• 

are, unfortunately, not too clear. The excessive quotes from the two 
secondary sources cited earlier are perhaps the chief weakness in the 
study. It has caused the author to slip into some strange citations: 
Lucques for Lucca (p. 4), Lipsia for Leipzig (p. 21), Bibliotheque Na-
tionale de Florence (p. 31, footnote 34), and so on. 

Chapter 5 is devoted to an examination of 18 plates from the 
manuscript Vat. lat. 6082, a missale plenum from the 12th century. 
An index to this Gradual is found in Appendix A and the plates in 
Appendix B. The study is not a comprehensive analysis of each of 
the neumes and the various forms each neume takes in the manuscript 
bu t a select reference to some of the melodic differences between the 
Beneventan version on the plate and the Vatican Gradual. Occasional 
neumes of interest are pointed out. No attempt was made to compare 
this manuscript with the two Beneventan Graduals already published 
and indexed in Volumes 14 and 15 of the Pa/eographie musicale. Such 
a comparison, both with regard to contents and musical notation, 
would have added much to the dissertation. 

Many of the plates in the Appendix are of interest in that they also 
contain examples of those manuscripts written in central Italy with 
non-Beneventan text but with a musical notation borrowed from the 
Beneventan. The importance of these manuscripts indicates a fertile 
area for subsequent studies. 

REMBERT G. WEAKLAND, O.S.B. is coadjutor archabbot of St. Vincent Archabbey 
and chancellor of St. Vincent College. 

[manuel Willheim 
Johann Adolph Scheibe: German 
musical thought in transition 

Ann Arbor: University Microfilms (UM order no. 
63-5159), 1963. (299p., pas. film $4.10; University 
of Illinois diss.) 

Konrad Wolff 

When composers double as writers, or vice versa, they usually create 
complications for posterity. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, for instance, 
is known to students of music history as one of the founders of the 
German lied and to students of literary history as the principal target 

211 



of Goethe and Schiller's satirical Xenien. Very rarely do the readers 
or even the authors of the one kind of history know about Reichardt's 
figuring in the other. It is therefore fortunate that the author of this 
dissertation on Scheibe (1708-1778), in addition to his musicological 
background, is schooled in German literature and in aesthetics. Scheibe 
was a respectable composer and a leading musical journalist. He also 
contributed much to the philosophy of the arts in general, both in 
Germany (where he grew up) and in Denmark (where he lived during 
the last thirty-eight years of his life). His best-known work, Der Cri-
tische Musicus, was originally conceived as a parallel to Johann 
Christoph Gottsched's Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst of 1730. 
Gottsched, who was the most respected German author of the time 
and the leading authority on literature, had been Scheibe's teacher in 
Leipzig. His book was based on the so-called "rationalist" principles 
of 17th-century French drama. This was what Scheibe tried to trans-
late into musical criticism, but with time, as Willheim demonstrates, 
he became increasingly less dependent on Gottsched's system. 

To the music student of our time, Scheibe is mainly known for his 
"most unfortunate" (p. 240) controversy over the music of J.5. Bach. 
Scheibe accused him of an "overloaded (schwulstig) and confused 
style"l as well as an "excess of art." He also objected to Bach's cus-
tom of writing out embellishments in actual notes, which, Scheibe said, 
made the melody unintelligible besides depriving it of harmonic beauty. 
He concluded by judging that with all due respect for Bach's tremen-
dous care and effort, his compositions were contrary both to Nature 
and to Reason. 

Scheibe's attack created a sensation. While Bach himself did not 
reply, one of his admirers, J. Abraham Birnbaum, Leipzig professor 
of rhetoric, wrote a forceful defense. Further emphasis was given the 
battle by two famous musical authors, Mattheson and Mizler,2 who 
opened their journals to Scheibe and Birnbaum, respectively, for the 
continuation of the fencing match. 

The most unfortunate part of the quarrel was that Scheibe was pre-
vented by the publicity of the affair from admitting that he had done 
Bach an injustice; however, in 1739 he did pay full tribute to the 
Italian Concerto. 

It is hard to conceive how a good musician such as Scheibe could 
ever have been deaf to the values of Bach's music, considering that 

IHis speaking of Bach as the "Lohenstein of music" shows Scheibe's de-
pendence on Gottsched who used to say the same thing of all contemporary 
writers he disliked. Lohenstein was a "schwulstig" writer of the 17th 
century. Cf. Scherer-Walzel, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, (3d ed., Ber-
lin, 1921), p. 309. 

