Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (Eisenach, Holy Roman Empire, March 21July/ 31 March 1685greg.-Leipzig, Holy Roman Empire, July 28, 1750) was a German composer, musician, conductor, chapelmaster, singer, and teacher of the period baroque.
He was the most important member of one of the most prominent families of musicians in history, with more than 35 famous composers: the Bach family. He was famous as an organist and harpsichordist throughout Europe for his great technique and ability to improvise music on the keyboard. In addition to the organ and the harpsichord, he played the violin and the viola da gamba.
His fruitful work is considered the pinnacle of baroque music; Its intellectual depth, its technical perfection and its artistic beauty stand out in it, as well as the synthesis of the various national styles of its time and of the past. Bach is considered the last great master of the art of counterpoint and a source of inspiration and influence for later composers and musicians, such as Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin, among many others.
Among his best-known works are the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Misa in B minor, the Small Fugue in G minor, the St. Matthew Passion, The Art of the Fugue, Musical Offering, the Goldberg Variations, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, several cycles of cantatas (including the famous Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140 and Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147), the Italian Concerto, BWV 971, the French Style Overture, BWV 831, the Suites for solo cello, the Sonatas and partitas for solo violin, the Keyboard Concertos and the Suites for orchestra.
Biography
Family
Johann Sebastian Bach belonged to one of the most outstanding musical families in history. For more than two hundred years, the Bach family produced fine performers and composers. At that time, the Lutheran Church, the local government and the aristocracy gave a significant contribution to the training of professional musicians, particularly in the eastern constituencies of Thuringia and Saxony. Johann Sebastian's father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was a talented violinist and trumpeter in Eisenach, a city of about 6,000 inhabitants in Thuringia. The position involved the organization of secular music and participation in church music. Johann Sebastian's uncles were all professional musicians, whose titles included church organists, court chamber musicians, and composers. Bach was aware of his family's musical achievements and around 1735 he outlined a genealogy, Ursprung der musikalisch-Bachischen Familie (Origins of the Bach Musical Family), seeking the history of generations of successful musicians in his family.
Early Years (1685-1703)
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, in the Duchy of Saxe-Eisenach (present-day Thuringia, Germany), on March 21, 1685, the same year as Georg Friedrich Händel and Domenico Scarlatti. The date of his birth corresponds to the Julian calendar, since the Germans had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar, for which the date corresponds to March 31. He was the eighth child (the eldest son was 14 when Johann Sebastian was born) of the marriage formed between Maria Elisabetha Lämmerhirt and Johann Ambrosius Bach, director of the city musicians. His father was the one who probably taught him to play the violin and the fundamentals of music theory. His uncle Johann Christoph Bach introduced him to organ practice.
His mother died in 1694, when Johann Sebastian was nine years old, and his father, who had already given him his first music lessons, died eight months later. Johann Sebastian, an orphan at the age of ten, went to live and studying with his older brother, Johann Christoph Bach, an organist at St. Michael's Church (Michaeliskirche) in Ohrdruf, a nearby town. There he copied, studied, and performed music, including his own brother's, despite being forbidden to do so because sheet music was very valuable and private and such paper was expensive. He learned music theory and composition, as well as playing the organ, and received lessons from his brother, who trained him in performance. of the clavichord. Johann Christoph introduced him to the works of the great South German composers of the time, such as Johann Pachelbel (who had been Johann Christoph's teacher) and Johann Jakob Froberger; composers from North Germany; from the French, such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis Marchand and Marin Marais, as well as the Italian harpsichordist Girolamo Frescobaldi. Also at that time he studied theology, Latin, Greek, French and Italian at the local gymnasium.
In 1700, at the age of fourteen, Johann Sebastian was awarded, along with his school friend Georg Erdmann, two years his senior, with a tuition for choral studies at the prestigious St. Michael's School in Lüneburg, not far from the seaport of Hamburg, one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire. This involved a long journey with his friend, probably partly on foot and partly by carriage, although it is not known for certain. There are no written references to this period of his life, but his two years at the school seem to have been decisive, as it exposed him to a broader palette of European culture than he had experienced in Thuringia. In addition to singing in the a cappella choir, it is likely that he played the organ with three keyboards and its harpsichords. He may have come into contact with the sons of North German nobles, who were sent to this select school to prepare for their careers. diplomatic, governmental and military.
