Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was regarded in his lifetime as a fine organist and an old-fashioned composer, and is now generally reckoned the greatest who ever lived. Born in Eisenach in 1685 into a family that had supplied Thuringia with musicians for five generations, he was orphaned at ten and raised by an elder brother, from whom he is said to have copied out scores by moonlight after being refused them. He held a succession of posts — organist at Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, court musician at Weimar, where he was imprisoned for a month for insisting on his release, and Kapellmeister at Cöthen — before becoming cantor of the Thomasschule in Leipzig in 1723, where he stayed twenty-seven years. The Leipzig job required him to teach Latin and music to schoolboys, and to provide a cantata for every Sunday and feast day. He wrote some three hundred, of which about two hundred survive, along with the St John and St Matthew Passions and the B minor Mass. At Cöthen, where the court was Calvinist and wanted no church music, he wrote the Brandenburg Concertos, the solo violin and cello suites and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. His technical command of counterpoint was without equal. The Art of Fugue and the Musical Offering, built on a theme Frederick the Great gave him to improvise on, push it as far as it will go. He had twenty children by two wives, of whom ten survived him, and four became significant composers. He went blind and died in 1750. Mendelssohn's performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829 began the revival.

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