Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach
The master of Baroque counterpoint, and the composer other composers study.
Johann Sebastian Bach spent most of his career as a working church musician in Germany, writing a steady stream of cantatas, organ music, and keyboard works for weekly services rather than for concert fame - he wasn't a celebrity in his own lifetime the way Handel was. His reputation as arguably the greatest composer in the Western tradition was built mostly after his death, as later generations rediscovered the sheer technical and expressive depth of his output.
Life in brief
Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685 into a sprawling family of musicians. Orphaned at ten, he was raised by an older brother who taught him the keyboard. As a young organist he once walked more than 250 miles to Lübeck to hear the great organist Dieterich Buxtehude - and overstayed his leave by months.
His career moved through a series of German posts, and each one shaped what he wrote. At the court of Weimar he was organist and wrote much of his greatest organ music; when he tried to leave for a better job, the duke had him jailed for nearly a month. At Köthen, where the court needed instrumental rather than church music, he wrote the Brandenburg Concertos, the cello suites, the solo violin works, and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. From 1723 until his death he was cantor of St Thomas's Church in Leipzig, responsible for music in the city's main churches - an exhausting job that produced hundreds of cantatas, the St John and St Matthew Passions, and the Christmas Oratorio.
He married twice and had twenty children, about half of whom survived childhood; several sons, including Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, became famous composers in their own right. In his last years his eyesight failed, and he died in 1750 after unsuccessful eye operations.
Music and style
Bach's depth centers on counterpoint: the art of combining independent melodic lines so they lock together harmonically. His fugues - collected across two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier, one prelude and fugue in every major and minor key - are still the standard by which contrapuntal writing is measured. His Brandenburg Concertos show the same rigor applied to the Baroque concerto's soloist-versus-ensemble format, each one scored for a different, distinctive combination of instruments.
What sets Bach apart is that his intellectual rigor never feels dry: the same pieces that teach composition students how voices fit together can dance, grieve, and blaze with joy. He also absorbed every style of his day
- Italian concertos, French dances, German chorales - and fused them into something unmistakably his own.
Key works
- St Matthew Passion (1727) - the story of the crucifixion for two choirs and two orchestras, and one of the summits of sacred music.
- Mass in B Minor - assembled and revised across decades, one of the largest and most demanding choral works in the repertoire, drawing on Mass tradition but expanding it to a scale far beyond liturgical necessity.
- The Well-Tempered Clavier - 48 preludes and fugues, a cornerstone of every pianist's training.
- Brandenburg Concertos - six concertos, each for a different group of soloists.
- Goldberg Variations (1741) - an aria and thirty variations for keyboard, made famous anew by Glenn Gould's 1955 recording.
- Cello Suites and Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin - music that makes a single instrument sound like an ensemble.
Legacy
After his death, Bach's music went quiet in public, though composers kept studying it - Mozart and Beethoven both learned from The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, its first performance since Bach's lifetime, and a full-scale Bach revival followed. Today his music turns up everywhere from jazz to film scores, and three of his pieces travel through interstellar space on the Voyager Golden Record.
Where to start listening: the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 is immediately energetic and approachable; the "Air on the G String" (from his Orchestral Suite No. 3) shows his quieter, more lyrical side. When you're ready for something bigger, try the opening chorus of the St Matthew Passion.