Robert Marshall

In the annals of musicological writing, few questions have been rehearsed so often, or for so long, as that of Mozart’s relationship to Bach and the significance of that relationship for subsequent music history. The traditional, and still predominant, understanding of Mozart’s relationship with Bach, reduced to its essentials, runs as follows. About a year after he had settled in Vienna, and by early 1782 at the latest, Mozart came to know the music of J. S. Bach during the course of his weekly Sunday musical matinees at the home of Baron Gottfried van Swieten. This exposure and confrontation, this