Johann Sebastian Bach

"If Beethoven appears to our generation as a Greek statue, Bach, on the contrary, impresses us as one of those Sphinxes of Egypt whose towering head commands the wide expanse of the desert."

The comparison is imaginative, but seems to me only partially just.

Sphinx in vastness of proportions, I admit; but the image is destroyed when character is taken into consideration. Bach is indisputably the mightiest of musicians; one is seized with awe in perusing the extraordinary catalogue of his works, so seemingly impossible are its dimensions; in casually looking over those forty and more folio volumes; in pausing for an instant to examine more closely any one of the pages, where the smallest detail seems to have been long considered and predetermined, while over all soars the essential thought, always profound and original. But was there ever a thinker less enigmatical?