It’s impossible to imagine a musical training without Bach, from children’s music academies to conservatories. Bach is here to stay. When I started teaching children in the 1970s, quite a few of my colleagues were making fruitless attempts to (partially) replace Bach with Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. The children, however, had very little if any enthusiasm for Bartók’s music and their teachers eventually had to back down. Bartók, with all due respect, was no match for Bach.

So what makes Bach’s music so indispensable? Bach’s inventiveness in fusing melody, harmony and rhythm into a logical and coherent narrative is simply astonishing and remains unrivalled even today. For everyone blessed with an ear for music, Bach’s music evokes the same deep emotions as when it was composed some three hundred years ago. Bach was a master of polyphony as well; if you can follow the individual lines in his fugues and make them audible, you’re well on your way to becoming a good pianist.