Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)

When Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750, it seemed unlikely that his reputation would outlive him by many years. Bach was respected during his lifetime as a virtuoso organist, but Buxtehude (1637–1707), Telemann (1681–1767), Hasse (1699–1783), and Graun (1704–1759) enjoyed greater admiration as German composers of the period. Unlike Handel (1685–1759), Bach was not an international star. He was not even a star in Leipzig, the town where he labored for the last 27 years of his life—the town council saw his death as an opportunity to find someone more to their liking. Of the more than 1,000 works of J. S. Bach that have survived, only eight were published in his lifetime. The rest were preserved in manuscript form, and hundreds were lost entirely. The idea that Bach would not only be remembered hundreds of years later but would be considered the greatest of all western composers was unthinkable.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany, in 1685, into an intensely musical family. Orphaned at the age of nine, Bach was taken in by his elder brother, Johann Cristoph Bach. He showed promise, but was no prodigy. He studied music from the age of fifteen in nearby Luneburg, and in 1703 became a church organist in Arnstadt, where he was criticized by the church authorities for adding “surprising variations and irrelevant ornaments” to his hymn accompaniments. He left Arnstadt to accept a post as organist in Mühlhausen in 1707. There he married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach, and moved on a year later to become Konzertmeister and Court Organist to the Duke of Weimar. Bach stayed in Weimar for nine years. It was here that he wrote the collection known as the Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book), most of the great organ preludes and fugues, and all but one of the major chorale preludes.

In 1717, Bach moved to Cöthen where he served for six years as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. Since the court was Calvinist, Bach had no chapel duties and instead concentrated on instrumental composition. From this period date his violin concertos and the six Brandenburg Concertos, as well as numerous sonatas, suites, and keyboard works. So little was Bach’s music valued that when Leopold died in 1734, the scores of the Brandenburg Concertos were auctioned off as part of a job lot of unsorted manuscripts.

In 1720 Maria Barbara died. The following year Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcke. Maria Barbara had seven children. Anna Magdalena would bear thirteen children—six would live to maturity. A week after Bach’s wedding, Prince Leopold also married, and his bride’s lack of interest in music curtailed Bach’s activities at the Cöthen court. In 1722 Bach applied for the post of Director of Music at Leipzig. In April 1723, after the favorites Telemann and Graupner (1683–1760) had withdrawn, Bach was offered the post. “Since the best man could not be obtained, a mediocre one will have to be accepted,” the mayor remarked.

Bach remained in Leipzig until his death in 1750. His duties centered on the Sunday and feastday services at the city’s two main churches, and during his early years in Leipzig, he composed prodigious quantities of church music, including the Magnificat, the St. John Passion, the St. Matthew Passion, and hundreds of cantatas. He was renowned as a virtuoso organist and was in constant demand as an expert in organ construction and design. After 1729, his output of religious music slowed as he began to concentrate more on secular instrumental and orchestral music.

In 1737, the music theoretician Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–1776) visited Leipzig. His account gives a valuable insight into the way Bach was viewed by his contemporaries: “One can hardly conceive how it is possible for him to achieve such agility, with his fingers and with his feet, in the crossings, extensions, and extreme jumps that he manages, without mixing in a single wrong tone, or displacing his body by any violent movement. This great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he … did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art.”

Bach's style of composition was in fact out of style by the time he reached his later years. Listeners preferred the lighter, graceful style of the early classical era to the complex polyphony of Bach's works.

Ten years after Bach’s death, Anna Magdalena died in a state of poverty that had hardly been relieved by selling some of Bach’s manuscripts. The recognition of Bach’s genius was slow but sure. Beethoven called him “the founding father of harmony” 51 years after his death. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) was a crucial pioneer in the promotion of Bach’s music to its proper place in western music. Each successive generation has discovered new depths and dimensions in this stupendous body of work.

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