2Although he devotes a whole chapter to Mizler (69ff.), Willheim does not 
mention the significant fact that Gottsched contributed articles on music(!) to 
Mizler's journal. This may have been one of the reasons for Scheibe's dislike of 
Mizler and for his gradual estrangement from Gottsched. 

212 

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• 



• 

during Scheibe's student years in Leipzig he had heard the master him-
self play. Willheim investigates the personal relations between Bach 
and Scheibe thoroughly and arrives at the convincing conclusion that 
there was no personal feud (as some Bach biographers believe). Never-
theless, it is quite possible that the young man, not being of a most 
generous disposition (a defect he shared with all the writers of his 
time), either consciously or unconsciously tried to get even with the 
one member of the older generation with whom he could never hope to 
compete. 

Willheim is objective enough to sympathize with Scheibe's criticism 
that Bach wrote too unvocally. Even if true, to blame Bach on this 
account is as narrowminded a reproach as the opposite one by Niigeli 
who some eighty years later blamed Mozart for writing too vocally. 
To understand the problem one must remember that instrumental 
music, to which this criticism principally relates, was just then com-
ing into its own. The great Lessing explained in 17673 that an instru-
mental composer must be much more than a composer of vocal music 
and must always be prepared to give his best, since no text can come 
to his aid and fill the gaps in the expressive quality of the music. 

Willheim regards Scheibe's initial aesthetic approach as deriving 
from Gottsched, that is, as essentially French. In a slightly oversimpli-
fied outline (20ff.) he describes the French style in music as vocal and 
expressive, centering on adagio pieces, in contrast to the Italian style 
of sensuous and lyric instrumental music in which the accent is on the 
allegro type. French music is characterized as rationalist-with refer-
ence to Cartesianism rather than the Enlightenment (p. 51)-and 
I talian music, as unphilosophical. Then Willheim shows that Scheibe 
gradually added the new idea of the century, Nature, to Gottsched's 
standards of French classical drama. 4 To Scheibe, the element of 
Nature in music was Melody (p. 100), whereas Harmony represented 
the Art of illuminating the melody and nothing more; when he blames 
Bach for showing" too much art," he is referring to the fact that in 
Bach's music the harmony follows its own laws. 

Later, in the chapter on rhetoric (p. 157), Willheim incidentally 
refers to Bach's occasional habit of expressing a variety of emotions 
throughout a cantata text by presenting the same melody in various 
figurations. However, this was just one of Bach's numerous ways of 
uniting the different parts of the same composition. Quite as frequent-
ly, he proceeds by harmonic means. The Second Partita is marked by 
the cyclic use of the dominant ninth chord and the Goldberg Variations, 
by the identity of the harmonic progressions and the harmonic rhythm 
without any help from melodic motifs.5 

3Cf. the review of Voltaire's Semiramis in Lessings Werke, Georg Wit-
towski, ed. Hamburgische Dramaturgie 5:12-17, (Leipzig, 1911). 

4Cf. Pope (1711): "First follow Nature ... at once the source, and end, 
and test of Art." 

'Certain authors have seen a melodic motif in the bass line. This is not so; 
the aria is homophonic, and the bass is just a bass. 

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For this, Schiebe had no ear, though he was not insensitive to har-
mony as a means of expression. Willheim prints in the Appendix a 
recitative from Scheibe's cantata, Ariadne, which shows an amazing 
pre-romantic use of tritone progressions and dissonances. 6 The ap-
preciation of harmonic logic as a thing of beauty (as for instance in the 
works of Corelli and Vivaldi) was beyond his comprehension; here, ex-
pected harmonic progressions are judiciously mixed with mild surprises, 
and the result resembles one of Horace's or Cicero's well-shaped sen-
tences. Bach added individual expression to this system by using 
dissonances and alterations whenever required, but he did not abandon 
the grammar of directed harmony for the sake of expressiveness as did 
Scheibe in his recitative. 

Willheim neglects this aspect, and we should have liked more help 
from him from a strictly musical viewpoint. He does give us an in-
teresting expose of how Scheibe, by underlining melodic inspiration as 
a primary source of composing, in fact transcended the Affektenlehre. 
This is followed by a discussion of rhetorical figures, ways of writing 
(Schreibarten), national styles and types of music. 

Willheim's report on Scheibe's doctrine of rhetoric is, on the whole, 
one of the best parts of the dissertation. Differently from Mattheson/ 
Scheibe speaks of rhetoric only for the present a tion of single phrases 
and not for the organization of a composition as a whole. In addition to 
strictly rhetorical figures, he also mentions three musical ones: tran-
situs, syncopatio, and ligatura. 

