How are the texts of ancient drama to be understood by modern interpreters - separated as we are by so great a distance of time and difference of culture? This problem has been treated in many ways in this century, as the study of ancient literature, like the study of other literatures, has undergone rapid institutional and intellectual changes. There are many paths and genealogies that could be traced through this history, and not only do many different methodological approaches overlap and interrelate in a variety of complex ways, but also there is great variety within any one broad heading (such as 'structuralism'). In this chapter I shall try to unravel some of the main threads that make up the texture of contemporary debate about critical methodology with regard to Greek tragedy. The methodology of each critic who works on Greek tragedy - myself included, for sure - is not the application of a ready-made theory so much as the product of (at least) teachers' and colleagues' influence, reading and study within classical scholarship and other fields, institutional pressures, laziness, acumen ... In attempting to trace some of the main lines of enquiry, it is inevitable that the siting of each scholar within the intellectual and social institutions of classical scholarship cannot be finely nuanced. What is more, the teleology of a history that ends with a necessarily partial view of the here and now must distort the picture of the critical developments to be traced. None the less, some lines on the map - however tentatively drawn - will help an appreciation of how contemporary understandings of Greek tragedy have developed.

By 300 BC or so Athenian tragedy had become the property of every Greek city, performed in its local theatre and reflected in its visual arts. This iconic prominence was sustained throughout the Graeco-Roman world for the next 600 years and more. That is why, for example, many of the wallpaintings discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum show tragic subjects, and even more include the motif of the tragic mask. These provide their own interest, but this chapter will concentrate on the period from 500 to 300 BC, the era when Athens was still the active centre of drama. It will also concentrate mainly on painted pottery, if only because very little that is relevant survives of the wall-paintings, sculpture, metal-work or other artforms.

As is amply shown throughout this Companion, tragedy was a major prestigious event within the cultural and political life of classical Athens. Pottery-painting was, by comparison, a humble and domestic art-form. Detailed paintings in the red-figure techniques were, none the less, an especially Athenian achievement; and, like drama, this Attic product was disseminated to all corners of the Hellenic world. While many of the vessels were standard and mass-produced, many others display elaborate workmanship, and must have been objects which expected individual attention. A fair number, furthermore, represent mythological and heroic scenes; and they do so in a dignified and serious style - at first glance not unlike that of tragedy.

Servius (called Marius or Maurus Servius Honoratus in MSS from the ninth century onwards) was a grammarian of the fourth century AD, the author of a celebrated commentary on Virgil. This is generally held to be based on a commentary (now lost) by an earlier fourth-century AD commentator, Aelius Donatus (the teacher of St Jerome), and exists in two forms: the longer, known as Servius Auctus, Servius Danielis, DServius, or DS, was first published in 1600 by Pierre Daniel, and is thought to be a seventh- to eighth-century expansion of the shorter form on the basis of material from Donatus' commentary not used by Servius himself. We know little about Servius' life, but he appears as a young man in Macrobius' dialogue the Saturnalia (dramatic date 383-4, but probably composed later in the fifth century) as a respectful follower of the pagan leader Aurelius Symmachus (Sat. 1.2.15).

Servius' commentary comes at the end of a long period of Virgilian commentary, which had begun in the first century BC. The commentary form itself goes back to Hellenistic and earlier Greek scholarship, above all on Homer, and in a sense Servius' work bears the same relationship to Homeric commentary as the Aeneid does to the Iliad and Odyssey. The format is the familiar one of a lemma (one or more words of the text) followed by comments, in the manner of a modern variorum edition: sometimes scholars are named, but more commonly (especially in the shorter version) we have merely expressions like 'some say . . . others . ..' The text is typically seen as raising a 'problem' (quaestio), to which a 'solution' is offered: the methodology goes back to the beginnings of Homeric commentary.

