Jim Tobin replies to me:

>>Bach's relations with the Leipzig town council had plunged from habitually
>>pissy to horrific.  From the beginning, they considered him a mediocrity,
>>a judgment which startles us today.  They sneered at his music as
>>"learned," in much the same way you now hear people scoffing at
>>"intellectual" music.
>
>There is a fairly recent book about Bach subtitled Johann Sebastian Bach:
>The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff, which evidently flaunts what
>was originally disparagement.  The book was a bit too learned for me to
>get caught up in, I'm sorry to say, but I'll give it another go eventually.

That I hadn't heard, and it goes against everything I've read.  But Wolff
may be the outstanding Bach scholar of his day.  Makes me want to read
the book.

Steve Schwartz