Johann Sebastian Bach was a composer of the Baroque era, the most celebrated member of a large family of northern German musicians. Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building. Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music.
Appearing at a propitious moment in the history of music, Bach was able to survey and bring together the principal styles, forms, and national traditions that had developed during preceding generations and, by virtue of his synthesis, enrich them all. J. S. Bach was born at Eisenach, Thuringia, on March 21, 1685, the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach and Elisabeth Lammerhirt. Ambrosius was a string player, employed by the town council and the ducal court of Eisenach. Johann Sebastian started school in 1692 or 1693 and did well in spite of frequent absences.
Of his musical education at this time, nothing definite is known; however, he may have picked up the rudiments of string playing from his father, and no doubt he attended the Georgen Church, where Johann Christoph Bach was organist until 1703. This Christoph had been a pupil of the influential keyboard composer, Johann Pachelbel and he apparently gave Johann Sebastian his first formal keyboard lessons. The young Bach again did well at school, until in 1700 his voice secured him a place in a select choir of poor boys at the school at the Michaels Church, Luneburg.
He seems to have returned to Thuringia in the late summer of 1702. By this time he was already a reasonably proficient organist. His experience at Luneburg, if not at Ohrdruf, had turned him away from the secular string-playing tradition, though not exclusively, a composer and performer of keyboard and 2 sacred music. The next few months are wrapped in mystery, but by March 4, 1703, he was a member of the orchestra employed by Johann Ernst, Duke von Weimar. This post was a mere stopgap; he probably already had his eye on the organ then being built at the New Church in Arnstadt.
When it was finished, he helped test the organ in August 1703 he was appointed organist at the age of 18. Arnstadt documents imply that he had been court organist at Weimar; this is incredible, though it is likely enough that he had occasionally played there (Kirby 2). In June 1707 Bach obtained a post at the Blasius Church in Muhlhausen in Thuringia. He moved there soon after and married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach at Dornheim on October 17. At Muhlhausen things seem, for a time, to have gone more smoothly.
He produced several church cantatas at this time; all of these works are cast in a conservative mold, based on biblical and chorale texts and displaying no influence of the modern Italian operatic forms that were to appear in Bach’s later cantatas. The famous organ Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, written in the rhapsodic northern style, and the Prelude and Fugue in D Major may also have been composed during the Muhlhausen period, as well as the organ Passacaglia in C Minor (BWV 582), an early example of Bach’s instinct for large-scale organization. Cantata No. ), God is my King, of Feb. 4, 1708, was printed at the expense of the city council and was the first of Bach’s compositions to be published. While at Muhlhausen, Bach copied music to enlarge the choir library, tried to encourage music in the surrounding villages, and was in sufficient favor to be able to interest his employers in a scheme for rebuilding the organ. His real reason for resigning on June 25, 1708, is not known. He himself said that his plans for a church music had been 3 hindered by conditions in Muhlhausen and that his salary was inadequate.
It is generally supposed that he had become involved in a theological controversy between his own pastor Frohne and Archdeacon Eilmar of the Marien Church. Certainly, he was friendly with Eilmar, who provided him with librettos and became godfather to Bach’s first child; and it is likely enough that he was not in sympathy with Frohne, who, as a Pietist, would have frowned on elaborate church music. It is just as possible, however, that it was the dismal state of musical life in Muhlhausen that prompted Bach to seek employment elsewhere.
At all events, his resignation was accepted, and shortly afterward he moved to Weimar, some miles west of Jena on the Ilm River. He continued nevertheless to be on good terms with Muhlhausen personalities, for he supervised the rebuilding of the organ, is supposed to have inaugurated it on October 31, 1709, and composed a cantata for February 4, 1709, which was printed but has disappeared (Schonberg 4). Bach was, from the outset, court organist at Weimar and a member of the orchestra. Encouraged by Wilhelm Ernst, he concentrated on the organ during the first few years of his tenure.
From Weimar, Bach occasionally visited Weissenfels; in February 1713 he took part in a court celebration there that included a performance of his first secular cantata, Hunt Cantata. Late in 1713 Bach had the opportunity of succeeding Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow at the Liebfrauen Church, Halle; but the duke raised his salary, and he stayed on at Weimar. On March 2, 1714, he became concertmaster, with the duty of composing a cantata every month. Unfortunately, Bach’s development cannot be traced in detail during the vital years 170814, when his style underwent a profound change.