Scheibe's distinction between three different styles (Schreibarten) 
contains a few original points. He recognizes (129ff.), first of all, the 
elevated style (splendorous music appropriate for festive occasions or 
grand subjects), then the intermediate style (meaningful, pleasant, 
and flowing, but also intelligent}8 and finally the low style which has 
its rightful place in the pastoral Schaferspiel (of which later Goethe 
produced several examples). Willheim then deals with the tradi-
tional genres (Gattungen) of music as described by Scheibe, whom he 
justly blames for neglecting the chamber style. In the account of na-
tional styles, Willheim, without much support in Scheibe's writings, 

6It always seems to me that German music was fully ready for Romanti-
cism by 1750, when the eruption of Classicism halted this evolution for a great 
number of years. Figures like c.P.E. Bach and Scheibe, who combined artistic 
and literary productions, resemble Berlioz and Schumann in this respect, and 
are in contrast to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. 

7Cf. Hans Lenneberg's translation of much of Der vollkommene Cape 11-
meister (not quoted by Willheim) in Journal of Music Theory 2:47-84, 193-
236 (1958). 

8"exceedingly clear, lively, fluent, and yet perspicacious," in Willheim's ren-
dering. 

214 

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• 

classifies the Polonaise or Polacca 9 as part of Polish music. By 1720 this 
dance had, in fact, become as international as the minuet. In this chap-
ter, I missed a reference to Georg Muffat's epoch-making Florilegium 
of 1696-97. 

The most progressive part of Scheibe's theories, and the climax of 
Willheim's dissertation, occurs in the section dealing with operatic reci-
tatives. In this field Scheibe was several steps ahead of everybody else. 
It is entirely possible that Gluck-who may have met Scheibe in Co-
penhagen in 1747 (p. 203)-was influenced by Scheibe's concepts. (It 
would be a worthwhile task to compare Scheibe and Gluck's operatic 
ideas in detail.) The highest possible compliment was paid to Scheibe's 
views in 1767 when Lessing quoted them extensively in his review of 
Voltaire's Semiramis (p. 208) . 

Willheim's book is solid and informative as far as it goes. There are 
some editorial flaws in it, from typographical errors and unintended 
repetitions (one sentence appears twice, on pages 199 and 200) to mis-
translations. Most of the essential passages from Scheibe's writings 
are fully quoted in German and then translated. Willheim translates 
"sie [die Natur] zu erhalten, ja so gar in bessern Stand zu setzen" by 
"to support it, to improve it," whereas it really means "to preserve 
it, and even repair it." (p. 101). On p. 95 he quotes Scheibe's assertion 
that symphonies must be judged by the fire of their invention and that 
it may happen that a composer, by force of trying to match the differ-
ent parts skillfully, deprives himself of his spontaneous spark. "Man 
intersuche also nur, ... ob alle Satze gehorig mit einander iiberein-
stimmen, und ob dahero den Komponisten vielleicht das Feuer verlassen 
ha t." This means: "All that is necessary is to find out ... whether the 
different movements hang together properly, and whether, for this 
reason (my italics), the fire has perhaps deserted the composer." "Da-
hero" can not mean anything else but an emphatic "for this reason." 
It is not correctly rendered in Willheim's translation: "One must ob-
serve ... whether all movements are properly in agreement with one 
another, and whether the composer, perchance, has lost his fire in sub-
sequent movements." There is no justification at all for adding the 
last three words, since the fire can have deserted the composer right 
in the beginning by force of his trying to make all movements "hang 
together properly." "Bewegungen," used by Scheibe as a technical term 
in two continuous sentences, is translated once by "movements" and 
once by "emotions" (p. 96). To use "motions" or "moving forces" both 
times would have preserved the thought expressed in the original Ger-
man. 

Shortcomings in the organization of the book disturb the reader. 
While respecting Willheim's reason for relegating the Bach contro-
versy to the very end, I still think that it should have come at least 

9Willheim (p. 148) speaks of the Polacca in the First Brandenburg Con-
certo, but Bach's name for the section in question was Poloinesse. Willheim 
does not mention the more typical Polonaise from Bach's Sixth French Suite. 

215 



before the discussion of opera (after Chapter VII), and perhaps even 
earlier. When I reached p. 100 ("When Scheibe attacked Bach for fail-
ing to keep music natural, or for an excess of art, Bach's friend and 
protagonist Magister Abraham Birnbaum rushed to his defense"), I 
felt that I had to turn at once to the concluding chapter and read 
that whole story first. 

