Lutheran churches maintained many of the customary vestments, paintings, altarpieces, and ceremonies; organ music and hymns survived, and the German Reformation would inspire a new tradition of church music that would reach its apogee in the work of J. S. Bach (1685–1750). It would give a transcendent dimension to the often prosaic words of the vernacular. But in the Calvinist tradition, pictures and statues vanished, church music was ruthlessly simplified, and ceremony was abandoned in favor of extempore worship.
