~ Bach, Johann Sebastian ~
Born: 1685 in Eisenach, Saxony (Germany)
Died: 1750 in Iéna, Saxony (Germany)
Bach came from a family with demonstrable musical talents documented
at least as far back as the mid-16th century: of the seven generation of
Bachs-beginning with the first-known professional musician, Veit Bach (died
1619) and ending with William Friedrich Ernst Bach (died 1845)-less than
ten of them choose a profession other than music. The Bach family's identification
with music is unparalleled in Western music, as is the genius of Johann
Sebastian.
He was the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach (1645-1695)
and Elisabeth Lämmerhirt (1644-1694); by the age of ten, his father
had died and many members of the household were dispersed to other more
financially stable branches of the family. Bach himself together with his
brother Jacob, moved from Eisenach to live with his eldest brother Johann
Christoph in Ohrdruf. In early adolescence Johann Sebastian suffered from
poor health which led to an erratic attendance at school, but his outstanding
boy soprano voice won him admiration and at the age of 15 he was recommended
for a position in the choir of Michaelis-Kirche in Lüneburg, a town
more than 200 miles away. There, remote from his family, he struck up a
friendship with the composer-organist Georg Böhm, a man 20 years older
than himself and willing to give him material and artistic guidance. Bach's
musical education was aided by his passion (which proved lifelong) for
studying other composers's music in manuscript and drawing his own musical
lessons from what he discovered. His interests were unusually wide, and
he found as much pleasure and inspiration in François Couperin as
he did in German or Italian composers.
This intense study eventually produced the young Bach's first efforts
at composition, a set of variations; with his first organ appointment at
Arnstadt's Bonifacius-Kirche in 1703-04, he wrote his first cantatas and
a number of preludes and fugues. These early works show him already in
the possession of unusual melodic inventiveness within the strict forms
he used. Church work was for Bach the ideal form of employment, for it
combined his intense religiosity with the opportunity to create music for
voice and organ in particular, the organ being his first and final fascination.
In Autumn 1705, Bach secured a one-month leave of absence from
Arnstadt and travelled on foot to Lübeck in order to study with the
renowned Danish-born German organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude, one
of the foremost living German musician and composer and whose organ music
greatly influenced Bach's. The visit was so rewarding to Bach that he overstayed
his leave by two months. He was criticized by the church authorities not
only for this breach of contract but also for the extravagant flourishes
and strange harmonies in his organ accompaniments to congregational singing,
and when his young cousin Maria Barbara (later his wife) was found to be
singing in the church choir at Bach's behest, he found himself in further
trouble. He was already too highly respected, however, for either objection
to result in his dismissal. Within a few months he resigned and moved to
a more prestigious position at Blasius-Kirche, Mühlhausen. In October
1707 he and Maria Barbara were married; they had their first baby, a daughter,
the following year. Yet the appointment at Mühlhausen proved unsatisfactory
both financially and theologically. Early in 1708 he accepted an appointment
as Hof-Organist and Kammer-Musikus to Duke William Ernst of Weimar. This
was hardly the top position within the Court's musical circles, but it
was preferable to the situation at Mühlhausen.
In Weimar he composed about 30 cantatas, including the well-known
funeral cantata God's Time Is the Best, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor,
BWV 582, Orgel-Büchmein and also wrote organ and harpsichord works.
He began to travel throughout Germany as an organ virtuoso and as a consultant
to organ builders. His performance of these and other works earned him
a reputation far beyond the environs of Weimar. His tasks became more specific
(including the monthly delivery of new cantatas) and his duties more onerous.
Bach felt his situation to be intolerable; he had now four children and
was dissatisfied with his family's standard of living. He seemed to lack
courtier's ability to deal advantageously with such situations, and when
he was passed over in 1716 he took the oppotunity to move on, this time
to become Kappellmeister in the newly-established household of Duke of
Weimar's son, Duke Ernst August, who had married and moved to Cöthen,
where the bride's father, Prince Leopold, was a great music lover.
However, Duke Wilhelm August did not give Bach up without some
unpleasantness: determined to humble his proud and plain-speaking musician,
he refused to give Bach permission to leave his employ , actually keeping
the composer under arrest for over a month before finally relenting and
allowing him to move to Cöthen. There, the demand was for chamber
music in which Prince Leopold could play an active role. Thus Bach composed
a series of suites, overtures and concertos as well as sonatas and other
small ensemble pieces. These were to include the four orchestral suites,
the Brandenburg Concertos (so-called because they were dedicated to Duke
Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg) and the beautiful Violin Concertos, BWV
1041/2/3, 1064/5, which were modelled on works by Italian composers (such
as Vivaldi) whom he so admired.
These were relatively stable, happy years for Bach and his family,
but obliged to accompany the Prince on a trip to Carlsbad in 1720, he found
on his return that he wife had died and was already on her grave. From
then on his desire to leave the Court became steadily more urgent, especially
when in 1721 his patron married a young woman with little musical inclination
and a determination to leave her husband into other diversions. Bach himself
had remarried: his new wife Anna Magdalena Wilcken, a fine singer and daughter
of court musician, was just 20 (Bach was now 36) and required to act as
step-mother to Bach's children whose education was proving problematic
in a town where the best school was Calvinist.