In 1930 Europe celebrated the bimillennium of Virgil's birth. The celebrations fell in the middle of Mussolini's dictatorship (1922-43), strengthening the links that Mussolini sought to establish between his Italian regime and ancient Rome. The Aeneid, singing of the birth of a new city and a new empire, helped to validate Mussolini's imperialist policies, and in 1936 a new Italian empire was born. In the same year the Austrian writer Hermann Broch began to meditate upon Virgil's position in the modern world and by 1937 he had conceived his novel The Death of Virgil. This envoi will focus in particular on Broch's novel, since it probes and anticipates many of the anxieties attached to twentieth-century responses to Virgil.

The opposed political approaches to Virgil offered by Mussolini and the anti-Fascist Broch typify the variety of Virgilian studies proliferating at this time. A renaissance of interest in Virgil was due not solely to the bimillennium, but more suggestively to the sense of crisis pervading Europe in the entre-deux-guerres period. George Steiner has observed that after the First World War the European ear became more attuned to the Virgilian voice of exile than to the Homeric cry of triumph. Such a claim seems validated by the wealth of Virgilian biographies published in the 1920s and 1930s.

Since the nineteenth century, the analysis of music has undertaken to provide accounts of musical structure by explaining musical events and patterns that lend coherence to an individual work as well as contributing to its beauty and meaning. Drawing on a variety of musical building blocks – whether harmonic, contrapuntal, melodic, rhythmic or sectional – analysts of various theoretical persuasions have asked their readers to set aside their first impressions in order to pay attention to the way a piece of music works by examining the details of its ‘facture’. The ‘truth-value’ of such interpretations can of course never be divorced from the ideas an analyst holds about musical structure, since these notions or ‘theories’ largely determine which musical parameters count as structurally significant. Nonetheless within the realm of musical analysis – far different from, say, mathematics or physics – it has rarely been the elegance or grandiosity of a structural theory that has attracted adherents. Instead, successful analyses have always appealed to an inherently musical plausibility, fuzzy though such a concept must ultimately remain. For this reason, the seeming circularity of interpretation endemic to musical analysis will appear less troubling, especially when one realises that analysts – if they are to succeed – need to persuade a community of musicians that it is possible to hear a piece as proceeding ‘so and not otherwise’, to borrow a phrase of Theodor W. Adorno. And contrary to some popular perceptions, musicians are a famously hard-nosed lot when it comes to being told how to hear a piece with which they are intimate.

I shall attempt in this chapter to open up another mode of understanding Bach within his historical context. This involves comparing his attitude to music with the metaphysical theories of certain rationalist philosophers of the Baroque era. Much of what I propose here is certainly conjectural: there is no question of a direct line of influence, or even that Bach was necessarily conscious of these parallels. I intend rather to show that Bach's musical thinking and that of the metaphysicians might depend on a similar historical world-view and, more importantly, that Bach's musical mind is equal to the greatest intellects of the age, even though he had no academic pretensions himself.

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and particularly his pupil Christian Wolff (1679–1754) are certainly very close to Bach historically; indeed Leibniz's name has occurred intermittently in Bach criticism and research, particularly in the decades leading up to 1950. Bach was closely associated with a follower of Leibniz and Wolff, Lorenz Mizler, who published Leibniz's famous dictum concerning music in the second issue of his Musikalische Bibliothek: 'Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.' But the metaphysics and personality of an older, consistently shunned figure, Benedict de (or Baruch) Spinoza (1632–77), may be even closer to Bach's creative personality, although – for religious reasons – this was something that Bach could not possibly have acknowledged consciously.

According to J. G. Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), Bach ‘learned the first principia on the clavier from his eldest brother, Mr. Johann Christoph Bach, formerly organist and schoolmaster at Ohrdruf’. No mention is made here (or in Bach's Obituary, which gives a similar account) of composition, and Johann Christoph is not known to have been a composer. In answer to a query of J. N. Forkel's, Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote in 1775: ‘The instruction received by [J. S. Bach] in Ohrdruf may well have been designed for an organist and nothing more.’ The clear implication is that composition was largely excluded.

