Johann Sebastian Bach

• 1. Introduction

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  In May 1747, Johann Sebastian Bach sat at a new and unfamiliar instrument in the court of King Frederick the Great in Potsdam. The king handed him a theme and dared him to improvise a fugue on it. Bach obliged, working out a three-part fugue on one of Frederick's early prototypes of the fortepiano. Back home in Leipzig, he turned that royal challenge into a set of fugues, canons, and a trio sonata called The Musical Offering. He was a German composer of the late Baroque, born in 1685 and dead by 1750. Yet for decades after he died, the wider world remembered him not as a composer at all, but as an organist. How does a man who wrote the St. Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor nearly vanish from view. Who pulled him back. And what did he build, exactly, that musicians from Beethoven to jazz players keep returning to.

• 2. A Family Of Musicians

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  The Bach family had already produced several composers when Johann Sebastian was born in Eisenach, the eighth and youngest child of the town's director of musicians, Johann Ambrosius Bach. His mother, Maria Elisabeth, was the daughter of a town councillor. The clan traced itself to a patriarch named Vitus "Veit" Bach, and across three to four generations it filled the Thuringia region with church organists, court chamber musicians, and composers. The insular cultural climate there fostered conservative musicianship, with outside influences arriving mainly through the courts.

  Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father eight months later, in February 1695. Orphaned at age 10, he moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, the organist at St. Michael's Church in Ohrdruf. There he studied, performed, and copied music, even though copying scores was forbidden because they were so valuable and ledger paper was costly. His brother exposed him to South German composers like Johann Pachelbel, North Germans like Dieterich Buxtehude, Frenchmen like Jean-Baptiste Lully, and the Italian Girolamo Frescobaldi.

  By the 3rd of April 1700 Bach had begun studies at St Michael's School in Lüneburg, a journey of two weeks north of Ohrdruf, probably made mostly on foot. He sang in the choir until his voice broke, used the school's comprehensive musical library, and took organ lessons. He also met sons of northern aristocrats sent to the nearby Ritter-Academie. Four of his own twenty children would carry the family trade forward: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian all became composers.

• 3. The Long Walk North

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  In 1705-1706, Bach upset his employer at Weimar when a four-week leave of absence stretched to roughly four months. He had gone to hear Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reincken play in Lübeck, a 450 km journey each way, reportedly on foot. Buxtehude probably introduced him to Reincken so Bach could absorb his mastery of fugue, his organ playing, and his improvisational skill. Bach already knew Reincken's music intimately; at age 15 he had copied out the monumental An Wasserflüssen Babylon.

  The respect ran both ways. When Bach revisited Reincken in 1720 and showed off his improvisation on the organ, the older man reportedly said: "I thought that this art was dead, but I see that it lives in you." That hunger to learn from others never left him. From around 1712, the music of Antonio Vivaldi became his most important late influence, teaching him, according to his biographer Forkel, "to think musically." Bach absorbed the Italian style partly by transcribing Vivaldi's string and wind concertos for harpsichord and organ. He sought to fuse the Italian sonata and the French suite into what he called a "mixed style," the vermischte Geschmack.

• 4. Quarrels And Patrons

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  On the 6th of November 1717, by the court secretary's report, Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention "for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal," and freed nearly a month later with an unfavorable discharge. The trouble with employers was a pattern. In Arnstadt he had faced an indictment for adding "strange tones" to his organ playing that confused the singers. In Leipzig he frequently clashed with the city council, whom he regarded as "penny-pinching."

  Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, was the rare employer who suited him. Himself a musician, Leopold hired Bach as Kapellmeister in 1717, paid him well, and gave him wide latitude. Because Leopold was a Calvinist who avoided elaborate music in worship, most of Bach's work from those years is secular, including the orchestral suites, the Cello Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, and the Brandenburg Concertos.

  Bach's standing improved when his sovereign, Augustus III of Poland, granted him the title of court composer of the Elector of Saxony in 1736. He had angled for it: in 1733 he composed a Kyrie-Gloria Mass for the Catholic court in Dresden and presented the manuscript as a bid for the honour. The appointment was part of his long campaign for greater bargaining power against the Leipzig council, where Johann Kuhnau had held the cantorate until his death on the 5th of June 1722.

• 5. The Leipzig Cantatas

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  In 1723 Bach took up the post of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, what one description called "the leading cantorate in Protestant Germany," and only after the job had been offered first to Georg Philipp Telemann and then to Christoph Graupner, who both stayed put. He was now responsible for music at the St. Thomas Church, the St. Nicholas Church, and to a lesser extent the New Church and St. Peter's, plus the running of the St. Thomas School. A cantata was required for the service on each Sunday and additional holiday across the liturgical year, except during the silent periods of Advent and Lent.

