Bach is unquestionably one of the geniuses of Western music history.
Western music history has been created by such people as: Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, and so on. Many many other musicians would have been born and died, but the reason the musicians who have left their mark on history is few and limited is because they were very rare people and they were the geniuses among tens of millions.
OK. Here is a question. How many people, cumulatively, were born on earth between the birth of Bach and the birth of Schoenberg?
There is a good site for estimating this.
It gives estimated statistics produced by PRB (The Population Reference Bureau), in relation to the question "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?".
Using this data, we can estimate that the number of people born on this planet in the 200 years between Bach's and Schoenberg's birthdays is 7.4 billion.
7.4 billion may seem small for the total number of people born in the last 200 years, and not "the population as of a certain year,"
On the other hand, we can check the Worldometer data, according to which there are now 7.8 billion people in the world. There are more than 7.8 billion people alive at this moment. (Data: As of December 2020)
It seems surprising that the cumulative total number of people who were born and died in the 200 years from Bach to Schoenberg is less than the population alive today. This implies that the population has been growing rapidly in recent years.
Let's assume that a genius appears among a certain number of people. There are more people at this moment than there were people born between Bach and Schoenberg.
Based on the population ratio at this very moment there could be: Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel and Schoenberg all living at the same time.
In this respect, the present age is a very tough time for a genius to make his or her mark in history. In the old days, a person who was "a genius deemed unique in the world" could not stand out so much in our current world. "The best genius in the country" in the old days might be "the best genius in the prefecture" in our current world. By the standards of the old days: "Oh, he could be definitely be regarded as the genius!" By today's standards, such things happen all the time.
From a different perspective, however, we could say that today's world is a wonderful world where geniuses like Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel and Schoenberg and so on simultaneously exist. There are many great people in our time whom you would have had to get in a time machine to meet. That is a perk of being born in the modern world.
For us, as modern people, getting on a plane is just like getting into a time machine. Somewhere on the planet there is a Bach or a Schoenberg. Aeroplanes, Zoom and Facebook are like time machines: synchronous time machines, so to speak. We may have already had a time machine in our hands.
