Composer of the month
Bach
Introduced by Boyd Neel illustrated by the BBC Scottish Orchestra
(Leader, J. Mouland Begbie )
Conducted by John Hopkins
A hundred years ago Bach's music was entirely unknown in this country and in most of Europe. Very little indeed of it was in print, and that little was hard to come by. Since his death two hundred years ago, he had been completely forgotten, so that those who, armed with faith, undertook his restoration and the recovery and publication of his music, had to dig pretty deeply and patiently into the past. And now that we have it all, now that Bach is one of the most performed and, without doubt, the best of all best-sellers, it seems incredible that there existed a sequence of generations that, having so great a treasure 'at hand, ignored it.