Although there is little historical evidence to support this, it is almost certain that during his stay in Lüneburg, the young Bach visited St. John's Church (Johanniskirche) and heard (and possibly played) the famous church organ (built in 1549 by Jasper Johannsen, and known as "Böhm's organ" after its most prominent player). Given his musical talents, it is highly likely that he also had significant contact with leading organists of the day in Lüneburg, most notably with Georg Böhm (the organist of the Johanniskirche), as well as organists from nearby Hamburg, such as Johann Adam Reincken and Nicolaus Bruhns. Through contact with these musicians, Johann Sebastian had access to probably the largest and most precise instruments he had ever played. At this stage he became familiar with the music of the North German academic organ tradition, especially with the work of Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, and with musical manuscripts and treatises on music theory that were in the possession of those musicians. Stauffer reported the discovery in 2005 of organ tablatures that Bach wrote, still in his teens, of works by Reincken and Dieterich Buxtehude, showing "a well-trained, methodical, disciplined adolescent deeply committed to learning his trade".
Weimar to Mühlhausen Period (1703-1708)
In January 1703, shortly after finishing school and graduating at St. Michael's and being turned down for the post of organist at Sangerhausen, Bach secured a position as court musician in the chapel of Duke John Ernest III., in Weimar. It is unclear what her role was there, but it appears to have included non-musical household chores. During his seven months' service in Weimar, his reputation as a keyboardist spread so far that he was invited to inspect the brand-new organ in the Church of Saint Boniface (St.-Bonifatius-Kirche, later Bachkirche, "church de Bach") from the nearby town of Arnstadt, 40 kilometers southeast of Weimar, and to give the opening concert there. The Bach family had close ties to this old Thuringian town, on the edge of the Thuringian Forest. In August 1703, he accepted the position of organist at that church, with light duties, a relatively generous salary, and a good new organ, tuned to a new system that allowed a greater number of keys to be used. At this time, Bach was undertaking the serious composition of organ preludes; These works, inscribed in the North German tradition of virtuoso and improvisational preludes, already showed a strict control of the motives (in them, a simple and brief musical idea is explored in its consequences through an entire movement). However, in these works the composer had not yet fully developed his capacity for large-scale organization and his contrapuntal technique, where two or more melodies interact simultaneously.
Despite strong family connections and being employed by a music enthusiast did not prevent tension from building between the young organist and the authorities after several years on the job. Johann Sebastian was dissatisfied with the level of the choir singers. He called one of them "zippel Fagottist " (lazy bassoonist). One night this student named Geyersbach went after him with a stick. Bach filed a complaint against him with the authorities. They acquitted Geyersbach with a minor reprimand and ordered Bach to be more moderate regarding the musical qualities he expected of his students. Months later, his employer was very upset after Bach absented himself from Arnstadt for four months (he had asked leave for four weeks) in the winter of 1705-1706 to visit the Grand Master Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck and attend his Abendmusiken in St. Mary's Church (Marienkirche). This well-known episode in the composer's life implies that he had to walk some 400 kilometers there and back to spend time with the man he considered possibly the foremost figure among German organists. The trip reinforced the influence of Buxtehude's style as the foundation of Bach's early work and the fact that he extended his visit over several months suggests that the time he spent with the old man was of great value to his art. Johann Sebastian wanted to become Buxtehude's clerk (assistant or successor), but he did not want to marry his daughter, which was the condition of his appointment.
In 1706, he was offered a better-paying position as organist at St. Blaise's Church (Divi-Blasii-Kirche) in Mühlhausen, a major city to the north. The following year he took possession of this better position, with significantly higher pay and conditions, including a good choir. Four months after arriving in Mühlhausen, he married, on October 17, 1707, Maria Barbara Bach, a second cousin of his, with who would have seven children, of whom four reached adulthood. Two of them—Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel—became important composers in the ornate gallant style that followed the Baroque.
The city council accepted Bach's requirements and invested a large sum in renovating the organ in the church of San Blas. In 1708, Johann Sebastian wrote the festive cantata Gott ist mein König, BWV 71 for the inauguration of the new city council, the publication of which was paid for by the city council. Twice in later years the composer had to return to conduct it.
Return to Weimar (1708-1717)
Just a year later, in 1708, he received a new job offer as organist from the ducal court in Weimar, so he left his post in Mühlhausen. There, he had the opportunity to work with a large and well-financed contingent of professional musicians.Bach moved in with his family to an apartment very close to the ducal palace.That same year, his first daughter, Catharina Dorothea, was born. She went to live with them the older and unmarried sister of Maria Barbara, who stayed with them helping with the housework until her death in 1729. Three sons were also born in Weimar: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Gottfried Bernhard. They had three more children, who however did not live to their first birthday, including twins born in 1713.