  In his first twelve months he resolved to compose new works for almost every liturgical occasion, the body of music now called his first cantata cycle. In his second year he wrote a cycle of chorale cantatas, each built on a single Lutheran hymn. Most followed a distinctive plan. The first stanza became an opening chorale fantasia and the last a closing four-part chorale, while the inner stanzas were rephrased into recitatives and arias. His earliest surviving chorale cantata, Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4, predated all of this by more than a decade.

  The Passions belong to these years too. The St Matthew Passion was first performed on Good Friday, the 11th of April 1727, and a listener described it as sounding like opera. The St Mark Passion of 1731 is lost, though Picander's libretto survives and allows partial reconstruction. Bach held the Leipzig post for 27 years, until his death.

• 6. The Architecture Of Counterpoint

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  From the Latin word for "flight" or "escape," the fugue runs through Bach's output the way sonata form would later define the Classical period. It is a polyphonic technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that enters in imitation and recurs throughout the piece. Each voice states the subject in turn; once every voice has entered, the exposition is complete, and episodes and further entries alternate until the music returns to the home key. Bach did not invent the form, but he shaped his fugues after Sweelinck, Froberger, Pachelbel, Frescobaldi, and Buxtehude, and contributed so fundamentally that he influenced generations of followers.

  Forkel, his first biographer, captured what set this writing apart. "It is a very different thing when two melodies are so interwoven that they converse together like two persons upon a footing of pleasant equality." From 1720, Forkel wrote, Bach's harmony lived in this interweaving of independent melodies, "so perfect in their union that each part seems to constitute the true melody."

  Bach pushed harmony as hard as line. He lived as modal music gave way to the tonal system, and he became a significant contributor to a keyboard temperament that allowed every one of the 24 major and minor keys, and modulation without retuning. The full demonstration was The Well-Tempered Clavier, two books each containing a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, the second drawn together over some 20 years. In the Suscepit Israel of his 1723 Magnificat he even had trumpets play quarter tones in the enharmonic scale of C minor.

• 7. The Surgeon And The Grave

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  In March 1750, with his eyesight failing, Bach underwent eye surgery, and again in April, at the hands of the British eye surgeon John Taylor. Taylor is understood today as a charlatan, believed to have blinded hundreds, including Bach's contemporary George Frideric Handel. Bach suffered a stroke a few days before the end and died on the 28th of July 1750, at the age of 65, from complications of the unsuccessful surgery.

  His estate, inventoried months later, included five harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, three violins, three violas, two cellos, a viola da gamba, a lute, a spinet, and 52 "sacred books," among them works by Martin Luther and Josephus. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach made sure The Art of Fugue, though unfinished, was published in 1751, and with Johann Friedrich Agricola he wrote the obituary, the "Nekrolog," printed in 1754.

  Bach was first buried at Old St John's Cemetery in Leipzig, where his grave went unmarked for nearly 150 years. In 1894 his remains were found and moved to a vault in St John's Church. That building was destroyed by Allied bombing in the Second World War, and in 1950 the remains were taken to St Thomas Church. Later research has even questioned whether the remains there are actually his.

• 8. The Long Revival

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  On a single week in 1870, Friedrich Nietzsche heard the St. Matthew Passion three times and wrote to Erwin Rohde of "immeasurable admiration," adding that "one who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as Gospel." By then Bach was firmly established as a giant, but it had not always been so. After his death his music was thought old-fashioned beside the emerging galant style, and he was remembered as a virtuoso organist and teacher. Through the later 18th century his son Carl Philipp Emanuel's reputation surpassed his own; Mozart said of him, "Bach is the father, we are the children."

  The turning point came in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion and precipitated the Bach Revival. The St. John Passion had its 19th-century premiere in 1833, and the first public performance of the Mass in B minor followed in 1844. In 1850 the Bach-Gesellschaft was founded to promote his music, choosing Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1, as the first work in its complete edition. In 1854 Peter Cornelius named Bach one of the Three Bs, alongside Beethoven and Berlioz.

  The 20th century kept finding new doors into him. Pablo Casals championed the Cello Suites as the first major performer to record them. Glenn Gould's 1955 debut recording of the Goldberg Variations turned an obscure piece into standard repertoire, reportedly selling 40,000 copies by 1960. Jazz players from Jacques Loussier to the Modern Jazz Quartet adapted his music. Three of his works ride aboard the Voyager Golden Records, sent into space on the two Voyager probes, including the first movement of Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and Gould playing the Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C major. On the 21st of March 2019, an interactive Google Doodle used machine learning to synthesize a tune in his signature style.