J.S. Bach

Bach's Hand in Creativity
21, 1685, in Eisenach, Thuringen, into a family that over seven generations produced at least 53 prominent musicians, from Veit Bach to Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach. Johann Sebastian received his first musical instruction from his father, Johann Ambrosius, a town died when he was nine Bach went to live and study with his elder brother, Johann Christoph, an organist in Ohrdruf.

In 1700 Bach began to earn his own living as a chorister at the Church of Saint Michael in Leburg. There, he studied with Bem. Bach made many trips to Hamburg, where he listened to the great Johann Adam Reinken play. A famous and humorous tale he liked to tell was that one day he was walking back to St. Michaels, and grew hungry. Dismayed to only find about three schillings in his purse, he sat down under a window of an inn, and thought about food. Suddenly, two herring heads fell in front of him. He was very hungry, so he picked them up and bit into one... only to find a Danish ducat in it! The case was the same with the second; thus, he was able to buy a real meal and return to Hamburg. Bach returned to St. Michaels, but shortly therafter, his voice broke. After his voice broke, however, he played violin or viola in the orchestra. (It's said that Bach spoke and sang in octaves for eight days before his voice settled.)

In 1703 he became a violinist in the chamber orchestra of Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar, but later that year he moved to Arnstadt, where he became church organist. In Arnstadt, he was also sort of a Cantor, which he spent the last twenty- seven years of his life in Leipzig. He trained boys, and lead an orchestra. Thus started a very famous dispute in August 1705, known as the 'Geyersbach incident.' Bach was walking home with his cousin, and Geyersbach and about four or five other students came out. We're not exactly sure what was said, but we do know that they started physical contact, and onlookers had to seperate them.

In October 1705, Bach secured a one-month leave of absence in order to study with the renowned Danish-born German organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude, who was then in L?eck and whose organ music greatly influenced Bach's. The visit was so rewarding to Bach that he overstayed his leave by three 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. After the authorities requsted for him to stop, he made the hymns too simple.

Late in 1706, Bach was in trouble again. This time, he was accused of letting a 'stranger (or unauthorized) maiden' into the choir loft. This is known to have been Maria Barbara, his cousin. This was the last straw for the Arnstadt council, and feeling the tension, Bach resigned.

Now where to go? Bach applied for a job as organist at St. Blasius Church in M?lhausen. That post was easily attained for him. By this time, he had a fianc? Maria Barbara. Shortly after Bach got the job, the were married. There was one problem with Milhausen: The church authorities did not believe in music. So Bach resighned from St. Blasius. In Milhausen, Bach's first two children were born: Catharina Dorothea, and Wilhelm Friedemann.

He went back to Weimar the next year as organist and violinist at the court of Duke Wilhelm Ernst and remained there for the next nine years, becoming concertmaster of the court orchestra in 1714. In Weimar he composed about 30 cantatas, including the well-known funeral cantata God's Time Is the Best, and also wrote a large number of organ and harpsichord works.

Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar was a good man, but he did not have great relations with his family. Long story short, Bach was caught in the middle, and was at one point thrown in jail near the end of 1717 for trying to resign.

He began to travel throughout Germany as an organ virtuoso and as a consultant to organ builders. In 1717 Bach began a 6-year employment as chapelmaster and director of chamber music at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Kothen. The Prince was a skilled violinist, bass violist, and harpsichordist. During this period he wrote primarily secular music for ensembles and solo instruments. Bach worked with a very select, eighteen piece orchestra. He also prepared music books for his and children, with the purpose of teaching them keyboard technique and musicianship.

These books include the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Inventions, and the Little Organ Book. Bach's first wife died while he was away in July 1720, and the next year he married Anna Magdalena W?cken, a fine singer and daughter of a court trumpeter from Weissenfels. A strange thing about Magdalena's family was that her brother and father were both trumpeters, and all three of her sisters (she was the youngest) were married to trumpeters. She bore him 13 children in addition to the 7 he had had by his first wife, and she helped him in his work by copying the scores of his music for the performers.

Later Years

Bach moved to Leipzig in 1723 and spent the rest of his life there. His position as musical director and choirmaster of Saint Thomas's church and church school in Leipzig was unsatisfactory in many ways. Aside from the building conditions being terrible, the boys were oftan sick due to poor healthcare, even for those times. He squabbled continually with the town council, and neither the council nor the other faculty appreciated his musical genius.

They saw in him little more than an old man who clung stubbornly to obsolete forms of music. Nonetheless, the 202 cantatas surviving from the 295 that he wrote in Leipzig are still played today, whereas much that was new and in vogue at the time has been forgotten. Most of the cantatas open with a section for chorus and orchestra, continue with alternating recitatives and arias for solo voices and accompaniment, and conclude with a chorale based on a simple Lutheran hymn. The music is at all times closely bound to the text, ennobling the latter immeasurably with its expressiveness and spiritual intensity.

Among these works are the Ascension Cantata and the Christmas Oratorio, the latter consisting of six cantatas. The Passion of St. John and the Passion of St. Matthew also were written in Leipzig, as was the epic Mass in B Minor. Among the works written for the keyboard during this period are the famous Goldberg Variations; Part II of the Well-Tempered Clavier; and the Art of the Fugue, a magnificent demonstration of his contrapuntal skill in the form of 16 fugues and 4 canons, all on a single theme. Every single fugue has mind numbing and twisting counterpoint, enough to make even a very skilled keyboardest feel sick or lowly.

Near the end of his life, Bach went to Potsdam, where his son, Carl Phillipp Emanuel was working for Frederic the Great of Prussia, the ruler chalenged Bach to improvise and create a fugue from a theme that Frederic would play. Just to make the music better and more intense, Bach, without a pedalboard, made a six-part fugue on the spot. The Prince was very impressed; later, Bach wrote out all his fugues from that and named it 'The Musical Offering.'

Bach's sight began to fail in the last years of his life,and he had two unsuccessful eye operations by John Taylor. (Taylor also ruined the eyes of H?del, Bach's contemperary.) He was totaly blind by May of 1750. Then, miraculously, in July, Bach's sight returned, and ten days later, he died of a severe stroke on July 28, 1750.