composer

Johann Sebastian Bach

March 21, 1685 - Eisenach (Germany) — July 28, 1750 - Leipzig (Germany)

About

Since his death more than 250 years ago, Johann Sebastian Bach has remained the touchstone for virtually all composers of Western classical music. Musicians of all eras have praised his music for its beauty, complexity, and inventiveness. Born into a musical family and orphaned at a young age, Bach grew to become an almost legendary keyboard virtuoso in his own lifetime. He took on a series of jobs directing music for royal courts and churches, and in his last decades established himself as the leader of musical life in Leipzig. So emblematic of the Baroque style is Bach that 1750, the year of his death, has become neatly associated with the end of the entire period. Though Bach rarely traveled beyond his home country of Germany, today his music reverberates around the world and beyond.

Early life

First years and family background

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a town in central Germany. His father, Johann Ambrosius, was in charge of instrumental music at the local church; in fact, many of Bach’s forebears and relatives were musicians, including a cousin who served as the town organist.

Bach received early instruction from his father and brother, and was said to be an excellent treble singer. Tragically, he lost both his parents at the age of nine and was subsequently sent to live with his older brother Christoph. As a boy he studied as a choral scholar while Christoph taught him to play and repair pipe organs. His brother also introduced him to the works of leading contemporary composers from across Europe including Pachelbel, Dieterich Buxtehude, Girolamo Frescobaldi, and Jean-Baptiste Lully. This early exposure to multiple styles undoubtedly played a role in Bach’s later synthesis of these different styles in his own works. Bach’s first compositions likely date from these early teenage years.

At the age of 15 Bach was again forced to move, this time to the town of Lüneburg. He joined a local school and chorus; however, his voice soon broke, so he earned his keep as a keyboard and string player. During his time in Lüneburg, he traveled to Hamburg to study with Johann Adam Reincken, an organist and leader of the north German school of composition.

The young professional

Weimar, Arnstadt, and Mühlhausen

Shortly after graduation, just 17 years old, Bach was appointed court musician in the chapel of Johann Ernst III, Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Though he held this position for only seven months, his reputation as a keyboardist spread so rapidly in that short time that he was invited to give the inaugural organ recital at the Neue Kirche (later named the Bach-Kirche) in nearby Arnstadt, a small town between Frankfurt and Leipzig. Later that year he left Weimar to become organist for the Neue Kirche.

His tenure in Arnstadt was rife with contention. He often clashed with the students with whom he performed. When Bach was 20, one of these students accused him of insulting him and his bassoon and struck Bach with a stick. Bach responded by pulling out a dagger. Bach’s employers reprimanded him not only for the fight but for his flamboyant organ playing. Specifically, he was reproached “for having hitherto made many curious variations in the chorale.” The irresistible pull of variation form on Bach reached its pinnacle nearly 40 years later in the Goldberg Variations.

In 1705, not long after the incident with the dagger, the church granted Bach leave to travel to Lübeck in order to hear the great composer and organist Dieterich Buxtehude. He traveled 450 kilometers in each direction, much of it on foot. Buxtehude was one of the most important composers of the 17th century, in part for his influence upon Bach and George Frideric Handel. Though Bach told his superiors that he would only be gone for four weeks, he ended up staying for four months to study with Buxtehude.

A year later Bach successfully applied for a new position as organist at a church in Mühlhausen. There he married his first wife (and second cousin), Maria Barbara. The most famous of their offspring is undoubtedly Carl Philipp Emanuel, a celebrated composer in his own right. Around this time Bach began taking pupils, and he taught regularly for the rest of his life. Most of Bach’s early compositions were for keyboard and organ as well as chorale preludes and cantatas with texts drawn from hymns and the Bible. The church council in Mühlhausen oversaw publication of Bach’s festive cantata Gott ist mein König, the only known cantata Bach published in his lifetime. Its premiere marked the first documented performance of one of his works.