I t is also confusing to the reader that W illheim is frequently at odds 
with chronology. In the Introduction, he immediately starts out with 
Kant, goes back to Thomasius, follows this by discussing first Gott-
sched and his generation, then Lessing (in the 1760's), and then speaks 
of the Scheibe of 1730. There are similarly confusing presentations to 
be found throughout the dissertation, for instance, in the (otherwise 
excellent) brief history of rhetoric during which Aristotle, Opitz • 
(1624), Quintilian, and Burmeister (1606) are mentioned in this order. 

My knowledge of the literature is not extensive enough to enable 
me to give a list of works which Willheim ought to have consulted, but 
it is certainly a serious matter that he did not incorporate in his re-
search the excellent and thorough study of Scheibe by Max Graf in 
Composer and Critic, (W.W. Norton, 1947), pp. 77-85. Since Will-
heim's dissertation was written, a new and important study of Johann 
Friedrich Reichardt by Werner Salmen (Atlantis Verlag, 1963) merits 
investigation, for the two musician-journalists had much in common, 
including the curious habit of contributing to their own journals pseu-
donymous letters on controversial subjects. 

On general aesthetics Willheim's sources are largely second- or even 
third-hand. I particularly object to the extensive use he makes of 
Windelband's philosophy textbook of 1891 which, despite the many 
editions it subsequently received, has always largely remained a collec-
tion of the philosophical blind spots of German academic intelligentsia 
in .Wilhelmine times. Willheim is not personally close enough to the 
great men of whom he speaks. He pairs Lessing and Winckelmann 
(p. 16) and Moses Mendelssohn and Reichardt (p. 88) as though they 
were friends and/or equals. Preferring modern textbooks to contem-
porary sources, he writes with a regrettable lack of color. In describing 
the Swiss aestheticians of the middle of the century, for instance, he 
relies almost exclusively on Cassirer (p. 15). How much inner truth, 
lucidity, and fire could have been gathered for this chapter from 
Goethe's detailed expose of their theories, as well as of their personali-
ties, in the seventh book of Dichtung und Wahrheit! And how refresh-
ingly does Goethe describe his visit with old Gottsched in Leipzig! 

This leads me to the most serious defect of the dissertation: Scheibe 
does not come alive in it. We do not learn what he looked like or what 
his personal habits were. We are not informed that he was married 
for the last thirty-nine years of his life. We learn about his character 
only incidentally; yet his character plays a big role in explaining some 
of his actions, just as in the case of Reichardt. Willheim, for instance, 
uncritically swallows Scheibe's account of how he founded Der Critische 
Musicus together with Telemann who figured as a silent partner of 
sorts. But this account, for which there is no supporting evidence 

216 



whatever, was only written after Telemann's death! Can we trust 
Scheibe? Ruhnke (Hans Albrecht in Memoriam, Barenreiter, 1962) 
doubts it seriously. Or take the fact that Scheibe, at the end of his life, 
enrolled as a Freemason, a fact which Willheim does not even mention. 
His collection of melodies to Freemason songs (1776) became very 
popular (the title page is reproduced in MGG 4:893). Was he sincere, 
or was it just another cultural fashion he thought he had to adopt? In 
any case, we ought to know more about Scheibe's religious beliefs. In 
his youth Leipzig was a battleground between the pietists and the 
antipietists (to which Bach belonged); this would presumably also 
throw additional light on some of Scheibe's aesthetic and ethical utter-
ances.!O 

More than anything, we should like to know Scheibe better as a com-
poser. Willheim discusses the recitative given in the Appendix with 
thoroughness and sensitivity, but there is much more to know about 
this man whose oeuvre C.F .0. Schubart said contained "quite a few 
works having a claim to immortality. Few composers knew how to 
write recitatives in so masterly a fashion; his arias too are full of lovely 
passages, and his choruses full-sounding and strong." 

According to the article on Scheibe in MGG (by Caroline Bergner 
and Hans Gunter Hoke), three flute sonatas, other cantatas, and "songs 
for piano"(?) by Scheibe are in existence. If and when Willheim's dis-
sertation is published-and I hope it will be-every interested reader 
will be grateful if the author were to include the maximum of avail-
able information on these works as well as an analysis of their charac-
ter, style, and form. The artistic creations by theorists and critics, apart 
from their potential intrinsic value, constitute a most important test of 
the theories and criticisms voiced by their authors. To quote Pope once 
more: "Let such teach others who themselves excel." 

lOThe religious element is also neglected in Willheim's resume of French 
aesthetics. Malebranche's objections to art expressing passions, for instance, 
belong to the most important ideas of the time; yet Willheim fails to include 
them. 

KONRAD WOLFF, German born, holds an M.A. in musicology from Columbia. He 
is on the advanced piano faculty at Peabody Conservatory. 

217