Johann Sebastian Bach

German composer

• Born: March 21, 1685
• Birthplace: Eisenach, Thuringia, Ernestine Saxon Duchies (now in Germany)
• Died: July 28, 1750
• Place of death: Leipzig, Saxony (now in Germany)

Bach pioneered modern classical music, setting the parameters of composition that have remained largely unchanged to the present. So significant was his contribution to musical composition that some historians divide the history of music into the periods “before Bach” and “after Bach.”

Early Life

Johann Sebastian Bach (yoh-HAHN zay-BAHS-tyahn BAHKH) was born in the shadow of Wartburg Castle, in the spring of 1685, in Eisenach, a few miles from where his fellow composer, George Frideric Handel, was born in the same year. Bach came from seven generations of talented musicians. His father was a court musician for the duke of Eisenach, and several of his close relatives were organists in the larger nearby churches. His eldest brother was apprenticed to the famous Johann Pachelbel.

Bach was only nine years old when his mother died, and his father died the following year. Consequently, in 1695, he moved thirty miles to Ohrdruf to live with his brother, the organist at St. Michael’s Church. He continued his musical education and also began studying New Testament Greek and other basic subjects at the cloister school. His brother, an excellent musician, taught him keyboard techniques and worked with him on the construction of a new organ. Very early, Bach became interested in the harmonic structure underlying the melodies he copied from manuscripts.

In March of 1700, Bach, at the age of fifteen, walked 200 miles with a fellow student to the ancient northern German city of Lüneburg to attend the Knights’ Academy, a school of practical education for young noblemen. The curriculum included courtly dancing, fencing, and riding, as well as the study of feudal law, politics, and history. Young Bach had the ability to read music at first sight and supported himself largely by singing and playing the organ.

Bach broadened his experiences while at Lüneburg. More than once, he walked the thirty miles to Hamburg to hear two of the largest organs in the world. The great organist Johann Reincken was in Hamburg, and Dietrich Buxtehude lived in Lübeck. Bach also observed a French community of Huguenot exiles; music was a focal point of their lives, and Bach heard French instrumental music performed by French orchestras, which enhanced his understanding of German and Italian musical forms.

Life’s Work

In 1703, Bach was ready for his first career appointment; he found it with the installation of a new organ in the old church at Arnstadt, a small city of lovely, tree-lined streets some twenty-five miles from Eisenach. His salary was substantial enough to enable him to purchase a harpsichord, several books, and clothing that befitted his new position. His duties as church organist were light, but his choir, he said, consisted of “a band of ruffians.”

Bach’s early compositions, as might be expected, were marked by immaturity. Perhaps his best organ work of this period was the serene Pastorale in F Major, characterized by its “free flow and logical unfolding of melody.” At Arnstadt, Bach also wrote his first cantata, later revised, For Thou Wilt Not Leave My Soul in Hell, whose continuous melody creates the musical equivalent of a soliloquy.

Needing greater depth to his musical experience, Bach, in the autumn of 1705, received what was supposed to be a one-month leave of absence to observe and listen to the great Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck. Bach was impressed with Buxtehude’s arrangement of cantatas in his Vesper Concerts, sung as dialogues between soloists and the chorus. When, after four months, Bach finally returned to Arnstadt, he brought fresh ideas with him and began ornamenting his organ playing with coloratura and countermelodies.

In 1707, Bach left Arnstadt to become organist at St. Blaise Church in Mühlhausen. That same year, at twenty-three years of age, he married his second cousin, Maria Barbara. At Mühlhausen, Bach gained valuable technical experience in overseeing the repair of the aged organ in the church. He was also called upon to write music for various civic occasions, such as the cantata God Is My King, calling for a brass ensemble, two woodwind ensembles, a string section, and two separate choirs.