This situation made the post as Cantor of the Thomasschule in Leizig
very appealing when it fell vaccant in 1722. Bach was not first or even
second choice for the position-both Christoph Graupner and Telemann were
offered it but had to decline. Nearly a year after the appointment was
originally advertised, Bach took up the position, pledging in his contract
not to supply music which was 'too theatrical' or 'too operatic'. Bach
new responsibilities including teaching various groups of scholars at the
school, composing music for two churches, St Thomas and St Nicholas, and
providing the occasional piece of music for the local university. He also
had to ask permission from the Council if he wished to absent himself from
Leipzig for any reason. The situation must have been very bad at Cöthen
for Bach to acceded to these conditions.
Yet he was to remain in this post for the rest of his life, and
although his pride and sense of self-worth led him into regular and bruising
contact with the various authorities to whom he was responsible, he never
became disenchanted enough to resign. Despite endless arguments between
himself and the Thomasschule appointees over whose empire ended where,
Bach continued to produced his sublime music throughout the decades he
was in Leipzig, and his eminence was recognize by various admirers, including
the King Elector of Poland-Saxony, who in 1736 awarded him the coveted
title Königlicher Hof-Componist. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel, then
26, became attached to the Court of the music-loving (and amateur flautist)
Frederick the Great of Prussiain 1740. In 1741 Bach visited his son son
in Berlin, Frederick's capital, and six years later he was invited to attend
on Frederick at Potsdam. Thus, in May 1747 'Old Bach', as Frederick fondly
called him, arrived and was presented to the King. The meeting was a complete
success, Bach overwhelming Frederick with his ability to extemporize at
the keyboard on demand. On his return to Leizig, Bach took one of Frederick's
own themes used during the meeting and developed it into the famous A Musical
Offering, dedicated (in June 1747) to 'a monarch admired in music as all
in the other sciences of war and peace'.
Bach was now in his sixties, and his general health had begun to
follow the course of his eyesight, which had been damaged irreparably by
the years of studying music by candle light. By 1749 he was completely
blind. The advent of blindness greatly hindered his efforts to complete
the works he left to be his last, and among the many pieces left incomplete
at his death (although heavily revised) was the famous Die Kunst der Fuge;
a set of fugal pieces which has fascinated musicians and commentators ever
since. The great man, on 66 when he died, was buried in an unmarked grave
near the south door of Leizig's Johanneskirche. In the late 19th century
his grave was rediscovered during building work. His ashes were moved inside
the church where they are now marked by the somewhat undemonstrative words,
'Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750'.
In Bach, Baroque polyphony reached its apotheosis and-at least
to the succeeding generation-its point of exhaustion, for by the time of
his death his music had already fallen a long way behind the forefront
of musical fashion. His achievements were to languish in obscurity for
close to 100 years before the efforts of others, particularly Mendelssohn,
revealed Bach's genius to a wider world. Bach was not innovator and no
iconoclast: what he revered above all was musical truth and beauty, and
he was ready to appreciate these wherever he came across them-from the
manuscripts of older Italian masters to the extemporizations of fellow
Germans. His musicality was complete and all-embracing, and only his temperament
and his natural inclination to regard music as an adjunct to his religion
restrained him from composing for the theatre (as did his contemporary
Handel). His oratorios demonstrated his complete grasp of what is required
to write convincingly for voices and orchestra. The connection between
religion and music can not be overstressed: Bach invariably added homilies
to God or Jesus at the beginning or end of his scores, even when they were
modest chamber pieces or exercises for his children and students. Bach's
music is a colossal summation of the tradition in Western music which led
to his mature style: his genius allowed him the perfect synthesizing power
to create the multitude of masterpieces which came from his pen.
In the body of work which is so crammed with significant achievements,
the selection of key works means that many fine or important pieces of
music will go unremarked, but this leaves much for the reader to explore
after initial contact. Perhaps the most instructive and entertaining place
to start is at the keyboard.
Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier) contains
two books of 48 preludes and which are an object lesson in what Bach set
out to achieve in his music. The use of a single instrument also helps
the listener to follow more closely the musical imagination at work. A
subsequent keyboard piece with equal rewards is the Goldberg Variations,
BWV 988, completed in the early 1740s at much the same time as the second
book of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. The great mass of organ works can
be approached through such pieces as the Toccata and Fugue in G minor,
BWV 542, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582 and the Preludes and
Fugues in A minor and C, BWV 543 and 545. The Orgut-Büchlein, BWV
599-644, contains 48 pieces which explore a wide range of the organ's sonic
and musical repertoire. In terms of solo instrumental music, the other
key works are the astonishing and very beautiful 6 Suites (Sonantas) for
Cello, BWV 1007-12.
Apart from 295 cantatas Bach wrote during his lifetime, of which
they are numerous favorites, his St John and St Matthew Passions are deeply-felt
recountings of the gospels which cannot fail to move the listener, while
the Christmas Oratorio and Mass in B minor, BWV 232 demonstrate Bach's
ability to deal profoundly with such occasional pieces.
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