Q. Did Bach's wife actually find people wrapping fish with his manuscripts at the fish market?? J.E.

A. I doubt it. First of all, there's the common sense factor. Musical manuscript paper was thick, stiff stuff in Bach's time, even more than it is today. It wouldn't wrap fish well at all.

Still, this story and variations on it abound. Martin Perlich, program
director for K-CSN FM in Los Angeles has been quoted as saying "Bach felt that after a piece was performed it was in effect 'done' and there was little use for its score. Indeed, it has been told that Mrs. Bach would use her husband's old manuscripts from to time to time to wrap fish in from the market."

Thie first claim is nonsense. Bach took good care of his manuscripts, according to Christoph Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach, the Learned Musician and other sources. After he died the manuscripts were divided between his older sons and his widow. There wasn't a large demand for the music, of course, but there was some. The eldest son, Wilhelm Friedermann, took to selling his father's originals rather than copies of them. This brought about the permanent loss of many works.

My favourite Bach-as-fish-wrap story comes from Milan Gowin, writing in the May 2002 issue of Polish Panorama. According to him, "Felix (Mendelssohn) was taking a walk through the market and noticed that a fish monger was wrapping his catch in what wasn't ordinary paper but music manuscript." He investigated and discovered the St. Matthew Passion. To be fair, Gowin doesn't seem to take the fish story entirely seriously.

Dr. Richard E. Rodda, writing program notes for the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, says, "Stories of Bach’s manuscripts being used to wrap fish in a Leipzig market are as sad as they are true." He may know something I don't know but, of the five biographies I have of Bach, none mentions the fish story or any of its variants. Some sources, including New Groves stress how carefully the collection of manuscripts was managed during Bach's lifetime and detail their disposition after his death.

So once again, I doubt all these stories -- but I will have a good look at the wrapping the next time I buy fish.

Q. I'm a little confused by your CD and DVD reviews. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that some of the ones you've covered recently have been around for quite a while.G.T.

A. You're absolutely right. Only about half of my reviews cover new releases. I try to alert readers to older releases that may have escaped their attention when they were new. This is especially the case with video reviews in which most of the DVDs are reissues of recordings that are or have been available on VHS.

Q. I went to fhe Piano and Winds chamber music concert on a few days ago, and was surprised to see that one of the instruments was a French horn. Isn't that a brass instrument? Or maybe the brass are considered winds too?J.C.

A. No, brass instruments are not normally referred to as winds and yes, the horn is a brass instrument. Yet it has been considered an integral part of wind ensembles, even more than the flute, since Mozart's time.

Why? Because the horn blends as well with winds as it does with other brass instruments and because it adds body to the sound. In works with piano parts, it serves as a kind of bridge between the true winds and the piano.

Q. What makes you think your opinion is better than anyone else's? K.P.

A. What gives you the idea that I think my opinion is better than anyone else's? I can perhaps claim that people have found what I've written about music over the last twenty-five years interesting and useful; not everyone, of course, but enough that newspapers and magazines have been willing to pay me to express my opinions in print. Does that mean that my opinion is "better" than anyone else's? Not in my mind. 

Q. Do you have a favourite composer and, if so, who is it? C.V.

A. I do have a favourite and always have. The composer's identity has changed a number of times over the last fifty years, however.

My original favourite, when I was eleven, was Rimsky-Korsakov. His Scheherezade was the first complete classical work I ever heard. My parents had it on a set of four 78s. I remember, each time I found a new subtlety in that score, being astonished at the layers of meaning that were possible in classical music.

Then I discovered Beethoven. He was to remain my favourite for most of my adolescence but he got bumped by J.S. Bach when I was twenty. The year I turned thirty I began hearing Mozart in a new way and he became my favourite for more than twenty-five years.

Recently, though, I've gone back to Bach. It's not that I like Mozart, Beethoven or even Rimsky-Korsakov any less. To the contrary, the pleasure I get from their music deepens every year. It's what Bach does for me is deepening even more quickly.  

Q. Classical music is dying, isn't it? P.S.

A. No.  

Q. I've heard that the fugue was the dominant form of the Baroque period, while the Classical and Romantic periods were the era of the symphony and other sonata-like forms. What form would you say best represents the twentieth century? M.C.

A. I trust that I'm not doing your Music Appreciation homework in answering this question. I say that because the generalities you report are the sort of thing one often hears in such courses.

I wouldn't agree that the fugue was the dominant form of the Baroque era. Some composers, including J. S. Bach wrote a great many of them, and most composers wrote some. But they were no more important than the concertos, sonatas and suites of the time, some of which included fugues.

When we get into the Classical and Romantic periods, it probably is fair to say that the sonata and its many relatives, including the symphony, were dominant. That's provided that we're willing to neglect opera and art song, of course.

At first glance it would seem that a rejection of form altogether is what characterized the twentieth century. Certainly some composers pronounced the symphony dead, but a great many others kept writing them. Consider just a few of the names: Sibelius, Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich . . . the list goes on and on. With the string quartet one thinks above all of Bartók and Shostakovich, but there were countless others who wrote series of such works. So I'd be inclined to say that sonata-like forms dominated the twentieth as well as the nineteenth centuries, even if new kinds of music made inroads.