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"When people talk about Bach, they often sound like Erich von Stroheim in 'Sunset Boulevard,' as he intones, in tribute to Norma Desmond, 'She vas de greatest of dem all.' .... One can end up saying, in a distinctly off-putting way, not only that Bach...is the greatest but also that everything else is worthless."
Some other references to JsBach in Ross' blog are:
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Were Baroque listeners uncultured idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music’s place in society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.
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When it comes to the central figures of musical history, the Grove gets the proportions right. Beethoven is still champion after all these years, with forty-two double-columned pages of biography and analysis. As in the previous edition, Beethoven’s works are written up flawlessly by Joseph Kerman, the dean of American musicologists. J. S. Bach gets thirty-six pages, Schubert thirty-four, Haydn thirty-three, Handel thirty-one, Mozart twenty-nine.