The Return to Weimar (1708–1717)

Bach remained in Mühlhausen less than a year before he quit, returning to Weimar as court organist. The reigning duke had a large, well-funded ensemble of musicians, a marked upgrade for Bach as both a performer and composer; he now had a talented pool of players to perform his pieces. While in Weimar Bach befriended Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the leading composers of the age. Bach later named him godfather and namesake to Carl Philipp Emanuel. In 1714 Bach was promoted to Concertmaster. Three years later Bach was mentioned in print for the first time, not for any specific compositions but as “the famous Weimar organist.” During his time in Weimar, Bach began composing secular keyboard and orchestral works in earnest. These latter works were particularly influenced by Italian composers such as Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi.

After several increasingly frustrating years in the court, Bach repeatedly attempted to resign from the post. In response, the exasperated Duke Ernst August I had him arrested and jailed for “obstinacy” in 1717. Upon release from his month-long imprisonment, Bach again submitted his resignation, which the duke, at last, accepted. Many years later, one of Bach’s students wrote that he first conceived The Well-Tempered Clavier “in a place where ennui, boredom, and the absence of any kind of musical instrument forced him to resort to this pastime.” This remark has led to speculation that Bach may have composed some of the pieces in his head while imprisoned.

Köthen (1717–1723)

Following his dismissal from the Weimar court, Bach accepted a position as Kapellmeister in the cort of Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. Leopold, an amateur musician who understood and respected Bach’s talent, not only paid well but gave Bach more freedom to compose and perform as he wished.

As a Calvinist, Leopold required only simple church music; with this mandate, Bach turned his attention largely to secular works written for the court’s musicians. The Köthen years yielded some of Bach’s greatest instrumental works, a veritable treasure trove that includes not only the six Cello Suites but the Brandenburg Concertos, the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. During his tenure he attempted to meet Handel in the nearby town of Halle, Handel’s birthplace, but by then Handel had already left.

A few years into Bach’s tenure in Köthen, tragedy struck when Maria Barbara died suddenly and unexpectedly. Bach, who had been traveling at the time, learned of her death only upon returning home weeks after the funeral. Less than two years later, he remarried to a young soprano named Anna Magdalena Wilcke.

Leipzig (1723–1750)

The New Thomaskantor

When budget cuts began limiting the court’s musical activity, Bach began looking for yet another job. In 1723 he successfully won the position of Cantor at the prestigious Thomasschule in Leipzig, though he wasn’t their first choice. The interviewing council initially offered the post to Telemann, who turned it down. After several other applicants dropped out, they reluctantly offered Bach the role. He remained in Leipzig for the rest of his life, a period of more than 27 years.

During his first few years in Leipzig, Bach composed at least three cantata cycles, a tremendous repertoire of roughly 200 sacred cantatas. This was done as part of his duties overseeing music for four churches, leaving him little time to compose secular works. He also instructed students in singing and instrument playing, both within the church and at Leipzig University, one of the world’s oldest still-operating universities. Bach earned extra money writing special occasion pieces (like music for weddings) and teaching privately.

A year after his arrival in Leipzig, Bach premiered the oratorio St John Passion, his first in the genre. This was followed by the 1727 premiere of his more widely-known St. Matthew Passion, one of the masterworks of the Baroque period. Eventually, Bach managed to carve out time to compose secular instrumental works. His Partita No. 1 in B-flat Major, first published as a stand-alone piece in 1726, was later released as part of a six-work set titled Clavier-Übung I.

Anna Magdalena bore many children during their time in Leipzig, though few survived infancy. Of these, Johann Christian Bach, nicknamed the “London” Bach, is most famous. Among his musical achievements, he was a major influence on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he toured London as a young boy.

The Collegium Musicum Years (1729–1741)

Beginning in 1729, Bach became director of the local collegium musicum, a voluntary group composed mostly of local university students. Telemann had founded the ensemble decades earlier. The position offered Bach the opportunity to compose for a talented ensemble of instrumentalists. Most of their concerts took place in a local coffee house. The combination of positions — Thomaskantor and director of the collegium musicum — arguably made Bach the most important figure in Leipzig’s musical life.

While the collegium directorship undoubtedly kept him busy, Bach continued to compose sacred and solo pieces. Ten years after his appointment in Leipzig, Bach completed the most well-known version of his Magnificat. A year later, in 1734, he premiered his six-part Christmas Oratorio. The collegium years also saw the publication of his Clavier-Übung II, which includes the Italian Concerto in F Major. Although the concerto genre is based on the interplay between solo instrument and orchestra, Bach achieves a similar effect in this piece for solo harpsichord by exploring the instrument’s capabilities through a play of contrasts and dynamics with skillfully alternating passages of forte and piano.

