"Scheibe ranked Hasse, C. H. Graun, Telemann, and Handel as the most advanced of German composers. . . . The poet Gottsched, in his Ode zum Lobe Germaniens, hailed Telemann and Handel as the most distinguished of German composers although as a resident of Leipzig he must have been familiar with the music of J. S. Bach." [Grove, v. 18, p. 651].

The Town Council of Leipzig (where Bach had taught for the last 27 years of his life did not regret his departure: "The school needs a Cantor <teacher> not a Capellmeister <conductor>." [quoted in Terry, p. 265]

Bach was recognized as Germany's greatest organ and clavier player: "The loss of this uncommonly skillful man is profoundly mourned by all true connoisseurs of music." [Spenersche Zeitung (a newspaper), August 3, 1750].

Telemann wrote an obituary in rhyme, praising Bach's "splendid organ playing":

" . . . the candle of thy fame ne'er low will burn;

The pupils thou has trained, and those they train in turn

Prepare thy future crown of glory brightly glowing. . . ."

Only a few crochety reactionaries like Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (in his preface to the Art of the Fugue), published two years after Bach's death, hinted that Bach might have a future of his own (not just as an organ-playing legend with successful pupils): "It is to be hoped that the present work may inspire some emulation. . . . restore in some measure, in the face of the hoppity melodification of so many present day composers, the dignity of Harmony."

Of the more than 1,000 works of J. S. Bach which have come down to us, only eight were published in his lifetime. (The rest were preserved in manuscript form.) Hundreds of others were lost entirely.

The idea that Bach would not only be remembered hundreds of years later but would be considered the greatest of all Western composers was unthinkable. And yet: fully one-third of all the pages in my recorder book (Mario Duschene's Method for the Recorder, Part Two) with works attributed to particular composers contain the works of J. S. Bach; there are more entries for Bach than any other composer (except Mozart) in OCLC's comprehensive database of books and recordings; there are more recordings by Bach than any other composer for sale at our local Blockbuster Music store. . . .

"In his Lexicon J.G. Walther devoted four times as much space to Telemann as he did to his kinsman J. S. Bach . . ." [Grove, v. 18, p. 651] Two hundred years later The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians [Grove] has five times as many pages devoted to Bach as Telemann.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany, on March 21, 1685. He came from an extraordinarily musical family: members of all four of the preceding generations in the paternal line had been musicians -- as were 3 brothers, 2 uncles, 3 cousins, 7 nephews, and 14 second cousins (6 of his grandfather's brothers' sons and 8 of their sons). His mother and father both died when he was nine. He was taken in by his older brother, Johann Christoph, and at 15 went to study music at the Michaeliskirche Particularschule in Luneburg. In 1703 he was appointed organist for the Neukirche (Bonifaciuskirche) in Arnstadt. Three years later he was called before the Consistorium of the church and reprimanded by the Superintendant, Johann Christoph Olearius:

In 1707 Bach left Arnstadt and served for a year as organist in Muhlhausen. There he married for the first time:

They would have seven children; four lived to maturity. In 1708 Bach went to Weimar where he spent the next nine years as Concertmeister and Court Organist to the Duke of Weimar.

He had written a few pieces at Arnstadt and Muhlhausen. At Weimar he started composing in earnest: the Orgelbuchlein, all but the last of the "Great" Chorale preludes, and the majority of the wonderful organ preludes and fugues.

In 1717 Bach moved to Cothen to serve as the Capellmeister in the court of Prince Leopold who (as Bach says in his letter to Erdmann quoted later) "both knew and loved music". "When Bach went to Cothen secular instrumental music was only on the threshold of an independent existence. Most German princes had their private orchestra, or Capelle, but instrumental music had for long been under the ban of the Church, . . ." [Terry, p. 122]

It was at Cothen that Bach composed "Six Concertos with Several Instruments, Dedicated to His Royal Highness, Monseigneur Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg &. &. &. by His very humble and obediant servant, Johann Sebastian Bach, Capellmeister of His Most Serene Highness the Reigning Prince of Anhalt-Cothen." There is no evidence the concertos were ever performed by their recipient. "In the catalogue of his library, which contained many things of value, Bach's score was not deemed worthy of mention, and after Markgraf's death in 1734, was assembled with other manuscripts for sale in a job lot. . . Bach, however, retained a copy of the score and performed the music at Cothen." [Terry, p. 135]

In 1720 his first wife (Maria) died and 18 months later he married again: Anna Magdalena, 20 years old, youngest daughter of Johann Casper Wulken, Court Trumpeter to the Duke of Weissenfels. They would have 13 children; six of them lived to maturity. If you have -- as I did -- the uneasy feeling that a man who fathers 20 children must be some kind of sex maniac, the youth of his second wife should be noted. Whereas most men (having just a single wife) have only 15 to 20 productive years, Bach had 30. Such fertility is impressive but not superhuman. Bach's production of music was superhuman; his production of children was merely remarkable.

