🇩🇪Johann
Sebastian Bach

When Johannes Brahms sat down to compose his first symphony — at the age of forty-three, after twenty-one years of trying — he said that he could hear the sound of giant footsteps behind him. He meant Beethoven. But if Beethoven heard giant footsteps behind him, he meant Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach occupies a position in Western music that has no true parallel in any other art form: he is simultaneously the culminating master of one period — the Baroque, which he brought to a state of absolute perfection — and the founding father of the tradition that followed. Every composer who came after him worked in a harmonic language that Bach had essentially defined. The tension between melody and counterpoint, the architecture of the fugue, the grammar of tonal harmony, the relationship between form and emotional expression — all of it passes through Bach. He is not merely a great composer in the history of Western music. He is closer to the inventor of its fundamental grammar.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 31, 1685, in Eisenach, a small town in the Duchy of Saxe-Eisenach in what is now central Germany. The Bach family was the most remarkable musical dynasty in German history: there had been professional musicians named Bach in Thuringia for at least a century before Johann Sebastian, and the name had become so synonymous with music in the region that locals would refer to any traveling musician as "a Bach." His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was the director of the town musicians and a violinist. Both parents died before Johann Sebastian was ten, and he was taken in by his eldest brother Johann Christoph, who was an organist in the town of Ohrdruf. Johann Christoph taught his younger brother keyboard and continued his education. According to an often-repeated account, the young Bach spent nights secretly copying out manuscripts from a locked cabinet in his brother's study, and his brother repeatedly confiscated them. The story may be embellished, but the underlying truth is clear: Bach was obsessive about music from the beginning, and he was educating himself far beyond what his formal instruction provided.

At fifteen he won a choral scholarship to St. Michael's School in Lüneburg, where he had access to a superb music library and to the organist Georg Böhm, who introduced him to North German organ tradition. At seventeen he walked over 250 miles to Lübeck to hear the legendary organist Dieterich Buxtehude play — he had received a month's leave, stayed for four months, and returned without apparent concern for the consequences. This pattern of self-directed, borderline reckless musical education continued throughout his early career. In his first professional appointment at Arnstadt in 1703, he was repeatedly criticized by church authorities for making his organ accompaniments so elaborate that the congregation could not follow the hymns. He was also accused of bringing "a strange maiden" — later identified as his cousin Maria Barbara, whom he would marry — into the organ loft. He was, in other words, not an easy employee, but he was clearly learning everything he could find to learn.

His career proceeded through a series of court and church appointments that were, by the standards of his era, respectable but not spectacular. He was court organist at Weimar from 1708 to 1717, where he wrote most of his major organ works — the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor — and developed his mastery of fugue to a point no composer before or after him has matched. He was Kapellmeister at the court of Köthen from 1717 to 1723, where he wrote the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I), the six violin partitas and sonatas, the six cello suites, and the two- and three-part inventions. And he was Cantor at St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig from 1723 until his death in 1750, where he wrote the Mass in B minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the Goldberg Variations, and approximately 200 surviving cantatas out of an estimated 300 he composed, one per week for years on end.

The Brandenburg Concertos, composed around 1721 and dedicated to the Margrave of Brandenburg who apparently never performed them, are the perfection of the concerto grosso form: six works, each using a different combination of instruments, each finding a different solution to the problem of balancing solo voices against the ensemble. The Well-Tempered Clavier — forty-eight preludes and fugues, two in each major and minor key — was the first systematic demonstration that the equally tempered tuning system could work across all twenty-four keys, and it functionally standardized Western keyboard tuning. Every pianist who touches a keyboard today plays in a tuning system that Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier justified and popularized. The Goldberg Variations — an aria with thirty variations commissioned, according to legend, to help an insomniac nobleman sleep — are considered the greatest set of keyboard variations ever composed, a structure of such mathematical elegance and emotional range that Glenn Gould recorded them twice, thirty years apart, and both recordings are canonical. The Mass in B minor, which Bach assembled over the last decades of his life, is the largest and most complex choral work in the Western repertoire.

Bach died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750, from complications following eye surgery — he had been nearly blind in his final years. His death was noticed by the local newspaper and essentially no one else. His sons were better known than he was, and they were actively working to supersede the contrapuntal Baroque style he had perfected with the newer galant and classical styles that were coming into fashion. His manuscripts were distributed among his children, some were lost, and the larger portion of his fame faded into relative obscurity. It was Felix Mendelssohn who restored him: in 1829, at the age of twenty, Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion since Bach's death, in Berlin. The effect was, by all accounts, overwhelming. The Bach revival that followed made the rediscovery of his work the defining musical event of the nineteenth century. Brahms called him "the beginning and end of all music." Albert Einstein said he would have nothing to say to God, but that he would "simply listen" to Bach. The mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who was Bach's contemporary, reportedly said that music is the arithmetic of the soul that counts without being aware it is counting. Bach, more than anyone who ever composed, proved that this was true.