Johann Sebastian Bach
March 31, 1685 — Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German Baroque composer and organist whose vast output — from the Brandenburg Concertos to the St. Matthew Passion — is widely considered the summit of Western classical music.
Early Life in a Musical Dynasty
Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 31, 1685, in Eisenach, in what is now the German state of Thuringia. He came from a family so thoroughly musical that the name "Bach" had become a synonym for "musician" in the region — over seven generations, the Bachs produced more than 50 professional musicians. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was a court trumpeter and town musician; his uncles and cousins filled similar posts across central Germany.
Orphaned at ten, Bach went to live with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, an organist in Ohrdruf, who gave him his first serious keyboard instruction. He later won a scholarship to study at the prestigious St. Michael's School in Lüneburg, where he had access to an excellent library and could hear the leading organists and court musicians of northern Germany.
He quickly distinguished himself as an organist of exceptional skill and began his working career at eighteen, serving as a court musician and organist in Weimar and Arnstadt before accepting a post at the court of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar.
The Great Works
Bach's output was staggering in quantity and quality. As Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen from 1717 to 1723, he composed the six Brandenburg Concertos — his most celebrated orchestral works — along with the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the violin partitas, and the cello suites. Prince Leopold was a genuine music lover, and this period produced some of Bach's most inventive secular instrumental writing.
In 1723 he was appointed Cantor of the Thomasschule in Leipzig, a post he would hold for the remaining 27 years of his life. The position required him to produce a new cantata every week for the church calendar — he wrote nearly 300. He also composed the St. Matthew Passion (1727), the St. John Passion, the Mass in B minor, the Goldberg Variations, and the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The sheer organizational complexity of these works — the interlocking voices, the architectural rigor — remains astonishing to musicians and scholars today.
Did You Know?
At his death in 1750, Bach was considered somewhat old-fashioned by the musical avant-garde. It was Felix Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 — nearly 80 years after its premiere — that launched the Bach revival and established his modern reputation as history's greatest composer.
Legacy
Bach died on July 28, 1750, likely from complications related to eye surgery. He left twenty children — seven with his first wife, Maria Barbara, and thirteen with his second, Anna Magdalena — and an estate that was divided up and partially lost. Several of his sons, including Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, became significant composers in their own right.
The scope of Bach's influence is difficult to overstate. Mozart and Beethoven studied his counterpoint. Brahms, Schumann, and Wagner revered him. In the 20th century his influence spread into jazz — the intricate voice-leading of bebop pianists, the long improvisational lines of John Coltrane — and into composers as different as Shostakovich and Arvo Pärt. The musician Vangelis, whose Baroque-influenced synthesis compositions echo Bach's interest in multi-layered structure, acknowledged the Baroque master as a foundational influence.
Today Bach is studied in every conservatory on earth and performed continuously. The Well-Tempered Clavier remains the essential textbook of tonal harmony.