Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a dynasty. By the time he arrived in Eisenach on 21 March 1685, the name Bach had been synonymous with civic music in central Germany for five generations; the 1735 Origin of the Musical Bach Family, a genealogical sketch Bach himself dictated in middle age, names fifty-three working Bach musicians across roughly two centuries. In some Thuringian towns the word Bach came to mean “town piper” in the same way Hoover came to mean vacuum cleaner.

He was the youngest of eight; his father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was Eisenach’s Stadtpfeifer and court trumpeter. Both parents died within nine months of each other, in 1694 and 1695, and the ten-year-old Sebastian was taken in by his elder brother Johann Christoph Bach at Ohrdruf, who taught him the keyboard from the manuscripts of Pachelbel, Froberger, and Buxtehude. The most famous anecdote of his boyhood — recounted decades later by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel to the biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel — has the young Sebastian secretly copying his brother’s locked-up Froberger manuscript by moonlight over six months, only for the brother to discover the copy and confiscate it. The story may be embroidered. The character it describes was not.

The seven posts

Bach’s career traces a tight arc across Thuringia and Saxony, post by post: Lüneburg (choirboy at the Michaelisschule, 1700); Arnstadt (organist of the Neue Kirche, 1703); Mühlhausen (Blasiuskirche, 1707); Weimar (court organist and later concertmaster to the rival dukes Wilhelm Ernst and Ernst August, 1708–1717); Köthen (Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, 1717–1723); and Leipzig (Thomaskantor and Director musices, 1723 until death). Each shift moved the centre of gravity of his composition.

The Arnstadt years gave more than music. In August 1705 he had a street fight with one Johann Heinrich Geyersbach, a bassoonist whom Bach had publicly called a Zippelfagottist — “nanny-goat bassoonist,” apparently a reference to the man’s wobbly tone. Geyersbach jumped him near the marketplace with a stick; Bach drew his sword. The consistory’s complaint book records that no one was hurt. Two months later he took the famous four-week leave to Lübeck, four hundred kilometres on foot in the direction of Dietrich Buxtehude, and stayed almost four months — a separate consistory hearing the following spring complained that he had “absented himself from divine service” and, on his return, had begun playing such “viele wunderliche variationes” (many strange variations) in the chorale that “the congregation has been confounded.”

Hath also hitherto been in the habit of making many strange variations in the chorale, mixing in many alien tones, on which account the congregation has been confounded.

— Arnstadt Consistory minutes, 21 February 1706

The Weimar years ended in a confinement. In autumn 1717 Bach asked too vigorously to be released for the Köthen post, and the offended duke had him jailed for almost four weeks in the Wilhelmsburg’s Landrichterstube. The court secretary’s note records that he was let out only on 2 December “with the announcement of unfavourable discharge.” The cell may have produced the Orgelbüchlein fair copy.

The organist

Bach’s organ writing absorbs the entire North German school — the rhapsodic toccatas of Reincken and Buxtehude, the chorale fantasias of Tunder and Scheidemann — and rebuilds it on a firmer contrapuntal foundation. The Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582 is the direct heir of the Buxtehude BuxWV 161, twenty-one variations on a ground bass borrowed (the first eight bars) from an earlier Trio en Passacaille by André Raison, a Parisian organist Bach almost certainly knew through one of the manuscript collections that passed through the Bach family. The Weimar years produced the great preludes and fugues — BWV 532, 541, 543, 548 — each chain a single rhetorical argument from the first pedal note to the final chord.

The Mühlhausen organ proposal of 1708 survives in Bach’s own hand and gives an unusually clear picture of what he wanted from an instrument. He asks for the existing organ to be enlarged with a new 32-foot Subbass in the pedal “for the more solid foundation of the music,” the Sesquialtera shifted to the Brustwerk “where it will be more usefully employed,” and — the gesture most his own — the addition of a Glockenspiel (a stop of tuned bells) “since the parishioners have desired it and paid for it themselves.” Even at twenty-three, he was negotiating registrations with congregations.

The collections

Bach’s habit of organising his keyboard music into ordered cycles is one of the defining gestures of his output. Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier he finished in Köthen in 1722 as a pedagogical instrument; Book 2 he assembled in Leipzig over twenty years and never had printed. The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, published in 1741 as the fourth part of his Clavier-Übung, owe their popular name to a story Forkel told and modern scholarship has weakened: that Count Hermann Carl von Keyserling, the Russian ambassador in Dresden and a chronic insomniac, commissioned them to be played at his bedside by his fourteen-year-old harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a Bach pupil. Forkel says Keyserling paid Bach with a golden goblet filled with a hundred louis d’or. The published copy carries no dedication; the timeline conflicts with Goldberg’s age; the goblet vanished without trace. The story persists because it ought to be true.

