Gonna say your source for your sweeping generatlizations is pretty removed from reality . Anonymous internet forum ! reality <| sep |> You ' re giving me goosebumps too <| sep |> There was a popular revival of Bach ' s music which was instigated by Mendelssohn around the 1830 s Liszt and C . Schumann were born slighter later than Mendelssohn and were directly or indirectly influenced by the revival that he started . This led to Bach ' s music becoming more widely played by a variety of performers . It also happened to coincide with the beginning of an age where people wanted to preserve and codify the great German works of the past . That ' s when Bach really began to enter the public consciousness , which was 80 years after his death . Mozart seems to have been more aware of Bach from an early age than Beethoven was , but he still used libraries to discover more of Bach ' s music . Ransacking may have been too strong a word , but both Mozart and Beethoven searched around in libraries , either seeking out , chancing upon , or as you say being shown works by Bach . Certainly Beethoven and Mendelssohn were taught his pedagogical keyboard music as youths , but it wasn ' t until later in life that these two composers realized the full extent of Bach ' s genius . And although Mozart and Beethoven ' s late music is greatly influenced by Bach at various points , neither of them seriously attempted to engineer any kind of public revival of his music . That was mostly Mendelssohn ' s doing .