There are too few datable works from the series 4 of cantatas written in 171416. However, it is obvious that he had been influenced by the new styles, and forms of the contemporary Italian Opera. His favorite forms appropriated from the Italians were those based on refrain da capao schemes in which wholesale repetitionliteral or with modificationsof entire sections of a piece permitted him to create coherent musical forms with much larger dimensions than had hitherto been possible.
These newly acquired techniques henceforth governed a host of Bach’s arias and concerto movements, as well as many of his larger fugues, and profoundly affected his treatment of chorales (Kupferberg 3). There, as musical director, he was concerned chiefly with chamber and orchestral music. Even though some of the works may have been composed earlier and revised later, it was at Kothen that the sonatas for violin and clavier and for viola da gamba and clavier and the works for unaccompanied violin and cello were put into something like their present form.
The Brandenburg Concertos were finished by March 24, 1721; in the sixth concertoso it has been suggestedBach bore in mind the technical limitations of the prince, who played the gamba. Bach played the viola by choice; he liked to be in the middle of the harmony. He also wrote a few cantatas for the prince’s birthday and other such occasions; most of these seem to have survived only in later versions, adapted to more generally useful words. The Well-Tempered Clavier, eventually consisting of two books, each of 24 preludes and fugues in all keys and known as the Forty-eight.
This remarkable collection systematically explores both the potentials of a newly established tuning point. For the first time in the history of keyboard music, made all the keys equally usable and the possibilities for musical organization afforded by 5 the system of functional tonality. Which is a kind of musical consolidated in the music of the Italian concerto composers of the preceding generation and a system that was to prevail for the next 200 years.
At the same time, The Well-Tempered Clavier is a compendium of the most popular forms and styles of the era: dance types, arias, motets, concertos, etc. , presented within the unified aspect of a single compositional technique; the rigorously logical and venerable fugue. On December 3, 1721, Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, daughter of a trumpeter at Weissenfels. Apart from his first wife’s death, these first four years at Kothen were probably the happiest of Bach’s life.
He was on the best terms with the prince, who was genuinely musical; and in 1730 Bach said that he had expected to end his days there. But the prince married on December 11, 1721, and conditions deteriorated. The princess described by Bach as an amusa required so much of her husband’s attention that Bach began to feel neglected. He also had to think of the education of his elder sons, born in 1710 and 1714, and he probably began to think of moving to Leipzig as soon as the cantorate fell vacant with the death of Johann Kuhnau on June 5, 1722.
Bach was so deeply committed to Leipzig that, although the princess had died on April 4, he applied for permission to leave Kothen. This he obtained on April 13, and on May 13 he was sworn in at Leipzig. He was appointed honorary musical director at Kothen, and both he and Anna were employed there from time to time until the prince died, on November 19, 1728 (Farb 1). Bachs first official performance was on May 30, 1723, the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday, with, Die Elenden sollen Essen. New works produced during this year include many 6 antatas and the Magnificent in its first version.
The first half of 1724 saw the production of the St. John Passion, which was subsequently revised. The total number of cantatas produced during this ecclesiastical year was about 62, of which about 39 were new works. On June 11, 1724, the first Sunday after Trinity, Bach began a fresh annual cycle of cantatas, and within the year he wrote 52 of the so-called chorale cantatas, formerly supposed to have been composed over the nine-year period 173544. The Sanctus of the Mass in B Minor was produced at Christmas (Schonberg 4).
During his first two or three years at Leipzig, Bach had produced a large number of new cantatas, sometimes, as research has revealed, at the rate of one a week. This phenomenal pace raises the question of Bach’s approach to composition. Bach and his contemporaries, subject to the hectic pace of production, had to invent or discover their ideas quickly and could not rely on the unpredictable arrival of inspiration. Nor did the musical conventions and techniques or the generally rationalistic outlook of the time necessitate this reliance, as long as the composer was willing to accept them.
