Bach versus Scheibe

On May 14, 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–76), a twenty-nine-year-old music theorist and composer in Hamburg, published a Sendschreiben (“letter”) describing the experience of a fictional musician with twelve living composers. Many readers were able to recognize one of the composers as Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann Abraham Birnbaum (1702–48), a professor of rhetoric at Leipzig University, took offense at Scheibe's rather critical remarks on Bach's style and published a vigorous defense. The resulting dispute, known as the Scheibe-Birnbaum affair, generated a number of publications over the next decade and has long been recognized as one of the most important documents regarding the reception of Bach's music before 1750. This chapter considers the Scheibe-Birnbaum affair and the hitherto unknown dimensions of the battle between Scheibe and Bach himself.