Johann Sebastian Bach - Biography
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach (in the German duchy of Thurnigia) on March 21st, 1685 and died in Leipzig on July 28th, 1750. Bach comes from a long line of musicians who were prominent in Germany for many generations. He was the youngest son of Johann Ambrosious, an organist in St. Michael’s church in Eisenach. His mother, Maria Elisabetha, died when Bach was nine; his father was to die the next year. His father gave him rudimentary musical instruction at an early age. The ten-year-old Bach went to live with his oldest brother, Johann Christoph, who was in his mid twenties and an established church organist in the town of Ohrdruf. His brother continued his musical instruction in a very intensive fashion .Bach studied the famed German composers of the previous period such as Johann Pachelbel, Johann Froberger and the somewhat younger, Danish composer, Dieterich Buxtehude. He also had a firm grounding in the great French and Italian masters. When Bach was fourteen, he was chosen by a local musical luminary, Elias Herda, to receive advanced musical studies in Lüneburg, a town not far from Hamburg. He became a chorister there at a very prominent Lutheran church, St. Michaels. Biographical information about Bach during this period is very sketchy but the proximity to a major city like Hamburg exposed him to a far wider range of knowledge and culture then he would have obtained in his provincial hometown.
Bach’s first position at the age of eighteen was as a court musician in Weimar, a small but culturally prominent city in the German duchy of Thurnigia. His reputation as a keyboard artist quickly spread and he got a permanent position as a church organist in the town in Arnstadt. It was at that time that he wrote his first compositions. One of the few colorful stories regarding Bach’s personal life was that a year in to his appointment, he took a few months leave of absence to hear the elderly Buxtehude, then the most prominent musician and organist in Germany, play in Lübeck. Legend was that he made the trip of over 200 miles primarily on foot; considering he would have had to walk through the forbidding Harz Mountains, this is unlikely. Buxtehude’s offered his position in Lübeck (upon his retirement) to whoever would marry his spinster daughter, Anna Margareta. Bach, George Frideric Handel and Johann Mattheson all passed.
Two years later, upon an appointment to another Thurnigia town, Mühlhausen, Bach married his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach. One of the reasons why Bach moved from position to position during his earlier years was that his fiery temper often led to clashes with colleagues, some leading to fisticuffs. During this period, Bach composed his first. Bach, probably wearing out his welcome in Mühlhausen, returned to Weimar to become a church organist. During this time he had begun to father children (eventually numbering twenty), including Wilhelm Friedemann in 1710 and Carl Philipp Emmanuel in 1710, both of whom would become major composers in their own right. During this period he was exposed to Italian baroque composers like Antonio Vivaldi and Benedetto Marcello, whose work he transcribed as keyboard arrangements. He also composed his six English Suites and many of his well known Fantasia and Fugues and Prelude and Fugues for organ, including the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” famously featured in Disney’s Fantasia. In 1717, anther dispute with his employers landed Bach in jail for a month before he was dismissed from his position.
Bach’s next position placed him in the town of Köthen, where he served a music loving Prince named Leopold as his director of music. The court was not Lutheran so Bach turned his attention from sacred music to write the instrumental music that much of his posthumous fame rests on. From this period we have the solo Cello Suites, the Violin Concertos, the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, the Orchestral Suites and the Brandenburg Concertos, amongst others. His wife and the mother of his first seven children, Maria Barbara, died in 1720. He then married Anna Maria Wilcke, a young soprano in 1721, who was eighteen years old at the time. While there was some pragmatism in the marriage, there must have been some romance since they had thirteen children.
Bach once more changed positions when he applied for the position of cantor and organist of the famous St. Thomas Church and school in Leipzig in the duchy of Saxony, where he succeeded the recently deceased composer and organist, Johann Kuhnau. As an audition piece, he presented them with the great St. John’s Passion, adapted from a portion of the Gospel of John. He obtained the position and was to stay there for the remaining twenty seven years of life. Leipzig, whilst an important mercantile city in Saxony, wasn’t the major city that it is today and it was Lutheranism, not opera and theatre, that was the principal concern of the town’s prominent citizenry. Among Bach’s duties was to supply the church with cantatas to be performed on holy days of the calendar for the Saint Thomas and St. Nicholas churches. These works, which are set to texts from the Gospels and Lutheran liturgy, ran anywhere from ten to thirty five minutes and often alternated between choruses and arias for four soloists, including a male alto. There well over 200 of these works accounted for with roughly a dozen missing. Amongst the more famous are Cantata 56 Ich Will Denn Kreuzstab Gernen Tragen, number 82 Ich Habe Genug , number 198 Trauer Ode and 140 Wachet Auf, which incorporates the famous hymn, Sleepers Awake.