The Baroque composer who submitted to the regimen inevitably had to be a traditionalist who willingly embraced the conventions (Kupferberg 3). About 1733 Bach began to produce cantatas in honor of the elector of Saxony and his family, evidently with a view to the court appointment he secured in 1736; many of these secular movements were adapted to sacred words and reused in the Christmas Oratorio. The Kyrie and Gloria of the Mass in B Minor, written in 1733, were also dedicated to the elector, but the rest of the Mass was not put together until Bach’s last years.
On his visits to Dresden, Bach had 7 won the regard of Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk, the Russian envoy, who commissioned the so-called Goldberg Variations; these were published as part four of the Clavierubung about 1742, and Book Two of the Forty-eight seems to have been compiled about the same time. In addition, he wrote a few cantatas, revised some of his Weimar organ works, and published the so-called Schubler Chorale Preludes in or after 1746. Of Bach’s last illness little is known except that it lasted several months and prevented him from finishing The Art of Fugue.
His constitution was undermined by two unsuccessful eye operations performed by John Taylor, the itinerant English quack who numbered Handel among his other failures; and he died on July 28, 1750, at Leipzig. His employers proceeded with relief to appoint a successor; Burgomaster Stieglitz remarked, The school needs a cantor, not a musical director though certainly he ought to understand music. Anna Magdalena was left badly off. For some reason, her stepsons did nothing to help her, and her own sons were too young to do so.
She died on February 27, 1760, and was given a pauper’s funeral (Kupferburg 3). Unfinished as it was, The Art of the Fugue was published in 1751. It attracted little attention and was reissued in 1752 with a laudatory preface by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, a well-known Berlin musician who later became director of the royal lottery. In spite of Marpurg and of some appreciative remarks by Johann Mattheson, the influential Hamburg critic and composer, only about 30 copies had been sold by 1756, when Emanuel Bach offered the plates for sale.
As far as is known, they were sold for scrap (Farb 1). 8 Bachs eyesight began to deteriorate during his last years and in March and April 1750 he was twice operated on. The operations and the treatment that followed them may have hastened Bachs death. Bach took communion on July 22, and died six days later. On July 31, he was buried at St. Johns cemetery. Emanuel Bach and the organist-composer Johann Friedrich Agricola wrote an obituary; Mizler added a few closing words and published the result in the journal of his society 1754. There is an English translation of it in The Bach Reader.
Though incomplete and inaccurate, the obituary is of very great importance as a firsthand source of information. Bach appears to have been a good Husband and father. Indeed, he was the father of 20 children, only 10 of whom survived to maturity. There is amusing evidence of certain thriftinessa necessary virtue, for he was never more than moderately well off and he delighted in hospitality. Living as he did at a time when music was beginning to be regarded as no occupation for a gentleman, he occasionally had to stand up for his rights both as a man and as a musician; he was then obstinate in the extreme.
But no sympathetic employer had any trouble with Bach, and with his professional brethren he was modest and friendly. He was also a good teacher and from his Muhlhausen days onward was never without pupils (Schonberg 4). Bachs output embraces practically every musical sight of his time except for the dramatic ones of opera and oratorio. Bach opened up new dimensions in virtually every department of creative work to which he turned, in format musical quality and technical demands.
As was normal at the time, his creative production was mostly bound up with the factors of his places of work and his employers, but the density and complexity of his music are such that analysts and commentators have uncovered in it layers of religious and numerological 9 which are not often found in the music of other composers. Many of his contemporaries, notably found his music too involved and lacking in immediate melodic appeal, but his chorale harmonization and fugal works were soon adopted as models for new generations of musicians. The course of Bachs musical development was by the changes in musical style taking place around him.
Together with his great contemporary Handel, Bach was the last great representative of the Baroque era in an age which was already reflecting the Baroque style. For about 50 years after Bach’s death, his music was neglected. This was only natural; in the days of Haydn and Mozart, no one could be expected to take much interest in a composer who had been considered old-fashioned even in his lifetimeespecially since his music was not readily available, and half of it, the church cantatas, was fast becoming useless as a result of changes in religious thought.
At the same time, musicians of the late 18th century were neither so ignorant of Bach’s music nor so insensitive to its influence as some modern authors have suggested. Emanuel Bach’s debt to his father was considerable, and Bach exercised a profound and acknowledged influence directly on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
