1685–1750 · Germany · Baroque
Johann Sebastian Bach lived from 1685 to 1750 and worked in Germany as a composer, organist and harpsichordist, one of the towering figures of the Baroque era. His huge and varied output of keyboard and organ pieces still forms a core part of the repertoire pianists learn from today.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born on 21 March (31 March, New Style) 1685 in Eisenach to the town musician Johann Ambrosius Bach and Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt, the youngest of eight children. The Bach family had been known for its musicality for several generations: almost all of its members worked as church organists, court musicians or composers. The future composer's father was responsible for secular concerts and church music in Eisenach.
When Johann Sebastian was nine, his mother died, and a year later his father died too. The orphaned boy was taken in by his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, who worked as an organist in nearby Ohrdruf. There Bach attended the local Gymnasium, while his brother taught him to play the organ and clavier and introduced him to the works of contemporary German composers, including Pachelbel.
At fifteen Bach moved to Lüneburg, where he attended St Michael's vocal school from 1700 to 1703. Besides singing in the choir, he apparently played the school's large organ and the harpsichord, and gained his first grounding in theology, Latin and other subjects. During these years he visited Hamburg and Lübeck and was able to hear celebrated organists of his time, including Dieterich Buxtehude, whom he held in high regard.
After finishing school, in January 1703 Bach briefly served as a court musician for Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar, and by August had taken up the post of organist at St. Bonifatius Church in Arnstadt. The position required only three days of work a week, paid well, and came with an instrument recently tuned to a new system that expanded a performer's possibilities. During this period Bach wrote a good number of organ works.
In Arnstadt Bach ran into conflict with the town authorities: he was unhappy with the choir's level of training, and in the winter of 1705–1706 he took unauthorised leave for several months to hear Buxtehude play in Lübeck. In 1706 he decided to change position, and the following year became organist at St Blasius's Church in Mühlhausen, with higher pay and better-trained singers.
After about a year in Mühlhausen, Bach took up a more senior post in Weimar as court organist and later as director of concerts. The family settled close to the ducal palace, and there Bach's sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel were born. During these years the violinist von Westhoff had a strong influence on the composer, whose works inspired Bach to write his own sonatas and partitas for solo violin.
In Weimar a long period of composing keyboard and orchestral works began. Bach closely studied the music of the Italians Vivaldi and Corelli, adopting from them the technique of dramatic openings and the alternation of soloist and orchestra, and he transcribed Vivaldi's concertos for organ and harpsichord. Around this time he also began work on the "Little Organ Book", a collection of chorale preludes possibly intended as a teaching aid for his eldest son.
By the end of his time in Weimar, Bach was already a well-known organist and harpsichordist. In 1717 a Dresden concertmaster arranged a musical contest between Bach and the celebrated French musician Louis Marchand, but on the day of the contest Marchand hastily left town, leaving Bach to perform alone.
Bach was not released from Weimar willingly: in November 1717 he was even briefly imprisoned for persistently requesting his discharge. At the end of that year he took up the post of Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, who, being a musician himself, valued Bach's talent, paid him well and gave him considerable freedom. Because the prince was a Calvinist and did not favour elaborate music in worship, most of Bach's works from this period are secular.
In Köthen Bach wrote orchestral suites, six suites for solo cello, English and French suites for keyboard, and three sonatas and three partitas for solo violin. It was also then that the first book of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" and the "Brandenburg Concertos" were written.
In July 1720, while Bach was abroad with the prince, his wife Maria Barbara suddenly died at the age of thirty-five, leaving four young children. A year later Bach met the singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke and married her in December 1721; thirteen children were born of this marriage.
In 1723 Bach won the competition for the post of cantor at St Thomas Church in Leipzig, together with a teaching position at its school. His duties included teaching singing, giving weekly concerts at the city's two main churches, and selecting musicians for performances; he made use of the option to hand the teaching of Latin to an assistant. Over his years in Leipzig, Bach repeatedly clashed with the city authorities.
The first years in Leipzig were especially productive: Bach composed several annual cycles of cantatas on the Gospel texts read in church every Sunday. Later, from 1729, he directed the secular ensemble "Collegium Musicum" and gave concerts twice a week at Zimmermann's coffeehouse, where a playful cantata about coffee-drinking was probably first performed.
During these same years Bach wrote the first movements of what would become the Mass in B minor and secured the title of court composer. In 1747 he visited the court of the Prussian king Frederick II, who gave him a theme to improvise on; Bach immediately played a three-part fugue, and later composed a whole cycle on the theme, "The Musical Offering". He did not manage to complete another major cycle, "The Art of Fugue".
Towards the end of his life Bach's eyesight began to fail rapidly. In 1750 the English eye surgeon John Taylor operated on the composer twice, but both operations were unsuccessful and Bach went completely blind. On 18 July his sight briefly returned, but that same evening he suffered a stroke; Bach died on 28 July 1750.
Bach was buried in the cemetery of St John's Church in Leipzig, but the grave was soon lost. Only in 1894 were his remains accidentally found during construction work; after the church was destroyed during the Second World War, his remains were moved around 1949–1950 to St Thomas Church, where Bach had served as cantor for twenty-seven years.
Bach worked in almost every musical genre of his time except opera, writing more than a thousand sacred and secular works over his lifetime for voice, organ, harpsichord and various ensembles. Some of these are arrangements of works by other composers, or reworked versions of his own earlier pieces. Today each of his compositions carries a number in the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis) catalogue. Among his best-known keyboard cycles are "The Well-Tempered Clavier", covering every key, the "English Suites", the "Goldberg Variations" and the "Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach".
For solo violin and cello, Bach wrote sonatas, partitas and suites; individual movements from them — minuets, courantes, arias — are often arranged for piano and accessible to beginners. To teach keyboard playing he wrote two- and three-part inventions arranged in order of increasing key signature, and for lessons at home he compiled the "Little Organ Book", a collection of chorale settings. These works form the basis of the pieces available on the site: they span every level, from simple minuets and canons for beginners to elaborate preludes and fugues for advanced students.
A significant part of Bach's output is organ music: during his lifetime he was known above all as a first-rate organist and composer of organ works. He worked both in free genres — the prelude, toccata and fantasia — and in the stricter forms of the chorale prelude and fugue, combining the traditions of North German and South German masters, among whom Pachelbel, Böhm and Buxtehude influenced him most. Throughout his life Bach also advised organ builders and understood the finer points of tuning their instruments.
A substantial part of Bach's legacy consists of vocal and choral works: the cantatas he wrote for almost every Sunday of the church year, the "St Matthew Passion" and "St John Passion", the "Christmas Oratorio", and the Mass in B minor, today widely regarded as one of the greatest choral works in the history of music. Beyond these large cycles, Bach left several motets, around 180 chorale settings, songs and arias — many of these works exist today in arrangements for different forces, including choir and small ensembles.