Besides the Brandenburg Concertos, Bach composed many other instrumental pieces at Cothen: the violin concertos, the unaccompanied partitas and sonatas for viola and cello, sonatas for flute and violin, and the sonatas for clavier and violin/viola da gamba.

He also continued with his keyboard music: The Clavierbuchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach <his son>, the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and some of the French Suites.

In 1723 Bach left Cothen to become Cantor and Director Musices at St. Thomas's in Leipzig. He would remain there for the rest of his life.

Bach produced the St. John's Passion in 1723 and the St. Matthew's Passion in 1729. Though certainly of high quality and grand in scope, with marvelous individual arias and choruses, taken in their entireties, they lack the magic of Bach's other work. Giving life to long sections of the Gospels was a dramatic challenge Bach did not seem up to. He produced most of his cantatas during this period, the Sanctus of the Mass in B Minor and most of the outstanding clavier concertos.

As can be seen from this letter in 1732 to Georg Erdmann (one of his few surviving personal letters to anyone) Bach was not entirely happy with the situation:

Though the Mass would seem to be a form equally as prescribed as the Passion, it actually offered Bach much more freedom. Bach was able to take the relatively few words central to each section and elaborate on them musically as he wished. Witness the magnificent Mass in B Minor. The Sanctus was written in the 1720's, the Symbolum Nicenum in 1732, the Kyrie and Gloria, (as noted above) in 1733. In the late 1740's Bach added the final sections and reworked the earlier ones.    Click   here   to listen to the powerful Sanctus [Dunedin Consort & Players].   Another good Sanctus   (Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Concentus musicus Wien, bigger chorus).   The entire Harnencourt Mass in B Minor .

Also during this final decade Bach wrote the marvelous, hypnotic "Goldberg" Variations (to help an insomniac prince get to sleep), "Schubler's Book" of choral preludes (for the organ), the "Musical Offering", and the Art of the Fugue.

Johann Nicolaus Forkel was Bach's earliest biographer. In On Johann Sebastian Bach's Life, Genius, and Works (1802) he summarized Bach's career:

Music was central to the orthodox Lutheran religion in which Bach believed. The following quotation from Martin Luther's "Table Talk" is representative:

The following is an imaginary dialog between the author ("LF") and Bach ("JSB").

 <Leipzig, 1749>

Bach died on July 28, 1750. What people said about him can be found in the quotations at the beginning of this chapter. What his townsmen and countrymen thought of him can be seen in their treatment of his widow:

She died in 1760 and was placed in the burial-ground where her husband "lay in a grave whose locality already was fading from the memory of the community he served." [Terry, p. 277]

But we mustn't be too harsh on these townspeople: though Bach was brilliant at teaching and inspiring individual students, he probably really didn't do that well with the masses he was supposed to instruct not just in music but in a number of other subjects as well. . . . And it was not just his fellow Leipzigers but many, many other Germans and visitors from other countries who heard him perform his work in Leipzig and in Weimar, Cothen, Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin. They recognized the genius of his playing, but failed to recognize the genius of what he played and wrote. He was too provincial, too "old-fashioned". This was the age of Voltaire, the Age of Reason! Mankind was advancing!

If the stories of many other artists teach us the danger of failing to be open to new forms, radical innovations, the response of Bach's contemporaries teaches us the corollary: the failure to be open to the past; the too-quick assumption that old forms are bankrupt. And the failure to recognize genius in religious people -- people reluctant to accept such a title for themselves or their work. Religious belief can be deadly to science, but is in no way incompatible with great art. With an inward peace and spiritual equilibrium foreign to modern people (and many of his contemporaries as well), Bach took life's joys, love, enmities, tragedy and -- never straining, never prettifying, always in tune -- let them flow through him into music. Music as clear, and compelling in its motion, as water flowing in a mountain brook. . . .

Bach did not consider himself a genius. The sad truth is that many times we can not recognize someone as a genius unless he first applies for the position --or has some champion who does so for him. . . . The poignancy of the situation is not in Bach's suffering (of which there is little evidence) but in the strange, inscrutable, amazing fact that, in his lifetime, he and his music had no such champion.

Do you know of art --especially contemporary art available through the Web-- which expresses genuine feeling? Email me: Lucius @ jspecht.org

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