JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Born: March 21, 1685. Eisenach, Germany.
Died: July 28, 1750. Leipzig, Germany.

In his own words...

"Whereas the Honorable and Most Wise Council of this Town of Leipzig have engaged me as Cantor of the St. Thomas School ... I shall set the boys a shining example ... serve the school industriously ... bring the music in both the principal churches of this town into good estate ... faithfully instruct the boys not only in vocal but also in instrumental music ... arrange the music so that it shall not last too long, and shall ... not make an operatic impression, but rather incite the listeners to devotion ... treat the boys in a friendly manner and with caution, but, in case they do not wish to obey, chastise them with moderation or report them to the proper place."

When people say that a composer such as Johann Sebastian Bach was a genius, what are they really saying? It is easy to call someone a genius, but far more difficult to explain what that means. The word itself tends to intimidate us, and we often feel that it is impossible to bridge the gap and find the human side of genius. So we simply call him or her a genius and are done with it.

In the case of Bach, however, his genius is a combination of a number of simpler qualities, all of which point to that human side. First, Bach was a craftsman. He lived in an age in which the composer created works according to the demands of his employer. For Bach, this meant that his various positions demanded different kinds of music. As court organist in Weimar, he produced his most important organ works, and as a composer for the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen he created music that his patron desired: ensemble music (including the famous Brandenburg Concertos, written for another royal patron, the Margrave of Brandenburg). But his most important and long-term position was as cantor of St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig. Not surprisingly, it is in this period that he wrote the bulk of his great church music. Because of the demands of his various employers, Bach was able to create works in a wide variety of genres, providing a breadth of expression not often seen.

A second quality we find in Bach is that of a student or an emulator. The composer constantly surrounded himself with the music of his contemporaries, and his study of these pieces (often involving rearranging pieces for different combinations of instruments) provided him an insight into a wide variety of national and personal styles. Throughout his life, he integrated these ideas into his own unique style.

Bach was also a deeply religious man. His personal Bible is filled with annotations and comments, and this depth of feeling finds its way into his sacred music, which often strikes the listener as an intensely personal statement of faith.

Finally, Bach had a passion for completeness. Many of his works seem to be exercises in exploring every conceivable possibility. An example of this is his two collections of preludes and fugues, the Well-Tempered Clavier. In them, Bach explores every possible major and minor key. But it is in his final works that this encyclopedic quality stands out. His Musical Offering is a tour de force of variations and contrapuntal inventions on a theme suggested to him by Frederick the Great. His Mass in B minor is not a liturgical work, but a summation of his sacred style, much of it reworked from earlier pieces. And his Art of Fugue (unfinished at his death) is a compendium of contrapuntal techniques unequaled before or since.

None of these qualities, by themselves, explain Bach's genius. In some aspects, he has no equal, and in all aspects, his music is unique. Taken together, however, they constitute the human elements of that genius. They help us to understand why and how Bach created what he did, and perhaps that is as close as we can come.

Born in 1685 in the Thuringian town of Eisenach (the same town in which Martin Luther had been raised two centuries earlier), Bach belonged to the most musical family that ever lived in Germany. He was the descendant of four generations of professional musicians. He received an unusually thorough education, covering such subjects as Latin, history, mathematics, and theology. As a child, Bach was a good singer, but it was only in his teens that he developed into a capable instrumentalist. In composition he was largely self-taught.

After completing his studies in Lueneburg, not far from Hamburg, Bach held positions as a church organist in several small German towns. In 1705, he made a pilgrimage to Luebeck, in the north of Germany, to hear Dietrich Buxtehude, the greatest organist of the day and a composer whose music was to have a profound effect. Bach's own fame as a virtuoso was beginning to spread, and by the end of his decade of service as court organist and concertmaster in Weimar (1708 to 1717), he had secured a reputation as the greatest organist and improviser in Germany. Many of Bach's most celebrated pieces for organ were written during his Weimar sojourn. Some of Bach's happiest years were spent at the court of Coethen (1717 to 1723), where Bach's young patron, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Coethen, a fine musician himself, treated him with respect and remarkable generosity. The bulk of his output consisted of chamber and instrumental scores for the prince's music-hungry court. It included such stellar achievements as the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, the Suites for Cello, and the Brandenburg Concertos.

