The final publication concerning the controversy was by Christoph G. When Scheibe reprinted the Birnbaum essays he managed to have the last word by liberally inserting footnote materials. Birnbaum again responded in a pamphlet entitled Vertheidigung seiner unparteyischen Anmerkungen … (Leipzig, 1739), reprinted in the Critischer Musikus, pp. This was followed by Scheibe's counterattack: Beantwortung der unparteyischen Anmerkungen über eine bedenkliche Stelle in dem sechsten Stücke des critischen Musikus (Hamburg, 1738), reprinted in the Critischer Musikus, pp. Birnbaum already cited, published in Leipzig, 1738, reprinted in Lorenz Mizler, Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek, I/iv (Leipzig, 1738 reprinted Hilversum, 1966), 62–73, and also in Scheibe's Critischer Musikus (Leipzig, 1745), pp. Rather it faded away after a few years, only to be resurrected by Bach scholarship in the nineteenth century.ġ1 The complex history of the controversy includes the following pertinent material in addition to Scheibe's initial letter published in the Critischer Musikus, p. He tried to counteract each critical attack aimed at him by Bach's circle of defenders with vigorous logic and at times unfortunate youthful sarcasm, but the war of words which developed never resolved itself positively one way or the other in his lifetime. Scheibe has been assumed guilty ever since. Bach had been insulted, and his Leipzig friends as well as Scheibe's enemies declared him guilty of a heinous crime: he had dared to suggest that the master's music was not without faults.
In the more than two hundred years since the 29-year-old musician and writer published his rather mild words of aesthetic disagreement with Bach's musical style, Scheibe's opinions regarding Bach have never received an adequate defence. The name of Johann Adolph Scheibe is at once famous and obscure in music history: famous perhaps for the wrong reasons, and largely as the result of his criticism of Johann Sebastian Bach, which can be found retold and frequently misinterpreted in almost all Bach biographies obscure because little attention has been focused on his many significant contributions to the historical study of musical thought in the early eighteenth century.
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