Meet J. S. Bach: A Cantata a Week for a Town That Wanted Someone Else

Orphaned at ten, and a 250-mile walk

Both his parents were dead before he was ten; his eldest brother took him in and taught him the keyboard. At twenty he was an organist at Arnstadt, was granted four weeks' leave to hear the great Buxtehude play at Lübeck, walked some 250 miles to get there, and stayed about four months.

The consistory minutes survive. They also record them asking why he had brought a strange young woman into the choir loft. He married her.

Hired third

In 1723 Leipzig needed a cantor. They offered it to Telemann, who declined, and then to Graupner, whose employer refused to release him. One councillor is recorded saying that since the best men could not be had, mediocre ones would have to be accepted.

They accepted Bach. He then wrote and rehearsed a cantata for most Sundays of the year, producing several complete annual cycles — a new piece of substantial music every week, for a congregation that had wanted somebody else.

Whether he said it or not

That line comes from his first biographer, writing fifty years after his death, and its authenticity as a direct quotation is genuinely uncertain. We have included it with that caveat because the working life underneath it is not uncertain at all.

He wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier twice over, a prelude and fugue in every key both times. He built the Goldberg Variations around a theme he states once at the beginning and once, unchanged, at the end — thirty transformations and then the thing itself, exactly as it was. Given a theme by the King of Prussia, he improvised on it, went home, and posted back a set of canons and fugues.

He signed his manuscripts S.D.G. — to God alone the glory — and began them J.J., Jesus help.

Turgid and confused

A prominent critic attacked the music in print in 1737 as turgid, confused, and obscured by an excess of art. For decades after his death he was remembered as an organist; the composer was a specialist's enthusiasm until Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion in 1829, seventy-nine years late.

He went blind at the end and was operated on by a travelling eye surgeon named John Taylor, never recovered, and died a few months later. Taylor went on to blind Handel too.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when the work is unglamorous and nobody is watching. He produced the deepest body of music in the Western tradition on a weekly deadline for an employer who had settled for him, and he will not be impressed by your need for ideal conditions.