In 1722 the death of Johann Kuhnau left vacant the position of cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, that city's most important church and musical center. Of the six applicants for the job, Bach was neither the most famous nor the town council's first choice. But by default, he was eventually offered the job, making him responsible for all music related to the church, and in 1723, he took up residence in Leipzig. Bach remained the cantor at the Thomaskirche until his death in 1750, composing five complete annual cycles of sacred cantatas, other sacred works -- including such masterpieces as his Magnificat, the St. Matthew Passion, and the B-Minor Mass -- numerous secular cantatas, and a vast amount of keyboard and instrumental music as well. In April of 1729, shortly after the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion, Bach was offered the directorship of the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, an association of professional and student musicians that gave regular public concerts. Founded by Telemann in 1704, it enjoyed an excellent reputation for the quality of its performances. After six years of occupying himself almost exclusively with sacred composition and working with limited forces to get his music performed, Bach was eager for the chance to return to the sphere of orchestral composition and to work, as he had in Coethen, with topflight instrumentalists. Among the works he wrote for this group were the second and third of his four orchestral suites. He withdrew from the Collegium in 1741; during the next few years, he completed the score of the B-Minor Mass, wrote the Goldberg Variations, and undertook two remarkable series of contrapuntal studies that summarized his knowledge of the art and theory of music: "A Musical Offering" and "The Art of the Fugue."

Bach had a uniquely inspired way of suiting the action to the word in his vocal settings. And he was equally brilliant when it came to composing for instruments alone: he understood their capabilities and never failed to make what he wrote for them substantive and virtuosic at the same time. He was a master of every musical idiom known in his day, from intricate 16th-century polyphony, already considered archaic, right up to the "gallant" style that began to sweep Europe in the 1730s. In spite of this eclectic reach, he seemed to many of his contemporaries to be old-fashioned, if not completely out of touch. Today, we can see that he was simply marching to the beat of a different drummer. His music reveals him as both the most profound summarizer and the most brilliant innovator of his era -- a composer whose ability to synthesize elements of different styles into a magnificently rich personal idiom set him apart from all his peers. And his influence as a master of counterpoint and large-scale musical structure extended to nearly all the great composers of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, including Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich.

Musical Examples:
 

	"Allegro" [06 min. 34 sec.], from Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 In G Major, BWV 1048 (around 1711-1713), first movement (no tempo indication) {Musici di San Marco, conducted by Francesco Macci}
	Prelude and Fugue in B Minor (maybe between 1728 and 1731, or 1747) [13 min. 27 sec.] -- read about it
	Goldberg Variations (1741) {performed by András Schiff, October 30, 2001}
		"No. 01," the aria [03 min. 58 sec.]
		"No. 06," fifth variation, duet [01 min. 23 sec.]
		"No. 09," eighth variation, duet [01 min. 42 sec.]
		"No. 14," thirteenth variation, free [04 min. 13 sec.]
		"No. 25," twenty-fourth variation, canon [02 min. 17 sec.]
		"No. 26," twenty-fifth variation, free [07 min. 21 sec.]
		"No. 31," thirtieth variation, quodlibet [01 min. 40 sec.]
		"No. 32," the aria [03 min. 35 sec.]

Works:

• Sacred vocal works, including over 200 church cantatas; 7 motets; Magnificat (1723); St. John Passion (1724); St. Matthew Passion (1727); Christmas Oratorio (1734); Mass in B minor (1749)
• Secular vocal works, including over 20 cantatas
• Orchestral music, including 4 orchestral suites, 6 Brandenburg Concertos, concertos for 1 and 2 violins, and for 1, 2, 3 and 4 harpsichords
• Chamber music, including 6 sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, 6 sonatas for violin and harpsichord, 6 suites for cello, Musical Offering (1747), flute sonatas and viola da gamba sonatas
• Keyboard music, including 2 volumes of Das wohltemperirte Clavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier, 1722, 1742), 6 English Suites (c.1722), 6 French Suites (c.1722), Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (c.1720), Italian Concerto (1735), Goldberg Variations (1741), and Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue c.1745-1750); suites, fugues, capriccios, concertos, inventions, sinfonias
• Organ music, including over 150 chorale preludes, toccatas, fantasias, preludes, fugues and passacaglias

Sources:
    http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/.
    Libbey, Ted. "Introduction to the life and career of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)." http://www.amazon.com/bach-essentials.