I thought you might like to read about Bach in preparation for Sunday’s program. Here’s the article I wrote about him:
Johann Sebastian Bach, the youngest of 8 children was born in Eisenbach, Germany in 1685. Johann Sebastian’s mother died when he was just nine, and his father, who taught him the rudiments of string playing died less than a year later.
Johann Sebastian and his brother Jacob moved in with their older brother Johann Christoph, who was an organist in the city of Ohrdurf, where Johann Sebastian attended school until he was 15, learning theology, Latin and Greek. He gained an expert knowledge of organ building by helping Johann Christoph repair one of the organs there. His brother gave him his first keyboard lessons and introduced him to the music of great composers such as Pachelbel, Lully, and Frescobaldi. He also learned from Italian composers such as Vivaldi, Corelli, and Torelli. It is said that Vivaldi’s music had the strongest single influence on Bach.
The legendary cellist and conductor, Pablo Casals was the first to record all of Bach’s music for unaccompanied cello. Casals first came across this music in 1890. He was so in awe of it that it took 10 years of intense study and practice before he performed it in public, and 49 years before he was confident enough to record it.
In 1703 at age 18 Bach was hired as a violinist and organist by Duke Johann Ernst III in Weimar. Several months later Bach was paid to examine the new organ at the New Church in Arnstadt, and then accepted the position of organist there.
During his time in Arnstadt Bach asked for four weeks leave to travel to Lübeck to hear the composer and organist Dieterich Buxtehude play and to ask to study with him. He traveled the 200 miles to Lübeck on foot. Bach had told his employer he would only be gone for a few weeks, but ended up staying away for several months.
In 1707 Bach became the organist at the Blasius Church in Müllhausen. That year Bach married his second cousin, Maria Barbara, with whom he had 7 children. He began teaching privately and over the years had approximately 80 private students. The following year Bach returned to Weimar as organist and eventually became the director of music at the duke’s court.
In 1717 he was hired by the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen as director of music. Having accepted the new job, Bach aggressively demanded to be released from his position in Weimar, which resulted in the Duke having Bach thrown into prison for one month for disobedience until his dismissal in disgrace.
In 1720 while Bach was traveling with the prince, his wife suddenly died at age 36. The following year he met and married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, 16 years his junior. They had 13 children.
In 1723 he was appointed cantor of the St. Thomas Church and director of music of Leipzig. He held this position in Leipzig for 27 years until his death. His responsibilities included directing the St.Thomas School, teaching singing to its students, and providing 4 of the main churches in Leipzig with music, as well as other aspects of the town’s musical life. Bach also become musical director of the university connected with Saint Paul’s Church.
To Bach, being a cantor was a step downwards in social status, and he did not respect his employers, who were the members of the city council. And the council considered Bach a third rate musician, a mediocrity, who refused to teach Latin.
What is absolutely staggering is that for the Sunday services in Leipzig he was required to compose, rehearse and perform approximately 30 min. of music each week for the Sunday services. The performers available to him included 16 singers and 18 instrumentalists.
Bach simultaneously conducted and played the organ with a boy pumping the air through the organ pipes. His 2 hands and 2 feet played several keyboards at the same time while pulling and pushing knobs and levers and probably turning pages himself.
Johann Matthias Gesner wrote: “If you could see Bach singing and playing his own parts, but watching over everything, out of 30 or even 40 musicians, the one with a nod, another by tapping with his foot, the third with a warning finger, and although he is executing the most difficult parts himself, noticing at once whenever and wherever a mistake occurs, holding everyone together, taking precautions everywhere, and repairing any unsteadiness, full of rhythm in every part of his body. In his obituary it is stated “his hearing was so fine that he was able to detect the slightest error even in the largest ensembles.”
Bach had 20 children. His music is incredibly dynamic, vibrant and filled with life. Bach had 20 children!!! It is absolutely staggering to imagine his mind gushing forth with all this incredible inspirational music plus having 20 children, raising them, and teaching music, all in the service and glory of God. In his manuscripts he wrote at the end of many of his compositions, the words: To God all glory.
The great organ builder Gottfried Silbermann also began building the first pianos in history and Bach proposed alterations in the mechanism, which Silbermann adopted. Part of the recording of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier by Glenn Gould is included in the gold record that was sent on NASA’s Voyager into space. Gould chose Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the music that comprised his very first recording in 1955. 27 years later he re-recorded them.
In 1729 Bach became director of the music society, the Collegium Musicum, and was also made Director of Music of the duchy of Saxe-Weissenfels, but was not required to relocate. In 1736 Bach was appointed Composer to the Electoral Saxony and Royal Polish Court.
