Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, a small town in the duchy of Saxe-Eisenach within the Holy Roman Empire ^[1]. He arrived into what may be the most remarkable musical dynasty in European history. For generations the Bach family had supplied Thuringia with town pipers, organists, and court musicians, so many of them that in some districts the word Bach became a local synonym for musician ^[2]. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, directed the town musicians of Eisenach and gave the boy his first lessons on the violin.

Loss shaped his childhood. His mother, Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt, died in 1694, and his father followed less than a year later, leaving the nine-year-old an orphan ^[1]. Johann Sebastian moved to nearby Ohrdruf to live with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, an organist who had studied with Johann Pachelbel. Under his brother's roof he received systematic keyboard training and, according to accounts gathered after his death, copied out music by candlelight from a manuscript volume his brother kept locked away ^[2].

In 1700, at fifteen, he won a choral scholarship to St Michael's School in Lüneburg, far to the north. The move exposed him to a wider musical world: the school's library held a large collection of German church music, and the region gave him access to the French-influenced court orchestra at Celle and, most likely, to the playing of the celebrated organist Georg Böhm ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Johann Sebastian Bach before fame finds here a poor, determined student walking long distances to hear the best organists of his day.

Bach's working life began in 1703 with a brief court post at Weimar, followed within months by his appointment as organist at the New Church in Arnstadt ^[1]. The Arnstadt years revealed both his talent and his stubbornness. In 1705 he obtained four weeks of leave to hear Dieterich Buxtehude, the famed organist of Lübeck, and walked much of the roughly 250 miles there. He stayed away about four months, and on his return the church consistory rebuked him, adding complaints that his elaborate harmonizations confused the congregation ^[2].

A better post at Mühlhausen followed in 1707, the year he married his second cousin Maria Barbara Bach. In 1708 he moved to Weimar as court organist to Duke Wilhelm Ernst, later adding the title of Konzertmeister ^[1]. Weimar was where his reputation as an organ virtuoso spread, and where many of his great organ works took shape, among them preludes, fugues, and the collection of chorale settings known as the Orgelbüchlein ^[3]. He also studied Italian concertos by Vivaldi closely, transcribing several for keyboard, an exercise that sharpened the clear ritornello structures heard in his later music ^[3].

Weimar ended badly. Passed over for the post of Kapellmeister in 1716, Bach accepted an offer from Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The duke, angered by his organist's push to leave, had him jailed for nearly a month in 1717 before dismissing him in disgrace ^[2]. The episode is one of the stranger Johann Sebastian Bach facts: a composer now honored worldwide once sat in a ducal prison for wanting a new job.

Cöthen, where Bach served as Kapellmeister from 1717 to 1723, was a Calvinist court with little demand for elaborate church music, so he turned to instrumental composition. The results rank among the central Johann Sebastian Bach achievements: the six Brandenburg Concertos, presented to the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721, the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, the six cello suites, and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a cycle of preludes and fugues in all twenty-four major and minor keys ^[3].

In 1723 Bach accepted the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, director of music for the city's principal churches and teacher at the St Thomas School. The town council chose him only after Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner declined ^[1]. The workload was immense. In his first years he composed roughly a cantata a week, and around 200 of his church cantatas survive from an output that was once larger ^[4]. For Good Friday services he wrote his monumental Passions, including the St John Passion (1724) and the St Matthew Passion (1727), the latter requiring double choir and double orchestra ^[3].

His later Leipzig decades produced works of encyclopedic ambition: the Clavier-Übung series including the Goldberg Variations (1741), the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Musical Offering (1747) built on a theme given to him by King Frederick the Great of Prussia, and the unfinished Art of Fugue ^[3]. The Mass in B minor, assembled in his final years from new and revised movements, gathered a lifetime of technique into a single Latin mass on a scale far beyond any liturgical use he could have expected ^[4].

Bach married twice and fathered twenty children, ten of whom survived to adulthood ^[1]. His first wife, Maria Barbara, died suddenly in 1720 while he was traveling with Prince Leopold; he returned to Cöthen to find her already buried. In 1721 he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a gifted young court soprano. Their marriage was by all evidence a working musical partnership: she copied scores in a hand so close to his that scholars sometimes struggle to tell them apart, and the two notebooks he compiled for her mix keyboard pieces, songs, and family entries ^[2].

The household in Leipzig was crowded, busy, and commercially active. Bach supplemented his salary by performing at weddings and funerals, examining new organs, renting out instruments, and selling music. From 1729 he also directed the Collegium Musicum, a society of students and professionals that gave weekly concerts at Zimmermann's coffee house, for which he wrote secular works including the humorous Coffee Cantata ^[4].

Four of his sons became notable composers in their own right: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian, the last of whom later taught the young Mozart in London ^[1]. Surviving documents show a man fiercely protective of his professional rights, repeatedly clashing with the Leipzig council over pay, duties, and the quality of the singers assigned to him ^[2].

Recognition of a kind arrived late. In 1736 Bach received the honorary title of court composer to the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, a distinction he had actively sought as leverage in his Leipzig disputes ^[2]. In 1747 he visited the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel served as harpsichordist. Invited to improvise on a chromatic theme supplied by the king, Bach later expanded it into the Musical Offering, a set of fugues, canons, and a trio sonata that he had engraved and dedicated to the monarch ^[3].

His eyesight failed in his final years, likely worsened by decades of copying music in poor light. In 1750 he underwent two operations by the traveling English oculist John Taylor, the same surgeon who later operated on Handel; both procedures failed and probably hastened his decline ^[4]. Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750, after a stroke, at the age of sixty-five ^[1]. He was buried at St John's Church; his remains were moved in 1950 to the choir of the Thomaskirche, where he had worked for twenty-seven years ^[4].

At his death, much of the musical world considered his style old fashioned. His estate was divided among his heirs, and a substantial number of manuscripts, especially those inherited by Wilhelm Friedemann, were later scattered or lost ^[2].

Bach's music never disappeared entirely: Mozart studied his fugues, Beethoven learned The Well-Tempered Clavier as a boy and reportedly punned that Bach (German for brook) should have been called Meer, the sea ^[2]. But the broad public revival began on March 11, 1829, when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, the first performance outside Leipzig since Bach's lifetime. The concert set off a wave of publication and performance across Europe ^[5].

The Bach-Gesellschaft, founded in Leipzig in 1850, spent half a century issuing his complete works, and in 1950 the scholar Wolfgang Schmieder published the thematic catalogue whose BWV numbers (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis) remain the standard way of identifying his more than 1,000 surviving compositions ^[4]. His counterpoint became the backbone of Western music education; harmony students still work from his roughly four hundred chorale settings.

His reach now extends well past the concert hall. Jazz musicians, film composers, and pop arrangers borrow his progressions, and a recording of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 travels aboard the Voyager Golden Record launched into interstellar space in 1977 ^[6]. Among the most repeated Johann Sebastian Bach facts is this reversal of fortune: a provincial cantor, buried with modest notice, whose work is now performed somewhere on earth virtually every hour of every day ^[5].