IN his lifetime Bach witnessed the reputations of his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emmanuel begin to supersede his own. This was to be expected: eighteenth-century culture favoured the latest musical trends over the preservation of past masterworks. Johann Sebastian could hardly have imagined that history would immortalise him simply as Bach. Nor could he have envisaged that devotees in London would play such a large part in the rediscovery and popularisation of his music.

The story of Bach's revival in England is not one of a sudden mass awakening to the genius of the composer, but rather a stop-start series of experiments and personal revelations. Take the year 1885. The 200th anniversary of Bach's birth offered the opportunity to focus on the composer, but Bach was still a historical curiosity, as the journalist Henry Sutherland Edwards demonstrates:

Positioning the character of Bach's compositions earlier than those of Shakespeare was a mark of antiquarianism, and despite the emerging recognition that ‘to the composers of Europe Bach is probably better known than Handel’, Handel was unsurprisingly presented as the more dominant figure of these ‘archaic’ masters: