Did Widor and Dupre really continue the Bach tradition?

My yesterday's post about continuing the Bach tradition, received a few comments. Thank you everyone who replied. One feedback from my friend Marcel got me thinking if Widor and Dupre really continued the Bach tradition.

My initial thought was that of course they changed everything and played legato. But later I started wondering if this issue goes deeper than that.

You see, both of these masters thought of themselves as continuing the Bach tradition even though we could think otherwise. But I think being a student of Bach goes beyond the issue of articulation or registration or performance practice in general.

I think these masters studied deeply Bach's works and were influenced by his ideas. They both improvised and wrote fugues which were modeled after Bach's examples.

So although both of them had their own unique style and were mirrors of their time (that's unavoidable), they could be considered Bach's students to some extent.

Of course, this question can be answered by every person differently. It really depends by what you think the Bach tradition is. But I thought it could be an amazing inspiration to know that our teachers were connected with the old Bach in one way or another.

In fact we could go much further than that. We could go back until Sweelinck. Because Bach learned from Buxtehude who was influenced by Reincken who was a student of Scheidemann who was a student of Sweelinck.

But wait, Sweelinck also was someone's student and so we could trace our lineage perhaps to even older times, the days of Schlick or Paumann. Every time I have a difficult day and can't find motivation to practice or feel frustrated about something, I think about these early masters who went before us and how they also must have had similar struggles and frustrations.