The duke of Saxe-Weimar, Wilhelm Ernst, appointed Bach chamber musician and court organist in 1708 and, later, his concertmaster. The duke doubled Bach’s salary, as the composer entered a completely different social world. Bach loved the melodic warmth and intensity of Italian music, and his compositions began to resemble that style. His cousin, Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748), was his close companion, and he and Bach developed musical theory together. Both men were particularly interested in the philosophical values underlying music, believing music to be a gift from God and of great spiritual importance. Bach wrote many dances and loved joyful music.

During his Weimar years, Bach composed some of the greatest organ music ever written. He perfected his technique of counterpoint, mastering the relation between melody and harmony. The Bachs had six children born to them at Weimar, two of whom (twins) died at birth.

Bach’s fame spread throughout Germany, albeit more as a performing musician than as a composer. In 1717, Prince Leopold of Köthen appointed Bach his court conductor and chapel master, and Bach entered a creative, relaxed period of his life. As chapel master, Bach was left alone to create as he saw fit. The twenty-three-year-old Prince Leopold loved music and understood it well. Unfortunately, most of Bach’s work from the Köthen years is lost, but he captured the vitality of that pleasant place in the Brandenburg Concertos and in The Well-Tempered Clavier, both written in Köthen.

Bach’s relaxed, joyful lifestyle was marred by two tragedies. In 1719, his one-year-old son Leopold Augustus died, and the next year, while he was traveling with the prince in northern Germany, his wife suddenly died. In December, 1721, Bach, age thirty-six, married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, who was twenty years old. Anna had a lovely soprano voice, and Bach often wrote music for her to sing. They were devoted to each other and often worked together, since they both earned their living as musicians at the Köthen court. Of the thirteen children whom Anna bore, seven died as infants. Altogether, Bach had twenty children, ten of whom survived to adulthood.

Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in Leipzig, Germany, writing church music of such quality that it continues to be performed. He had not wanted to leave Köthen, but his main purpose in life was not yet fulfilled. Years before, he had written that his chief goal in life was to write “well-conceived and well-regulated church music to the glory of God.” To realize his creative ideas for church music and to provide a better education for his sons at St. Thomas School, Bach took a 75 percent reduction in salary and relinquished his post of court musician to take up one of the most famous cantorships in Germany.

Bach’s principal responsibilities in his cantorship revolved around St. Thomas Church and the St. Thomas School. Leipzig was an imperial free city, so it had no princely court and, thus, no court orchestra. The town musicians were employed at both church and civic events. Since the Lutheran Church was the established church, the government officials on the city council of Leipzig had the responsibility of securing a music director for all musical activities in the four churches of Leipzig. Bach had to compose or select, plan, and arrange the music for each liturgy. He personally directed his music on alternate Sundays at St. Thomas Church and at St. Nicholas Church.

As director of music, Bach also composed cantatas for festive civic occasions such, as visits by royalty or the birthdays of leading citizens of the town. His office also made him cantor of St. Thomas School, in charge of teenage boys. He called the boys for the opening of classes at 6:00 a.m., taught several classes, and had prayers with them at 8:00 p.m. He also visited the sick in the school hospital next to the church.

Weak-sighted for years, partly because of overwork and poor lighting, Bach was almost blind by 1749. The next year, after two strokes, Bach died in Leipzig at the age of sixty-five. In a most fitting culmination of his life and calling, his final work was the chorale Before Thy Throne I Now Appear.

Bach’s joyful legacy continues to inspire and refresh countless thousands. His wives and children loved him, and he helped them develop their varied musical talents. All of his children, he believed, were born musicians, and he could put on a vocal and instrumental concert with his own family alone. He wrote many songs of love for his wives. Bach was “temperate, industrious, devout, a home lover, and a family man; genuine, hospitable, and jovial. Frugality and discipline ruled in the Bach home, also unity, laughter, loyalty, and love.”

Portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach from young man to old all reveal the same serious demeanor, intelligent eyes, cheerful disposition, determined lips, and kindly face. He loved life, his family, his music, and his God, as his works demonstrate. He wrote cheerful dances as well as joyful church music, because he separated neither his life nor his music into sacred and secular categories but saw the purpose of all music as “the glory of God and the re-creation of the human spirit.”

