Johann Sebastian Bach

1685–1750, GERMAN

Hailed by many as the greatest Baroque composer, Bach created music ranging from oratorios to intimate keyboard pieces. His composition combines mathematical complexity with profound humanity.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH, 1746
This portrait by the German artist Elias Gottlob Haussmann depicts Bach at the age of around 60, holding his famous six-voice puzzle canon.

ON TECHNIQUE

Lutheran church music

Music was an integral element of Lutheran church services. By the 18th century, the singing of chorales (hymns) by the congregation was accompanied and harmonized by an organist, who might provide solo preludes and interludes. Cantatas—more elaborate performances by solo singers, choir, and instrumentalists—were also integrated into the service. The musical element of a service might last an hour or more. Sunday services were the main musical performances available in German cities, although some Lutherans felt that music distracted from worship.

GERMAN BAROQUE ORGAN MADE IN THURINGIA IN AROUND 1650

The last of eight children, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in the town of Eisenach in Thuringia, Germany, in March 1685. Members of his family had been musicians since the 16th century: his father, Johann Ambrosius, was a talented string player prominent in Eisenach’s small-town musical life; several uncles were organists; and a cousin, Johann Christoph Bach, had achieved some renown as a composer.

Johann Sebastian learned to play and compose early in life, immersed in his family’s rich musical tradition as well as its Lutheran Protestantism. He was orphaned at the age of nine, his father dying nine months after his mother, and was sent to live with his eldest brother, Christoph, at nearby Ohrdurf. Christoph was an organist who had been a pupil of the celebrated composer Johann Pachelbel and Johann Sebastian’s informal musical education was able to continue under his brother’s gaze. It may have been at Ohrdurf that he first learned to play the organ, and he certainly sang in the church choir as, at the age of 15, his vocal ability won him a place at the prestigious Michaeliskirche school in Lüneburg, near Hamburg in northern Germany. There, his interest in the organ grew under the influence of composer Georg Böhm, the organist at Lüneburg’s Johanniskirche.

BACH HOUSE, EISENACH
The half-timbered house in Eisenach, once mistakenly thought to be Bach’s birthplace, now serves as a museum to his life and work. It contains several of the instruments he owned and played.

Disgruntled employee

Bach finished his education at the age of 17 and set out to earn a living. After a spell in a minor post at the court of the duke of Weimar, in 1703 he became church organist, first at Arnstadt, then Mühlhausen, both towns in Thuringia. However, with his exuberant talents harnessed to mundane work, he proved to be a troublesome employee. The church authorities in Arnstadt were annoyed that he spent a long leave of absence in distant Lübeck, where he had traveled to hear performances by Dieterich Buxtehude, then at the cutting edge of German music. They also claimed that his accompaniments to chorales were far too elaborate. Bach in turn grumbled about the wide-ranging duties he had been given, which distracted him from the organ and his composition. He had no patience with the poor quality of local musicians, and once engaged in a violent brawl with a young bassoonist whose abilities he had insulted.

IN PROFILE

Anna Magdalena Bach

Bach’s second wife, born Anna Magdalena Wülcken in 1701, was the daughter of a trumpeter. Before they married, she was a singer at the Köthen court. She gave birth to the first of 13 children in 1723. Anna Magdalena was a competent musician who copied scores for her husband, but claims she wrote some of his music are spurious. The Anna Magdalena Notebooks, collections of music assembled by Bach for his wife, testify to her role in domestic music-making. After Bach’s death, Anna Magdalena was left destitute. She died a beggar in 1760 and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

PAGE FROM THE CHACONNE IN BACH’S PARTITA IN D MINOR FOR SOLO VIOLIN, HANDWRITTEN BY ANNA MAGDALENA

Early recognition

By this time, the quality of Bach’s organ-playing had begun to attract attention and some of his noteworthy compositions had also emerged. The cantata Gott ist mein König (God is My King), his first published work, was printed while he was at Mühlhausen in 1707. He may also have composed the Toccata and Fugue in D minor— one of his most celebrated organ works—around this time.

Bach followed a strict Lutheran code of sexual morality. The only early evidence of interest in women was a complaint from church authorities that he had allowed a “strange maiden” into the Arnstadt organ loft. In 1707, buoyed by a small inheritance from his maternal uncle, he married his second cousin, Maria Barbara. They had seven children, only four of whom survived infancy. Most of these births took place at the ducal court at Weimar, where, from 1708, Bach was an organist and later a concertmaster.

BACH CHURCH, ARNSTADT
Bach served as the organist in the Neue Kirche (New Church) in Arnstadt, Thuringia, in 1703–1707. It was renamed Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Kirche in his honor in 1935.

Weimar influences

The wider connections of a dukedom brought Bach into contact with current musical trends outside Germany, notably the work of Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. It also spread Bach’s reputation as a virtuoso. He was reportedly invited to Dresden to take part in a musical contest with French organist Louis Marchand; the Frenchman failed to turn up, implicitly conceding defeat. Although less constraining, and considerably better paid, than being a Thuringian church organist, Bach’s position as a servant of the capricious duke of Weimar was never wholly comfortable. In 1717, he sought permission to accept the post of musical director at another German court, that of Prince Leopold of Köthen. Outraged by this disloyalty, the duke imprisoned Bach for a month, before reluctantly letting him go.

Prince Leopold was a keen amateur musician who maintained a small orchestra, and Köthen provided fertile ground for Bach’s lively imagination. His focus shifted from organ music and cantatas to works for harpsichord, violin, and cello, and for the chamber orchestra.

THE DUKE OF SAXE-WEIMAR
In 1708, Bach took a position as chamber musician in the court of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, who ruled over the duchy with his brother, Johann Ernst.

