Johann Sebastian Bach, that wretched old genius. Not only did he scoff at an entire theory of musical temperament, he did so while enriching the overall musical landscape of the Teutonic Baroque.
A brainy bastard, yes, Ol' Bach didn't want to compose operas because of the audience's passivity--the way listeners consumed the idiom was done without engaging the art, itself. (Having fathered some 20 children, you can imagine what a Bach admonishing was like.)
His St. Matthew Passion, then, is "contemplative, a study in suffering and transcendence...tighter and more angular, a battlefield of action and reaction," writes Zachary Woolfe in the New York Times.
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