Imagine if you will, just for a moment, being Johann Sebastian Bach, showing up a little late for breakfast (or maybe not, Johann Sebastian was probably the kind of guy that showed up at exactly the right time, being a self-disciplined and productive kind of person), someone (maybe your wife, who knows) asks “How are you? Were you at the music again last night, get any good stuff done?” and you could just say “Oh nothing much, just some of the most influential and consequential music of the next several hundred years, perhaps ever, in fact. So, what’s for breakfast?”. You could just coast on that, but then you don’t, you go one better, rinse and repeat.

I was listening to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major again, and I still can’t get over how astonishing this music is. A man, an ordinary man with a fundamental understanding of music and the human condition wrote that. He didn’t just write that and call it a day, as he fully had a right to, he knocked it out and then got on with thinking up other music, which is incredible.

To be fair, I could have written these two paragraphs about Beethoven too, but I was listening to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major and had this thought, this idea (again, I have it every time that I listen to it). I could have been listening to anything by Beethoven and it would be as applicable. The towering, immense genius of it, reaching down through the centuries.