The Final Decade

The owner of the coffee shop where the collegium musicum performed died in 1741, leaving the ensemble without a performance space. Bach, now in his late 50s, stepped down as director; the organization subsequently dissolved. Nevertheless, it was a fruitful year for the composer, who oversaw the publication of his Goldberg Variations. These were named after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who may have premiered them. Bach also began working on The Art of Fugue, a collection that represented the culmination of his long fascination with the technique, around this time. His last great work, and one of the greatest works in all of classical music, is his monumental Mass in B Minor.

Bach spent his final few years in increasingly poor health, probably a result of diabetes. When his eyesight declined, he sought treatment from an English eye surgeon named John Taylor. A charlatan later revealed to have blinded hundreds of patients (including George Frideric Handel), Taylor’s surgeries on Bach were unsuccessful. Bach’s health quickly and irreversibly declined, and four months after the last surgery he lay dead of a stroke.

Bach’s Work

Bach completed over 1,100 known works, though many of the unpublished works are now lost. He composed in multiple genres, often incorporating complex counterpoint into his pieces. He was a devout Christian, and his piety is reflected in much of his music, as well as the numerous church positions he held: his output consists of Latin and German church music, Passions, masses, oratorios, and hundreds of cantatas both sacred and secular. He wrote many seminal works for organ and other keyboard instruments, as well as chamber works like violin and harpsichord concertos, music for solo strings, and even orchestra. Though Bach never composed an opera, his masses and oratorios often rival the drama of the stage.

While he was broadly recognized as a virtuoso organist in his lifetime, his compositions were far from universally praised. One contemporary critic lamented, “his bombastic and intricate procedures deprived [Bach’s pieces] of naturalness and obscured their beauty by an excess of art.” Today, Bach’s music is lauded for its sublime combination of supreme intellect and emotional power.

The Well-Tempered Clavier

The Well-Tempered Clavier consists of two books of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. Beginning with a prelude in C major, the pieces move up the chromatic scale, alternating between major and minor (i.e. C major-C minor-C# major-C# minor, etc.) until concluding with a fugue in B minor. Numerous composers from Frédéric Chopin to Dmitri Shostakovich have written their own collections of preludes and fugues, directly inspired by Bach’s sets.

In the twentieth century, technological advancements expanded the reach of The Well-Tempered Clavier beyond anything Bach could have imagined. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, arrangements of classical compositions performed on synthesizer, sold over a million copies following its release in the late 1960s. Less than a decade after the release of Switched-On Bach, NASA launched two copies of the Voyager Golden Record into space aboard the Voyager probes. These discs contained recordings of sounds and musical compositions representative of humanity, including three compositions by Bach, more than any other composer.

Mass in B Minor

The Mass in B Minor, completed the year before Bach’s death, is his final masterpiece. It is his only setting of the complete Latin text of the Ordinary mass. The work is largely based upon earlier compositions by Bach, compiled into a 2-hour behemoth for vocal soloists, chorus, and instrumental ensemble. Written in the final years of the Baroque period, the Mass stands as tribute to Bach’s devout faith and as a crowning achievement of the era.

St Matthew Passion

With a monumental duration of 2 hours and 45 minutes, Bach’s oratorio St Matthew Passion undoubtedly ranks among the great compositions of Baroque music. It is the second part of Bach’s unfinished project to write four German-language Passions corresponding to the four Evangelists’ accounts of the final moments of Jesus Christ’s life. Bach scored the large-scale work for solo voices, double choir, and double orchestra.

Bach composed the work for Good Friday services in 1727 during his tenure in Leipzig. The work remained unperformed outside Leipzig until 1829, when composer and conductor Felix Mendelssohn led performances in Berlin. The success of these concerts played a pivotal role in the “Bach Revival” that established the Baroque master’s longstanding reputation as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Cello Suites

Of all Bach’s compositions, perhaps no other has captured the popular imagination as much as his Cello Suites. Likely written during his years in Kothen, they consist of six six-movement dance suites in a mix of major and minor keys. Though written for a single-line instrument, these pieces are dense in counterpoint and often create a sense of having multiple players. These pieces languished in obscurity for more than a century before the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals popularized them. Since then, the suites have become the “Mount Everest” of the cello repertoire, presenting a daunting but richly rewarding test of cellists’ technique and musicality.