The Köthen years

Although it is notoriously difficult to date many of Bach’s compositions, it was probably at Köthen that he wrote such masterpieces as the Concerto for Two Violins, the Suites for Solo Cello, and the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. The Brandenburg Concertos, six works based on the Italian concerto grosso style in which soloists play together with a small orchestra, were written in 1721, and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier—24 preludes and fugues in the full range of major and minor keys— was completed the following year.

The period at the court at Köthen was generally a happy time for Bach, but was marred by family tragedy in 1720. While Bach was accompanying the prince to the spa at Carlsbad, his wife Maria Barbara unexpectedly fell ill and died. He returned too late for the funeral. A year later, Bach married the 20-year-old singer Anna Magdalena Wülcken (see box).

THE THOMASSCHULE, 1840
Bach lived in Leipzig at the Thomas School, which was affiliated with Thomaskirche, the Lutheran church where he was musical director. This sketch of the school was made by Felix Mendelssohn, who lived in a building opposite from 1835 to 1847. It was Mendelssohn who helped revive interest in Bach’s works in the 19th century.

A decisive move to Leipzig

Whether unsettled by these events or by changes at court, the prince married a woman who was utterly uninterested in music, and Bach started looking for an alternative post and a new challenge. In 1723, a vacancy appeared in the Saxon city of Leipzig, a thriving center of commerce and culture. A “cantor” was needed, who would be responsible for the music in the Thomaskirche and other major churches in the city. Having failed to recruit their desired candidate, the prominent composer Georg Philipp Telemann, the city authorities reluctantly took on Bach—as one councilor put it, “when the best man cannot be obtained, mediocre ones have to be accepted.” Bach had to promise that his music would “ not last too long,” nor be “operatic” in style. Despite this unpromising beginning, Bach had found a post he was to fill for the rest of his life.

Bach’s creative energy in his early years in Leipzig was astonishing. Responsible for the music at four churches, he wrote new cantatas at an average rate of one a week, plus larger-scale works for the high points of the church year—the Magnificat for Christmas 1723, the St. John Passion for Easter 1724, and the St. Matthew Passion for Easter 1727. Nor was his output by any means restricted to sacred music. Some of his best-loved keyboard pieces, including the Partitas, English Suites, and French Suites, date from this period. In 1729, he became director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, which staged weekly performances of secular music at the Zimmerman coffeehouse.

BACH AND HIS SONS, 1730
This painting by German portraitist Balthasar Denner is thought to depict Bach, holding a cello, with three of his sons; some historians, however, dispute that it shows the family of Bach.

Home life and family

Bach’s home became a center of music-making, in which the entire family participated. The composer wrote many works for domestic performance or as learners’ pieces for his numerous offspring. Anna Magdalena gave birth to 13 children between 1723 and 1742, of whom only six survived infancy; however, the constant round of births and deaths does not appear to have interrupted Bach’s productivity, nor to have disturbed what was a mutually contented marriage.

In contrast, Bach’s relations with his Leipzig employers were always difficult. There were endless conflicts over pay and status, and over the nonmusical teaching duties that he was supposed to have performed but often did not. In 1736, he secured an additional post as court composer to the elector of Saxony in Dresden, a prestigious position that made him largely immune to any further criticism from the Leipzig authorities. It was at the Dresden court that Bach received a commission from the Russian ambassador, Count Keyserlingk, to write a soothing piece of music for harpsichordist Gottlieb Goldberg to play to help the count sleep at night—the work now known as the Goldberg Variations.

ST. MATTHEW PASSION
In the St. Matthew Passion, sung in German and shown here in a handwritten score from the 1740s, Bach’s music stresses the terrible anguish of the Crucifixion.

Travels and troubles

Bach did not follow musical fashions. In 1737, he was strongly attacked by the young music critic Johann Adolf Scheibe for his allegedly “bombastic and confused style” that offended contemporary tastes for simplicity and clarity of melody and harmony. However, Bach’s later music only served to reaffirm his old-fashioned commitment to dense counterpoint, or the intertwining of two or more melodic lines.

In 1747, on a visit to Berlin, he was invited to play in front of the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, who was employing Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emmanuel (see box) as a court musician. The king presented Bach with an original theme on which—for the royal amusement—he spontaneously improvised a three-part fugue at the pianoforte. Back in Leipzig, he used the same theme to create The Musical Offering, a set of contrapuntal pieces including a six-part fugue. Up to his death, he was working on his Art of Fugue, an exhaustive exploration of the possibilities of contrapuntal writing that was a monumental tribute to a disappearing musical world.

FREDERICK II OF PRUSSIA
Bach dedicated his Musical Offering to the Prussian king, though the work is now seen as the composer’s critique of Frederick’s religious and aesthetic values.

Final works

In 1749, Bach went blind. He died the following year, possibly of diabetes, and was buried in an unmarked grave. His work as a composer was soon largely forgotten, but interest revived in the 19th century, especially after Mendelssohn’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829.

By the century’s end, Bach had become famous enough for his body to be dug up and reburied in a stone sarcophagus. His remains now lie in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche.

IN PROFILE

C.P.E. Bach

Four of Bach’s sons had notable musical careers. The most prominent was Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach (1714–1788), whose reputation at one time eclipsed that of his father. The second surviving son of Johann Sebastian by his first wife, C.P.E. was employed at the Prussian court for 30 years. Famed for his virtuosity on the harpsichord, he wrote an influential manual on keyboard technique, which introduced the use of the thumbs into keyboard-playing. His emotional and dramatic keyboard sonatas were a source of inspiration to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

TITLE PAGE OF C.P.E. BACH’S TREATISE ON THE HARPSICHORD, 1759