Bach’s duties also included being the principal of the St. Thomas school, where he taught music. Bach often had acrimonious encounters with town elders over his salary, housing and insufficient size of his orchestra. He continued to write massive amounts of organ music and in 1724 wrote the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier for keyboard and the French Suites for harpsichord. Around 1730, he composed his famous series of Motets for chorus, the great Magnificant and one of the great works of Western civilization, St. Matthew’s Passion for double chorus and orchestra. In 1729, he also added a prominent secular position as the director of the Collegium Musicum. During the 1730s, he wrote his Seven Harpsichord Concertos, Christmas Oratorio, Italian Concerto for solo keyboard and the Goldberg Variations. In 1733, in order to gain a position as the court composer of Saxony, he presented the Elector of Saxony with a Kýrie and a Gloria Patri that what would eventually become part of the B minor Mass, probably the magnum opus of his career.
In 1740, Bach composed the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. These two sets of preludes and fugues explore all the keys, sharps and flats of the Western musical scale. These 48 pieces have been a musical bible for musicians from Ludwig van Beethoven to Arnold Schoenberg.
Bach’s ceaseless work composing well over 1,000 pieces, in addition to his duties as an administrator and performer, began to take a toll on his health as he passed sixty and his eyesight began to fail. In 1747, he visited the Potsdam court of King Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who challenged Bach to improvise a fugue on one of his own themes. The result was a full scale work entitled A Musical Offering, consisting of fugues, canons and a trio based on the King’s theme. The final major work of Bach was The Art of the Fugue, a complex series of fugues and canons based on the opening theme that is a summation of all of Bach’s immense contrapuntal knowledge. Before completing this work, he submitted to a primitive form of eye surgery to remove cataracts by an English ophthalmologist, John Taylor, who was to also perform a similar operation on Bach’s contemporary, Handel. His health weakened further. After a severe stroke, he died on July 28th, 1750. The Art of the Fugue was left unfinished, though it was to conclude with a colossal fugue on the keys representing Bach’s name B-A-C-H (H being B flat in German notation). Bach’s son, C.P.E Bach, wrote on the final page “upon this Fugue which the name B-A-C-H is applied as a counter subject the composer died.” Before he died, he dictated an organ prelude, Before Thy Throne I Now Appear, to his son in law, Johann Altnickol.
Bach – though incomparably great and widely admired as an organist – was a provincial musician whose reputation as a composer barely extended beyond German professional musicians; particularly compared to Handel, who was born the same year as him and died nine years later as an international celebrity. Bach’s sons were celebrated musicians themselves and tried to keep his reputation alive. C.P.E. Bach in particular began to correspond with a music critic named Fokel, who was to become Bach’s first major biographer in 1802. This information is the basis of much of the firsthand knowledge we have of Bach. Beethoven was a great admirer of Bach whom he referred to as “the father of harmony,” but his knowledge was limited to the keyboard works and as late as the 1810s he tried in vain to get a copy of the B minor Mass. The Bach revival really began when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn performed The St. Matthew Passion, which had gone unperformed for nearly a century by 1829. This event, along with fervor of young Romantics such as Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, created a great Bach renaissance that the centennial of his death in 1750 saw the founding of the Bach-Gesellschaft (society) whose major purpose was to accumulate and publish Bach’s works, a task that was not completed until the close of the nineteenth century. In the interim, another great composer, Johannes Brahms, was to be profoundly affected by Bach.
Bach was now immortalized as one of the greats of music but this was more for the professional musician then the average music lover, who found his music intimidating. In the first third of the twentieth century, great musicians such us Pablo Casals, Wanda Landowska and Albert Schweitzer popularized his works. More controversially, the famed Conductor Leopold Stokowski made a series of orchestral transcriptions of the organ works including the famed Toccata and Fugue that was used in an episode of Fantasia. These hyper-Romantic transcriptions horrified purists but turned thousands into Bach fans.
With the development of the LP and the bicentennial of his birth in 1950, there was a spur to record hundreds of Bach works, particularly by small specialty labels who could record in war ravaged Germany for next to nothing. The second wave came with Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv’s dedication to performing Bach in a historically correct fashion, by musicians like harpsichordist John Kirkpatrick, organist Helmut Walcha and conductor Karl Richter. Bach’s works were finally, consistently compiled in the ‘50s by German musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder, who gave us the BWV listing system. Above all, the brilliant Canadian pianist Glenn Gould made Bach enormously popular, starting with his recording of The Goldberg Variations. The final phase began with the period instrument-devoted movement that occurred primarily in England, Netherlands and Germany. At this point in history, Bach, along with Mozart and Beethoven, is considered the greatest of composers.
