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Two of these anniversaries were musical ones: fifty years ago, in 1964, The Beatles triggered 'an incurable hysteria' in the USA, with five singles occupying ranks one to five on the Billboard Hot 100 of 4 April; the author of the article attributes to The Beatles' music 'a basic cultural joy, an optimism, an aesthetic that is so undeniably upbeat that we long for the future promised by that present, as when we watch "Mad Men"' (38). Several thoughts ran through my head when reading this: first, that 2014 might be called the year of the 'eighteenth-century Kleinmeister', considering that Gottfried August Homilius was born in 1714 and Johann Friedrich Reichardt died in 1814; second, that the common feuilleton view of eighteenth-century music history is obviously still dominated by a concept of heroes' tales; third, and most disquietingly, I wondered whether there is any historical connection between The Beatles as paragons of twentieth-century popular music and composers like C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, Homilius and Reichardt as supposed eighteenth-century 'little masters' of classical music. Yes, Forkel's concept of music history is Eurocentric, fraught with the ideologies of colonialism and the conviction that there is an absolute musical beauty deriving from man's nature and gaining consciousness in Western art music (compare Frank Hentschel, Bürgerliche Ideologie und Musik: Politik der Musikgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland 1776-1871 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2006), especially 25-48), but it is also a document of the distinction between merely popular, time-dependent, 'non-heroic' music and elitist, timeless, 'heroic' art music, a distinction that is still in our heads today - or at least in the heads of many German journalists. [...]all in all there is no reason to mock the eighteenth century's 'Kleinmeister' while elevating The Beatles over all earlier music, as the author of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung article does, because important dimensions of the group's aesthetic and social foundation came into being in the century when 'non-heroic' composers dominated the scene (other dimensions, of course, came from elsewhere; a complex conceptualization of popular music, especially pop music, has now been worked out by Diedrich Diederichsen in Über Pop-Musik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2014)).