Elia Taubert

“... and this man, the greatest musical poet and the greatest musical rhetorician that has ever existed, and probably that ever will exist, was a German. Be proud of him, oh Fatherland, be proud of him, but also be worthy of him!”
― Johann Nikolaus Forkel

“Nowhere so well as in the Well-tempered Clavichord are we made to realise that art was Bach’s religion. He does not depict natural soul-states, like Beethoven in his sonatas, no striving and struggling towards a goal, but the reality of life felt by a spirit always conscious of being superior to life, a spirit in which the most contradictory emotions, wildest grief and exuberant cheerfulness, are simply phases of a fundamental superiority of soul. It is this that gives the same transfigured air to the sorrow laden E flat minor prelude of the First Part and the care-free, volatile prelude in G major in the Second Part. Whoever has once felt this wonderful tranquility has comprehended the mysterious spirit that has here expressed all it knew and felt of life in the secret language of tone, and will render Bach the thanks we render only to the great souls to whom it is given to reconcile men with life and bring them peace.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“Because of the continuity of its tone, which can be maintained as long as desired, the organ has in it an element of the eternal. Even in a secular room it cannot become a secular instrument.”
― Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

“The fact that the work today has become common property may console us for the other fact that an analysis of it is almost as impossible as it is to depict a wood by enumerating the trees and describing their appearance. We can only repeat again and again—take them and play them and penetrate into this world for yourself. Aesthetic elucidation of any kind must necessarily be superficial here, What so fascinates us in the work is not the form or the build of the piece, but the world-view that is mirrored in it. It is not so much that we enjoy the Well-tempered Clavichord as that we are edified by it. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter—to all these it gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.”
― Albert Schweitzer