day to the present.

During his lifetime Bach had already been celebrated as the greatest living keyboard player. But it is essential to recognize that for Bach and his contempo-raries, harpsichordists and organists were, more often than not, the same people. In the early eighteenth century, as throughout the seventeenth, the term “clavier” was generic and embraced all keyboard instruments, whether they were attached to strings or pipes. And it followed that a “clavier” player was equally at home on all the available keyboard instruments.

Defining the Repertoire

Naturally enough, during the Baroque era the various keyboard instruments, includ-ing the organ, shared a common repertoire to a significant extent. This is true not only for the earlier masters but also—far more than has generally been acknowl-edged—for much of the “clavier” music of Bach. This means specifically that we must abandon the deeply entrenched “binary” categorization that is literally cen-turies old but nonetheless an anachronistic one. We must recognize, rather, that with regard to performance medium, Bach's keyboard compositions do not fall into two strictly separated categories—consisting of works either for the organ or for the stringed keyboard instruments—but rather into three: works exclusively or primarily for organ, works exclusively or primarily for harpsichord, and works for “clavier,” that is, for any keyboard instrument. Only such a three-part division of Bach's keyboard repertory does full justice to the explicit designations contained in the sources and to the historical circumstances of keyboard performance in the Baroque era.