Myth-Making and the Politics of Nationality in Narratives of J.S. Bach’s 1717 Contest with Louis Marchand

Abstract

The early accounts of the keyboard contest that took place in Dresden in 1717 between J.S. Bach and Louis Marchand are widely divergent, despite Birnbaum (1739), C.P.E. Bach and Agricola (1754), Adlung (1758), Hawkins (1776), Marpurg (1786), and Forkel (1802) all claiming the authority of either Bach or his sons. These discrepancies enabled later biographers to craft their narratives selectively according to their own allegiances. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Bach biography typically followed Bach/Agricola’s and Forkel’s retellings, in which Marchand fled Dresden on the day of the event before it could take place. However, in life-writing on Marchand, the story instead appeared in Marpurg’s more sympathetic version, which held that one concert took place—with Marchand implicitly judged to be Bach’s equal—prior to his taking flight. This rendering was apparently favored in France, where the episode’s potential for being appropriated to illustrate Austrogermanic musical superiority against French philistinism would have generated significant unease. Examination of variant narratives therefore reveals much about how national ideologies can steer a biographical episode in particular directions, as well as how an influential author’s endeavors to straighten the historical record can unwittingly send myth-making along fresh trajectories.