Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Thuringia, on 21 March 1685, into the greatest family of musicians in history: for more than a century the Bachs had been organists, cantors and town musicians throughout the region, so much so that in some towns “a Bach” meant “a musician”. His father, Johann Ambrosius, was a town musician and probably taught him the violin. But Johann Sebastian lost his mother at nine and his father at ten.

Orphaned, he was taken in by his elder brother Johann Christoph, organist at Ohrdruf and a former pupil of Pachelbel, who taught him keyboard. According to an anecdote, the boy copied by moonlight, at night, a book of music his brother had forbidden him to use. In 1700, at fifteen, he won a place as a chorister at St Michael’s School in Lüneburg, where he discovered a rich music library and heard great organists such as Georg Böhm.

In 1703 he became organist in Arnstadt. In 1705 he obtained four weeks’ leave to hear the famous organist Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck: he walked some four hundred kilometres and stayed nearly four months, earning reproaches on his return. In 1707 he became organist in Mühlhausen and married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach, with whom he had seven children, including Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, future great composers.

From 1708 to 1717 he was organist and later Konzertmeister at the court of Weimar, where he composed much of his organ music, probably including the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor. When he wanted to leave for a better post, the duke had him imprisoned for a month for insubordination. In 1717 he finally became Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, a Calvinist prince who needed no church music. Bach therefore composed mainly instrumental music: the Brandenburg Concertos (1721), the Suites for solo cello, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722).

In 1720, returning from a journey, he learned that Maria Barbara had died and was already buried. The following year he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a twenty-year-old singer, with whom he had thirteen children, including Johann Christian, who made his career in London. In 1723 he became Cantor of St Thomas’s School and director of music for the city of Leipzig, a post he held until his death. He had to provide a cantata every Sunday for the city’s churches: he composed several annual cycles, of which more than two hundred cantatas survive.

In Leipzig he composed his greatest sacred works: the St John Passion (1724), the St Matthew Passion (1727), the Christmas Oratorio (1734) and the Mass in B minor, completed in 1749. He also directed the Collegium musicum, which gave concerts at Zimmermann’s coffee house, for which he wrote the Coffee Cantata. He published the Goldberg Variations (1741) and, after improvising in 1747 before King Frederick II of Prussia on a theme the king gave him, The Musical Offering. His last years were devoted to The Art of Fugue, left unfinished.

Suffering from a serious eye disease, in 1750 he underwent two disastrous operations by the English surgeon John Taylor. He died in Leipzig on 28 July 1750. After his death his music was considered old-fashioned, but it continued to be studied by Mozart, Beethoven and the great composers. In 1829 Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, launching the Bach revival. He is now regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.