In his last year of life Bach’s health deteriorated. He suffered from motor problems in his right hand and arm and from problems with his eyes, specifically cataracts. Ultimately he became totally blind. Some months before his death in 1750 he had 2 unsuccessful eye surgeries, and died of a stroke at age 65.
During his lifetime, people thought of Bach as just an ordinary working musician, though as a virtuoso he acquired almost legendary fame. He was primarily valued as an organist and his keyboard music such as The Well Tempered Clavier was for many years only appreciated for its educational uses. Yet he wrote all kinds of music—for organ and other keyboard instruments, orchestras, choirs, and concertos for many different instrumental combinations. And as a publisher, Bach was involved in the distribution of the music of other composers.
Unfortunately approximately 40% of Bach’s sacred cantatas have been lost, and more than half of his secular cantatas have been lost. Much of Bach’s music wasn’t published until long after his death. In fact, out of the hundreds and hundreds of cantatas he composed, only one was published during his lifetime. And because most people didn’t understand that Bach was a genius of a composer, amazingly, after his death some of his cantatas were used as kindling to light fires. Well over 1,000 compositions were eventually published and it’s amazing to learn that, according to his son, the composer, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, his father composed in silence and not at the keyboard.
Although Bach’s music was considered to be old-fashioned and was ignored for many years, it underwent a revival thanks to Mendelssohn, who conducted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion 79 years after his death in 1829 and the St. John Passion in 1833. Bach is now seen as one of the greatest geniuses in music history.
Bach’s music had a profound influence on composers such as Haydn and Mozart, and upon many musicians since that time. “Bach” is the German word for a little stream or brook. Beethoven said: “His name should not be Brook, it should be Ocean.” And Brahms said: “Study Bach: there you will find everything.”
One eye witness described Bach’s organ playing: “His feet seemed to fly across the pedals as if they were winged, and mighty sounds filled the church’. Bach’s obituary states: ‘His fingers were all of equal strength, all equally able to play with the finest precision. He had invented so comfortable a fingering that he could master the most difficult parts with perfect ease. He was able to accomplish passages on the pedals with his feet which would have given trouble to the fingers of many keyboard players”.
Bach was fond of beer and cider. He drank wine regularly, and also enjoyed hot chocolate, coffee and tobacco. Bach is also known to have smoked a pipe, and apparently he really loved coffee. So much so that he wrote a cantata about it and a girl who is addicted to it. It’s affectionately known as the Coffee Cantata and was 1st performed at Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig in 1735. It’s about a coffee-obsessed woman whose father wants her to stop drinking it.
Baroque music crops up in some unexpected places. At LaGuardia, Newark and JFK airports, classical music that prominently features Bach is played in the vicinity of the check-in zone. His music is also regularly played in New York City’s Penn Station, and in many stations in the London Underground because it is thought that Baroque music has a calming effect on stressed out travelers. Shopping centers and convenience, store managers occasionally use Baroque music to discourage loitering.
Bach often used 14 and 41 in his music because these numbers correspond to the numerical values of the letters in his name, B-A-C-H. B is 2, A is 1, C is 3 and H is 8. The total is 14. 14, and its mirror, 41, were among Bach’s favorite numbers. These numbers are hidden inumerable times within the notes and musical structure of his music. In fact, the first 2 cantatas he composed and began performing at his new job in Leipzig each comprised 14 individual compositions.
The Mass in B Minor is a summation of his vocal writing and is sometimes referred to as his most important composition. Bach completed it a year before his death in 1750. On the last page of the manuscript he wrote his customary ‘The end. Glory to God alone.’” Its first complete performance was not until 1870, 120 years after Bach’s death. The great conductor, Robert Shaw said: “It is undoubtedly one of the very few great achievements of the human mind and heart.”
Shaw: “Shaw’s last performances of it were in 1998. At pre-concert remarks 9 to 10 months before his death Shaw said: “It may well be true that Bach’s Mass in B minor has become, some 250 years later the most remarkable musical allegory of human existence—its pain, aspiration and promises.”
The conductor John Eliot Gardiner wrote: “One of Bach’s monumental achievements was to show that music and language together can do things which neither can do separately. But he also proves that music sometimes surpasses language in its capacity to penetrate to the innermost resources of consciousness and chip away at peoples prejudices and our sometimes toxic patterns of thinking.”
In 1962 Robert Shaw brought the Mass in B Minor on a performance tour of the former Soviet Union, climaxing during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Shaw spoke about this historic tour: “What cultural exchange can do is act as a lubricant and a delay-before-harsh-measure-any-old-decision factors. It can gain us time. And it can make us aware of the possibility of getting along with these or other people. A deputy minister of foreign affairs said to our ambassador, ‘All this makes our work somewhat easier, Mr. Ambassador’”.