Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and organist of the late Baroque era. He spent his whole life in a small corner of central Germany, working for town councils, churches and minor courts, and was known in his day mainly as a brilliant organist. Yet the music he wrote, from the Brandenburg Concertos and the Well-Tempered Clavier to the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, is now regarded by many musicians as the foundation of the Western tradition.

Bach was born on 21 March 1685 in Eisenach, in Thuringia, a town of the duchy of Saxe-Eisenach within the Holy Roman Empire, and in the same town where Martin Luther had gone to school. The Bachs were the most extensive musical clan in Germany: for several generations they had supplied town pipers, organists and court musicians across Thuringia, and the name Bach was almost a byword for musician in the region. His father, Johann Ambrosius, was director of the town musicians.

His mother died in 1694 and his father less than a year later, leaving him an orphan at ten. He went to live with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, organist at Ohrdruf, who taught him keyboard and introduced him to the music of German, French and Italian composers. At fifteen he won a place as a choral scholar at St Michael's School in Lüneburg, where he could hear the great organists of northern Germany.

In 1703 Bach became organist at the New Church in Arnstadt. In the winter of 1705 he took four weeks' leave to hear the famous Dieterich Buxtehude in Lübeck, travelling some 400 kilometres, reportedly on foot, and stayed away about four months, to the annoyance of his employers, who also complained about his elaborate harmonies and his quarrels with the student choir. In 1707 he moved to Mühlhausen and married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach.

From 1708 to 1717 he worked at the ducal court of Weimar, first as organist and from 1714 as concertmaster. Much of his great organ music dates from these years. He also studied and arranged concertos by Antonio Vivaldi, whose clear structures and driving rhythms became part of his own style. When he accepted a better post elsewhere without permission, the duke had him locked up for nearly a month before letting him go.

From 1717 to 1723 Bach was music director to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. Because the court followed the Calvinist faith, which used little music in worship, he wrote chiefly secular music for the prince's fine orchestra. Out of these years came the six Brandenburg Concertos, presented in 1721 to the Margrave of Brandenburg, the suites for solo cello, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, twenty-four preludes and fugues in every major and minor key, intended to show off a keyboard tuned so that all keys could be used.

Maria Barbara died suddenly in 1720 while he was away travelling with the prince. In 1721 he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a gifted singer. Between his two marriages Bach had twenty children, of whom only ten survived to adulthood.

In 1723 Bach became Thomaskantor in Leipzig, the cantor of St Thomas School and music director for the city's main churches, a post he held for the rest of his life. It was a demanding job: he taught the boys of the school and had to provide music for every Sunday and feast day. In his first years he composed cantatas at a staggering rate, building several annual cycles, of which around two hundred sacred cantatas survive. For Good Friday he wrote the St John Passion (1724) and the St Matthew Passion (1727), huge settings of the story of Christ's death that combine Gospel narrative, reflective arias and congregational hymns, the chorales at the heart of Lutheran worship since the Protestant Reformation.

Bach often clashed with the town council, which he felt did not give him the musicians or respect he needed. From 1729 he also directed the Collegium Musicum, a student ensemble that gave public concerts in Zimmermann's coffee house, for which he wrote secular cantatas such as the Coffee Cantata. In 1736 the Elector of Saxony, who was also King of Poland, gave him the title of court composer, strengthening his hand against the council.

In his later years Bach turned increasingly to large collections that summed up his art: the Clavier-Übung series, including the Goldberg Variations, a second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Mass in B minor, assembled in its final form around 1748 to 1749. In 1747 he visited Frederick the Great of Prussia at Potsdam, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel served as harpsichordist; the king gave him a theme on which to improvise, and Bach later developed it into the Musical Offering. The Art of Fugue was left unfinished. In 1750 he underwent two eye operations by the travelling English surgeon John Taylor, which left him weakened and blind. He died in Leipzig on 28 July 1750.

Bach's music is built above all on counterpoint, the art of combining several independent melodic lines so that they make sense together. His fugues, in which one theme enters in each voice in turn and is developed with endless ingenuity, are the classic examples of the technique. But he absorbed every style of his time, the French dance suite, the Italian concerto and the German chorale, and fused them. For Bach, a devout Lutheran who often headed his scores with an abbreviation for Jesus help and signed them with one for to God alone the glory, music was both a craft and an act of worship.

By the time of his death his style seemed old-fashioned, and his sons, especially Carl Philipp Emanuel in Hamburg and Johann Christian in London, became more famous than he was in the fashions of the time. His music never vanished, however. Musicians studied his keyboard works: Mozart arranged his fugues, and Beethoven learned the Well-Tempered Clavier as a boy. In 1802 Johann Nikolaus Forkel published the first biography, and in 1829 the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, its first performance since Bach's death, setting off a revival that also fed a growing German national pride.

The Bach Society published a complete edition of his works from 1850, and the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalogue of 1950 gave them the BWV numbers still used. Today his music is played on period instruments and modern ones, in churches, concert halls and jazz clubs, and it has been sent into space on the Voyager probes. The Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, where he is buried in St Thomas Church, is the centre of research on his life, and he remains one of the defining figures of the musical culture of Germany.