Here we have a fact of great importance for the understanding of Bach's early development as a composer: unlike his great contemporary G. F. Handel, he seems to have received no formal tuition in the rudiments of composition. His early compositions, most of which are for keyboard, had dual roots: in his own rapidly growing skill as an organist and harpsichordist (‘In a short time he had fully mastered all the pieces his brother had voluntarily given him to learn’); and in his ‘observation of the works of the most famous and proficient composers of his day and … the fruits of his own reflection upon them’.

To judge by the character of Bach's early keyboard works, both the improvisatory and virtuoso aspects of his playing acted as spurs to his creativity. Improvisation was essential to the keyboard player's training in Bach's day, and numerous passages in the early keyboard works no doubt had an extempore basis, notably the free fantasy interludes in the sonata BWV 963 and in the toccatas BWV 910-15 or the ruminative elaborated chord sequences in the preludes BWV 921-3 and in the third section of the toccatas BWV 910 and 913.

The notion of consciously performing the works of Johann Sebastian Bach in a Baroque fashion, with Baroque forces, is a relatively recent development. Indeed, it is an idea that has taken firm hold only in the past fifty years. When we look back on the history of Bach's music – its birth in the Baroque, its eclipse in the Classical Period, its rediscovery in the Romantic era, and its canonisation in modern times – we find that musicians took many different approaches to playing it. The issues of what we now call ‘performance practice’ have constantly changed.

The Baroque era itself was a period of considerable stylistic self-consciousness, and this self-consciousness affected the way pieces were performed. As a German, Bach took an eclectic approach towards composition, calculatedly calling on aspects of at least five national styles: German, French, Italian, English and Polish. Each style implied particular forms, gestures, and – most importantly – modes of performance. For instance, the Overture in B Minor BWV 831, written in the French style ('nach Französischer Art’ as Bach put it), contains rhythms in the opening section that attempt to record the sharply dotted ‘French’ performing style. When Bach revised the early, C minor, version of this Overture, BWV 831a, for inclusion in Clavier-Übung II (where it is paired with an Italian Concerto ‘nach Italiaenischen Gusto’), he sharpened the rhythms to bring the execution more closely into line with the French manner of playing (Example 13.1). That is to say, he intentionally bowed to the conventions of French performance practice.

The musical family is by no means an unfamiliar phenomenon, and nearly everyone must be acquainted with at least one household in which practically every member delights not only in listening to music but also in singing or playing musical instruments. Even with the weakening of family ties and the proliferation of ready-made forms of home entertainment in western society today, it is still possible for many a paterfamilias to echo the words that J. S. Bach wrote in 1730 in a famous letter to his former schoolmate Georg Erdmann:

Moreover, musical talent of an unusual kind has manifested itself in modern times in families such as the Menuhins and the Torteliers. One could discuss at length the relative importance of heredity and environment in the formation of musical families at whatever level of attainment, but it seems quite clear that the role played by environment is more important in fostering a talent for music than it is in influencing other forms of artistic and intellectual endeavour. By its nature, musical activity impinges on everyone within earshot (and, some would say, even on the child in the womb) and therefore invites at least some degree of communal engagement. Literature, painting and mathematics (to mention three branches of cultural activity closely connected to music) are, on the other hand, solitary pursuits, and - the Brontes, the Breughels and the Bernoullis notwithstanding - the musical family is a phenomenon rarely paralleled in the other arts.

The second half of the eighteenth century: ‘adoption’ – ‘classical’ rephrasing – Mozart's image of Bach

The historical location of Bach in the music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the accompanying radical changes are determined by his position in the second half of the eighteenth century. The caesura ‘1750’ could indicate a break in the influence of Bach's music, or the beginning of a tradition where it and his understanding of it are transmitted to his sons, students and future generations in a linear, undisturbed fashion, or, conversely, the beginning of the process of reinterpretation that is more familiar after the turn of the nineteenth century. Each of these three positions has consequences for the writing of music history in the second half of the eighteenth century and for the development of a ‘Romantic Bach interpretation’ in the early nineteenth century. In the first case, the phase 1750–1800 can be portrayed without Bach, which, given the minor influence of Bach's music on the general public, would be correct. In the second case, the preservation of the Bach tradition, there is the danger that the ‘shift’ of the divergent horizons of expectation, in Blumenberg's sense, would be exaggerated and the historical portrayal would be focused too much on the monument ‘Bach’. The third position has the advantage of differentiating between the ideas of breaking with the past and continuity and sees the process of reinterpretation during the eighteenth century as the decisive precondition for the means whereby Bach's music, once functional and rhetorical, now becomes autonomous.

