Johann Sebastian Bach

Their life

German composer and organist of the Baroque era whose mastery of counterpoint — in works like the Brandenburg Concertos, the Mass in B minor, and The Well-Tempered Clavier — made him the towering craftsman of Western music. Largely a working church musician in his lifetime, his genius was fully recognized only later.

Known for

• Brandenburg Concertos
• The Well-Tempered Clavier
• Mass in B minor
• St. Matthew Passion
• Mastery of counterpoint and fugue
• Thomaskantor of Leipzig

The road they walked

Bach came from a family that had been making music professionally in Thuringia for nearly a century before he was born, so it was assumed rather than remarkable that another Bach would grow up to hold an organ bench or a cantor's post. He was orphaned by ten — his mother died in 1694, his father the year after — and was taken in by an older brother, Johann Christoph, an organist who gave him his first serious keyboard training, reportedly copying out manuscripts by candlelight against his brother's wishes. As a teenager he walked, more than once, extraordinary distances to hear organists he admired — most famously a few hundred miles to Lübeck in 1705 to study with Dieterich Buxtehude, overstaying his leave from his job so badly that it nearly cost him his position.

His working life was a string of church and court appointments, each one shaping what he wrote. At Weimar he was court organist and built his reputation on the instrument. At Cöthen, serving a Calvinist prince with no need for church music, he turned to instrumental writing — the Brandenburg Concertos, the cello suites, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. From 1723 until his death he was Thomaskantor in Leipzig, responsible for music at the city's principal churches and for teaching Latin and music to boys at the St. Thomas School — an exhausting civic post that nonetheless produced, cantata by weekly cantata, the St. John and St. Matthew Passions and, eventually, the Mass in B minor.

In his own time he was famous chiefly as a performer — an organist and improviser without rival — while his compositions were often regarded as formidably old-fashioned, thick with counterpoint just as musical taste was turning toward simpler, lighter styles his own sons helped popularize. It took nearly eighty years and a revival led by the young Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, for the wider world to recognize what Leipzig's choirboys had been singing all along.

How their story ended

Bach's health declined in his final years, worsened by failing eyesight that led him to undergo eye surgery in 1750 performed by the itinerant English oculist John Taylor, a procedure that left him blind. He died in Leipzig on 28 July 1750; historians generally attribute his death to complications following the surgery, possibly combined with a stroke, though the exact cause remains debated. He was buried near St. John's Church, his grave unmarked and later lost, until his remains were identified and reinterred at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig in 1950, near the choir he had led for a quarter century.

In their words

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Tables where Johann sits

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