In the early part of the seventeenth century it was the fashion in instrumental music to overload single notes with ornaments and add florid runs. Lately it has become the fashion to do so in vocal music as well. That Bach shared this disposition may be inferred from certain pieces that he wrote in this style. An instance is the Prelude in E minor in the first part of the _Well-tempered Clavier._ But he soon returned to his natural better taste, and altered the movement to the form in which it is engraved.(325)
Every decade has its own style of melody, distinctive of itself and evanescent. A composer must carefully avoid it if he hopes to be listened to by posterity. In his young days even Bach ran upon this rock. His early compositions for the Organ, and the two-part _Inventions_ in their original form, are full of fiorituri such as the taste of his period approved. His Organ compositions remain comparatively untouched, but the _Inventions_ he closely revised. The public will soon be able to compare them in their first and later forms, as the publishers, with admirable spirit, have resolved to discontinue the present edition and to send out to subscribers a revised one based on Bach’s corrected text.
Bach’s processes of revision so far mentioned, however, merely correct faults of form, that is, diffuseness or incomplete development of a musical thought. But Bach employed other methods which are less easy to describe because they are more subtle. He often rivets the style and character of a piece by changing a single note, strictly correct grammatically and yet disagreeable to an artist such as himself. Even commonplace passages he could convert into phrases of beauty by the addition or alteration of a single note. Only the most sensitive taste and trained experience can decide in such cases, and Bach possessed both in the highest perfection. He developed them to such a pitch, indeed, that his brain eventually rejected any idea which, in all its properties and relations, did not accord inevitably and naturally with the whole composition. Consequently his later works display such consistency of merit that all of them seem to have been cast complete in a mould, so smooth, facile and abundant is the flow of his rich fancy. It is on the highest summits of the art that harmony and melody find their ideal union, and as yet Bach dwells there in majestic isolation.