To raise objections about the very topic one has been asked to write about is surely unusual; perhaps it would be better not to address the topic at all. But that would be far too simple a solution. It makes more sense to formulate the discontent, not as a disclaimer soon to be forgotten, but rather as a critical undercurrent that will run throughout both this chapter and the next.

Three fundamental objections can be raised against the assigned topic. First, much of the material is ubiquitous, given that there is hardly a composer of the nineteenth or twentieth century who has not occupied himself with Bach, whether it be by choice or requirement. Perhaps it would therefore be more feasible to investigate those who have given Bach a wide berth. Delimiting the material in this manner would serve as a corrective to the unattainable goal of comprehensively listing and critically interpreting all forms of Bach reception. Secondly, there is the danger of mythologising Bach by producing yet another historiographically out-moded description of great heroes, a monocausal, linear music history delineated by monuments, Bach – Beethoven – Brahms – Schoenberg – Boulez. Thirdly, there is the historical and ontological difference between Bach's horizon of expectation and that of the present day; the ubiquity of Bach's music and the mythologising of Bach today contradict the situation in his own time.

Some understanding of the theological content and the liturgical practices of Lutheranism is essential for the historical appreciation of Bach's music. Bach's theological thinking was formed by the distinctively Lutheran responses to the Reformation debate of the sixteenth century, and he composed a great deal of his music for the Lutheran liturgies of his day. For example, the church cantatas usually relate in some way to the biblical readings, liturgical provisions, congregational hymnody, and ecclesiastical monody of the particular day, season or celebration. This chapter therefore outlines some of the distinctive features of the Lutheran Reformation in general, and Luther's musical and liturgical reforms in particular, as they relate both to later Lutheranism and to Bach's life and works.

The Reformation

Although it is customary to employ the term ‘Reformation’ as the ecclesiastical analogue of the ‘Renaissance’ of sixteenth-century Europe, it might be more accurate to speak of the ‘Reformations’ of the period. Although there were certainly a number of common concerns – such as the authority of the Bible in contradistinction to the authority of the church of Rome, or the concept of the general priesthood of all believers set against the particular priesthood of Catholicism – the Reformation in each European area developed its own characteristics, both theological and practical. Thus the Reformation in Switzerland, centred on such cities as Geneva, Basle and Zurich, was strongly influenced by the theology of such Reformers as Zwingli, Calvin and Bullinger.

The repertory

The Bach literature shows no unified approach to the categorisation of the instrumental music: while some writers describe the entire repertory as ‘chamber music’, others speak of ‘chamber and orchestral music’. The reason for this uncertainty lies in the historical change in the meaning of the terms ‘chamber music’ and ‘orchestra’. For Bach's contemporaries, the term ‘chamber music’ covered all types of music written for the court and for domestic consumption, but excluded music intended for the church and theatre. In his letter releasing Bach from his service in 1723, the composer's employer in Köthen could write, therefore, that Bach had served him as ‘Kapellmeister and director of our chamber music’. According to our contemporary understanding of the term, it is now restricted to ‘music written for and performed by a small ensemble, usually instrumental, with one performer on a part’.

The word ‘orchestra’ was occasionally used in Bach's day to refer to a relatively large body of players, or so it would appear to be used by Silvius Leopold Weiss in a letter to Johann Mattheson of 1723: ‘But to accompany on the lute in the orchestra, that would of course be too weak.’ In general, however, it may be said that neither Bach nor his contemporaries drew a distinction in principie between an ‘orchestra’ and an ensemble that performed ‘chamber music’.