Significance

Three categories of musical performance were common in the early eighteenth century: church music, theatrical music, and chamber music. Johann Sebastian Bach’s eleven hundred compositions fall into the first and last categories. His instrumental concertos, suites, and overtures were mostly intended for drawing-room performance. His three hundred church cantatas were his “musical sermons,” consciously designed to complement the spoken word and illumine the liturgy. Bach composed five entire yearly sets of cantatas. His passions and oratorios are musical dramas full of action and events, more dramatic than much that was written for the theater.

Bach’s compositions were true masterpieces, in the sense that they broke the established rules governing music and created new rules in their place. His personal, subjective understanding of melody, countermelody, harmony, counterpoint, and other basic components of a musical composition came to constitute the objective standards by which classical music was created and judged. In many ways, Bach’s greatest works still stand as the aesthetic ideal for serious Western music, and his basic harmonic and chord progressions have found their way, in altered form, into the pop music repertoire as well.

Although Bach lived his entire life in Germany, he quickly learned other national styles of music and incorporated them into his compositions: From France, he acquired delicate dance suites and restrained instrumental music. From his native Germany, he particularly loved and employed fugal techniques. From Italy, melodic and dramatic operatic music and the vocal motets of the Renaissance found their way into his compositions.

Bach’s library reveals something of his thinking and attitude toward life. The eighty-one volumes that Bach owned all dealt with theological and religious subjects, and Bach used them to find the precise wording he wanted for his lyrics. He personally selected the 141 verses of Scripture in The Saint Matthew Passion and took equal care in planning its musical composition. Many appreciate and love as great art Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Sheep May Safely Graze, and Bach’s glorious Christmas Oratorio, but to understand them fully, one must realize the spiritual view of life that motivated Bach. His belief in the reality of eternity caused his music to be timeless.

Bibliography

Chiapusso, Jan. Bach’s World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. A thorough biography that gives attention to the cultural and historical setting in which Bach composed his music. The author understands the musical philosophy underlying composition, and he applies his knowledge to Bach’s work.

David, Hans T., and Arthur Mendel, eds. The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. Revised and enlarged by Christoph Wolff. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Includes many of the letters and other documents written by Bach. Also contains a twenty-eight-page “Portrait in Outline” and a lengthy section entitled “Bach as Viewed by His Contemporaries.”

Dowley, Tim. Bach: His Life and Times. Neptune City, N.J.: Paganiniana, 1981. A brief and profusely illustrated book that recounts Bach’s life in a succinct, interesting manner. A fascinating introduction to the subject.

Heckscher, Martin A., et al. The Universal Bach: Lectures Celebrating the Tercentenary of Bach’s Birthday. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986. An interesting collection of essays written for the three hundredth birthday of Bach under the auspices of the Basically Bach Festival of Philadelphia. The five essays examine Bach’s musical symbolism and Bach as a musical scholar and biblical interpreter.

Schweitzer, Albert. J. S. Bach. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1950. A profoundly intellectual but sensitive biography by an eminent Bach scholar. Bach’s techniques of composition are examined in an erudite fashion.

Terry, Charles Sanford. Bach: A Biography. 2d ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. One of the oldest “modern” biographies of Bach. Tends to be dry and somewhat wordy, but carefully accurate. Includes seventy-six photographs of places where Bach lived and worked; the photos, taken in the early twentieth century, are themselves an important historical record.

Williams, Peter. The Life of Bach. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. An examination of Bach the man and the composer. Williams questions whether the centuries of acclaim for Bach’s music have made it impossible objectively to evaluate the composer’s work.

Wolff, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Biography focusing on Bach’s performing and composing by a noted Bach scholar. Wolff analyzes Bach’s innovations in harmony and counterpoint within the context of European musical and social history.