Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 31, 1685 (New Style), in Eisenach, the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Eisenach, into a prominent dynasty of musicians. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was the director of the town musicians, and it is highly probable that he taught young Johann Sebastian the basics of violin and music theory. His mother, Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt, died in 1694, and his father passed away just nine months later in 1695. The ten-year-old orphan was taken in by his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, who was the organist at St. Michael's Church in Ohrdruf. Under his brother's guidance, Bach studied keyboard instruments, copied music by prominent composers of the day, and received a solid academic education at the local gymnasium.\n\nIn 1700, Bach secured a scholarship at the prestigious St. Michael's School in Lüneburg. This move brought him into contact with a broader European musical culture. In Lüneburg, he sang in the school's elite choir, played the organ and harpsichord, and likely encountered French instrumental styles through visits to the nearby court of Celle. After graduating in 1702, Bach embarked on his professional career, briefly serving as a court musician in Weimar before accepting the post of organist at the New Church in Arnstadt in 1703. It was during his tenure in Arnstadt that Bach famously walked over 250 miles to Lübeck to hear the legendary organist Dieterich Buxtehude, whose North German organ style profoundly influenced Bach's early compositions.\n\nBach's professional journey continued with a brief tenure as organist at St. Blasius in Mühlhausen starting in 1707, where he married his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach. In 1708, he returned to Weimar as court organist and chamber musician to Duke Wilhelm Ernst. This Weimar period was highly productive for Bach's organ music; he composed many of his great preludes, fugues, and the "Orgelbüchlein" (Little Organ Book), a collection of chorale preludes intended for pedagogical use. In 1714, he was promoted to concertmaster, requiring him to compose a church cantata every month.\n\nIn 1717, seeking greater artistic freedom and status, Bach accepted the position of Kapellmeister (director of music) at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. Because Prince Leopold was a devout Calvinist who preferred simple, non-liturgical church services, Bach's duties shifted away from sacred organ music toward secular instrumental chamber works. The Cöthen years (1717–1723) yielded some of Bach's most celebrated instrumental masterpieces, including the six Brandenburg Concertos, the Cello Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, and the first book of "The Well-Tempered Clavier". This period of artistic triumph was marked by personal tragedy when Maria Barbara died suddenly in 1720. Bach married the soprano Anna Magdalena Wilcke in December 1721, a union that proved highly supportive and musically collaborative.\n\nIn 1723, Bach secured the prestigious appointment of Thomaskantor (cantor of the St. Thomas School) and Director of Music in Leipzig, a position he would hold for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life. In Leipzig, Bach was responsible for the musical education of the students at the St. Thomas School and for providing music for the city's principal Lutheran churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas. To meet these rigorous demands, Bach composed several annual cycles of church cantatas, totaling over two hundred surviving works. He also produced his monumental passions, the "St John Passion" (1724) and the "St Matthew Passion" (1727), which represented the pinnacle of Lutheran liturgical music. From 1729, Bach also directed the Collegium Musicum, a secular student ensemble founded by Georg Philipp Telemann, for which he wrote numerous keyboard concertos and orchestral suites.\n\nDuring his final decade, Bach withdrew from the intense demands of weekly cantata production to focus on highly complex, speculative contrapuntal works. These late masterpieces include the "Goldberg Variations" (1741), the "Musical Offering" (1747)—composed for King Frederick the Great of Prussia—and the unfinished "Art of Fugue". Bach's health and eyesight declined rapidly in his last years. In 1750, he underwent two unsuccessful eye operations performed by the traveling English surgeon John Taylor, which left him completely blind. Bach suffered a stroke and died on July 28, 1750, in Leipzig.\n\nBach's musical style is characterized by an extraordinary synthesis of national traditions, combining Italian melodic lyricism and concerto forms with French dance rhythms and German polyphonic rigor. His mastery of counterpoint—the art of combining independent melodic lines—remains unmatched in Western music history. While his contemporaries often viewed his music as overly complex, academic, and old-fashioned, subsequent generations recognized his profound structural logic and expressive depth. The nineteenth-century Bach revival, catalyzed by Felix Mendelssohn's historic performance of the "St Matthew Passion" in Berlin in 1829, firmly established Bach as a foundational pillar of the classical music canon, whose influence continues to shape musical education and composition worldwide.