For ensembles, the six Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046–1051) survive in the fair-copy presentation manuscript sent to the Margrave of Brandenburg in March 1721 — accompanied by a French dedication so abjectly formal that Bach scholars still find it slightly embarrassing. The Margrave appears never to have had them performed; the manuscript was filed and stayed filed until rediscovered in the 1840s.

The sacred output

Within five years of his arrival in Leipzig, Bach had composed five complete annual cycles of cantatas for the Lutheran liturgical year — roughly three hundred cantatas, of which about two hundred survive. The two great Passions stand apart: the St. John Passion (BWV 245, 1724) and the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244, 1727), the latter for double chorus and double orchestra mounted in the Thomaskirche from purpose-built galleries. The Mass in B minor (BWV 232) Bach assembled across the final years of his life from existing movements and newly composed sections — a complete Catholic mass written by a Lutheran cantor, with no clear single occasion of performance in his lifetime. Several of its movements were originally written for the funeral of the Saxon Elector’s wife.

After the Calov Bible — a 1681 edition of Luther with marginal commentary by the theologian Abraham Calov — was rediscovered in Frankenmuth, Michigan in 1934, the Concordia Seminary in St. Louis opened it to find dozens of pencilled marginalia in Bach’s hand. Beside 2 Chronicles 5:13 — the dedication of the Temple, “when the trumpeters and singers were as one” — he wrote, in German: “NB. When pious music is performed, God with his grace is always present.”

Late synthesis: the Royal Theme and the Art of Fugue

In May 1747 the sixty-two-year-old Bach travelled to Potsdam to visit Frederick the Great, whose chamber flautist C. P. E. Bach had served the king for seven years. Frederick — an accomplished flautist himself, on whom Quantz had spent his life — set Bach a theme on the spot, a winding chromatic subject of the kind that defeats ordinary improvisation, and asked him to extemporise a six-voice fugue on it. Bach demurred on the six-voice (“subjects of such artificial nature need to be worked out”) but improvised a three-voice fugue immediately. Within three months he had returned to Leipzig and turned the royal theme into the Musical Offering (BWV 1079): a six-voice ricercar, ten canons of increasing ingenuity, and a trio sonata, printed and sent back to Potsdam as a thank-you. The dedication copy still survives in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek.

At the same time he was at work on the Art of Fugue (BWV 1080), an encyclopaedia of contrapuntal technique on a single subject. The final fugue is a quadruple fugue and it breaks off in mid-bar, on a half-cadence in D minor, just after the four-note motive B-flat–A–C–B (B-A-C-H in the German note-naming) has entered for the first time in the bass voice. The autograph manuscript carries a note in his son Carl Philipp Emanuel’s hand: “NB. Über dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme BACH im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben.” (“Over this fugue, where the name BACH is brought in as a counter-subject, the composer died.”) Modern scholarship has shown that the dying-while-writing story is a flourish — the fugue was unfinished months before — but the place where the music stops is no less moving for that.

Bach died in Leipzig on 28 July 1750, blind and recovering from a second cataract operation performed by the English itinerant oculist John Taylor — the same surgeon who would blind Handel the following decade and who claimed in his self-promoting memoirs to have “restored sight” to over twelve thousand patients. Taylor’s “couching” procedure involved pushing the clouded lens out of the line of sight with a needle, without anaesthetic. Bach died of complications a few weeks after the second attempt. Taylor moved on.

The rediscovery

Bach was never wholly forgotten in the half-century after his death. Mozart studied the Well-Tempered Clavier at Baron van Swieten’s home in Vienna in 1782 and wrote his K. 405 transcription of five Bach fugues for string quartet shortly after; Beethoven’s late sonatas and the Hammerklavier fugue are unimaginable without it; Forkel’s biography of 1802 was a deliberate manifesto, written to forestall what its author saw as a real risk of the music being lost. But the public moment that returned Bach to the concert hall was the young Felix Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion on 11 March 1829 at the Berlin Sing-Akademie, in the centenary year of its composition. Mendelssohn was twenty. The hall was full, and a second performance had to be added. “To think,” Mendelssohn is said to have remarked, “that it took an actor and the son of a Jew to bring back the greatest of Christian music.”

From 1850 the Bach-Gesellschaft began the first complete edition of the works; the Neue Bach-Ausgabe succeeded it in 1954. Today the catalogue runs to BWV 1128 plus Anhang — and counting, as new attributions are made and old ones revised. The Bach who left Leipzig in 1750 had written, by current count, roughly 1,128 surviving compositions. That is a number. The appropriate response to it was Beethoven’s:

Not Bach — brook — should be his name. But Meer — ocean.

— Ludwig van Beethoven, recorded by his pupil Carl Czerny