The suites open with the famous prelude of Suite No. 1. To cellist Yo-Yo Ma, this music “represents the infinitude of what we have in the natural world,” whether rushing water or soaring birds. With this evocation of nature, it’s fitting that the man whose last name literally translates to “brook” has come to represent the mountaintop of music for solo violin and cello.

Partita for Solo Violin No. 2 in D Minor

Bach composed his set of six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin during his years in Köthen. Virtually every great violin performer has recorded them. George Enescu called the collection “the Himalayas of violinists” due to their breadth, difficulty, and monumental beauty.

Of the six pieces, the Partita for Solo Violin No. 2 in D Minor stands out for its incredible Chaconne. Like most eighteenth-century chaconnes, Bach’s consists of variations over a repeated harmonic progression in a triple meter, yet his work carries a profound intensity that sets it apart. Composers and performers have long been fascinated by this movement in particular. Johannes Brahms wrote of it, “To me the Chaconne is one of the most beautiful, incredible compositions. On one staff, and for a small instrument, this man pours out a world full of the most profound thoughts and powerful emotion.”

Goldberg Variations

According to Bach’s obituary, “He needed only to have heard any theme to be aware — it seemed in the same instant — of almost every intricacy that artistry could produce in the treatment of it.” Nowhere is this better exemplified than in his Goldberg Variations. The set of 30 variations takes its name from Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a gifted musician who studied with Bach as a child. They are widely considered to be the most important keyboard cycle of the 18th century. Within the theme and variations genre, only Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations rival the Goldbergs in their significance.

Brandenburg Concertos

In 1721, Bach presented a collection of six concertos to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwendt (present-day western Poland and eastern Germany, including Berlin). Bach had likely written the concertos years earlier and then assembled a collection of his most impressive pieces for the Margrave, perhaps in an attempt to secure a new court position. Unfortunately, it seems that Christian Ludwig did not have an orchestra equipped to play all the pieces, so the scores sat on a dusty shelf, unopened for more than a century.

The six concerti are written for a variety of instrumental combinations. In the most popular of the concerti, No. 3 in G Major, the violins, violas, and cellos are organized as distinct groups, each with soloistic passages. The second movement is remarkable for its brevity: one measure consisting of two half-note chords. Bach left no instructions on how this single measure of music is to be performed; naturally, this has fueled decades of debate. Some choose to treat the movement as a sort of musical semicolon separating the first and third movements; others embellish the chords with an extended, improvisatory cadenza; and some insert movements from other Bach concertos.

Bach’s influence and legacy

Even in his own lifetime, Bach’s music was sometimes viewed as old-fashioned. Though learned musicians turned to Bach as a source of instruction, his music remained underperformed in the decades after his death. Haydn collected Bach scores, as did Mozart. At eleven years old, Beethoven garnered his first published concert review for a performance of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Coupled with the fact that many of his compositions had never been published, most of Bach’s work was neglected for many years. Some pieces languished in obscurity for more than a century; the Cello Suites, for example, were hardly performed at all until Pablo Casals popularized them in the early twentieth century.

The major event that launched a resurgence of interest in the Baroque master was an 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion conducted by Felix Mendelssohn. In its wake, composers across Europe began researching and transcribing Bach’s music in earnest. One of the most famous of these was French composer Charles Gounod’s Ave Maria, built upon the Prelude No. 1 in C major.

While composers like Mozart and Beethoven are more widely celebrated in pop culture, Bach is held in near-universal reverence among musicians. Composers from the Classical era to the present day have heaped superlatives upon Bach, many crowning him as a sort of father of classical music. At the turn of the nineteenth century, one theorist published an illustration depicting the composer at the center of the Sun, the source of musical genius from which all others attain wisdom. A later writer coined the expression “the three Bs,” placing Bach ahead of Beethoven and Hector Berlioz (Berlioz has since been supplanted by Johannes Brahms). Beethoven himself referred to Bach as “father of harmony,” adding, “Not brook [Bach] but sea [Meer] should he be called.”