While I could simply write off your post as so much boorish bloviating (and I admit the main reason I'm writing this post is so I can experience the joy of using that phrase -- can't think of anywhere I else I can get away with saying "boorish bloviating" -- isn't the internet wonderful?) I'm going to rise to your bait, because you actually do make a valid point amidst all your b.b.: it's true that there is a long history, dating back to the man himself, of people professing to admire J. S. Bach's music for the wrong reasons. It's also true that Telemann and Vivaldi are underrated, A Brief History of Time is either the first- or second- most-owned and least-read book (Joyce's Ulysses comes to mind as another contender), Slava's recording of the Brahms cello sonatas are essential listening, and that Mendelssohn can be blamed for creating what Bernstein called the "classical music racket" that plagues the art form to this day.

But -- how can you love the Brahms cello sonatas and not love Bach? Bach permeates those sonatas --especially the E Minor, whose third movement is a fugue whose subject Brahms borrowed from -- get ready -- The Art of the Fugue! (Contrapunctus 13, to be exact.) Robert Schumann, who was as committed a Romantic as any, declared that "the profound combinatorial power, the poetry, and the humor of modern music trace their origins to Bach." He also referred to Bach's fugues as "character pieces." Baron von Swieten may have been one of the pretentious bloviators who worshiped Bach for his inscrutability, but if he hadn't introduced Mozart to Bach's music there would be no Magic Flute, no Jupiter Symphony, no C Minor Mass. (The Requiem was more Handel-influenced.) (Okay, now I'm bloviating.)

Anyway, Philidor, you and I are more guilty of pointless elaboration than Bach was. But your post reminded me of something Bach's contemporary, Johann Mattheson, wrote after he heard the world premiere of Bach's Cantata no. 21:

“In order that good old Zachau may have company, and not be quite so alone, let us set beside him an otherwise excellent practicing musician of today, who for a long time does nothing but repeat:

“I,I,I,I had much grief, I had much grief, in my heart, in my heart. I had much grief, etc., I had much grief, etc., in my heart, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., I had much grief, etc., in my heart, etc.”

Then again: ”Sighs, tears, sorrow, anguish (rest), sighs, tears, anxious longing, fear and death (rest) gnaw at my oppressed heart, etc.”

Also: “Come my Jesus, and refresh (rest) and rejoice with Thy glance (rest), come, my Jesus (rest), come, my Jesus, and refresh and rejoice … with Thy glance this soul, etc.”

(The etceteras stand for the repeat signs Mattheson used here.)