This period in Bach's life was fruitful and began a time of composing keyboard and orchestral works. He reached the level of competence and confidence to expand existing structures to include outside influences. On the death of Prince Juan Ernesto in 1707, his brother Guillermo Ernesto had assumed de facto power. Due to his previous closeness to Duke Juan Ernesto, who had also been a seasoned musician and admirer of Italian music, Bach had studied and transcribed the works of Antonio Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli and Giuseppe Torelli, among other Italian authors, thanks to which he had learned to write dramatic openings and to use the dynamic rhythms and harmonic patterns found in said music, assimilating its dynamism and harmonic emotiveness, and applying these qualities to his own compositions, which in turn were interpreted by the musical ensemble. of Duke William Ernest. He absorbed these stylistic aspects in part by transcribing Vivaldi's concertos for strings and winds for harpsichord and organ; many of those transcribed works are still frequently performed. He was especially drawn to the Italian style in which one or more solo instruments alternate section by section with the full orchestra through one movement.
He continued playing and composing for the organ and interpreting concert music with the duke's ensemble. He also began composing preludes and fugues, later compiled in his monumental work The Well-Tempered Clavier ( Das Wohltemperierte Klavier), first printed in 1801, consisting of two books compiled in 1722 and 1744, each containing a prelude and fugue in each major and minor key. He began writing Orgelbüchlein ( Little Book for Organ ) a didactic work that he left unfinished. It contained traditional Lutheran chorales arranged in complex patterns, to form organists.
In 1713, he was offered a position in Halle when he advised the authorities during Christoph Cuntzius's renovation of the main organ in the west gallery of the Marktkirche Unser Lieben Frauen. Johann Kuhnau and Bach they played again when it opened in 1716. In the spring of 1714, Johann Sebastian was promoted to Konzertmeister, an honor that involved performing a church cantata monthly in the castle church. The first cantatas in the new series composed by Bach in Weimar were Himmelskönig, sei willkommen, BWV 182, for Palm Sunday, which coincided with the Annunciation of that year; Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12, for Jubilant Sunday; and Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten!, BWV 172 for Pentecost. His first Christmas cantata, Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, BWV 63, possibly premiered here in 1713. or if it was performed for the bicentennial of the Protestant Reformation in 1717.
In 1717, the anecdotal attempt at a musical duel with Louis Marchand occurred in Dresden (it is said that Marchand left the city after previously listening to Bach in secret). Kapellmeister) of the court of Anhalt-Köthen and with the mediation of Duke Ernest Augustus —Wilhelm Ernest's nephew, with whom he was in lawsuits at the time—, Prince Leopold offered Bach the vacant position, which he accepted. This displeased the Duke of Weimar and when the composer submitted his resignation he ordered his arrest for a few weeks in the castle before accepting it. According to a translation of the court clerk's report, he was imprisoned for almost a month before being unfavorably discharged:
On November 6, [1717], the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge.On November 6 [of 1717], the other chapel master and organist Bach was imprisoned in the Court's Court for for forcing too obstinately the matter of his resignation and was finally released from his arrest on December 2 with an unfavorable notification of his dismissal.
Köthen (1717-1723)
Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen hired Bach as Kapellmeister in 1717. Prince Leopold, who was also a musician, appreciated his talent, paid him well, and gave him considerable time to compose and play. However, the prince was a Calvinist and did not use elaborate music in his religious services. For this reason, most of his works from this period were secular. Examples are the Suites for orchestra, the six Suites for solo cello, the Sonatas and partitas for solo violin and the Brandenburg Concertos. He also composed secular cantatas for the court, such as Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht, BWV 134a.
Despite being born in the same year and only about 130 kilometers apart, Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel never met. In 1719, Johann Sebastian made a journey of about thirty kilometers from Köthen to Halle with the intention of meeting Handel, but Handel had recently left the city. In 1730, Wilhelm Friedemann, Johann Sebastian's son, traveled to Halle to invite Handel to visit the Bach family in Leipzig. However, said visit never took place.
On July 7, 1720, while Bach was traveling with Prince Leopold in Karlovy Vary, his wife, Maria Barbara Bach, died suddenly. Some specialists point out that in her memory he composed the Partita for solo violin no. 2, BWV 1004 , especially the last section of it, the “Chaconne”. The following year, he met Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a talented young soprano 16 years his junior who sang at the Köthen court. They were married on December 3, 1721. Together they had thirteen more children, six of whom reached adulthood: Gottfried Heinrich, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian, who became noted musicians; Elisabeth Juliane Friederica (1726-81), who married her father's student Johann Christoph Altnickol; Johanna Caroline (1737-81); and Regina Susanna (1742-1809).
Leipzig (1723-1750)
Johann Kuhnau had been Thomaskantor of the Thomasschule at the Lutheran Church of St. Thomas (Thomaskirche) in Leipzig from 1701 until his death on June 5, 1722. Bach had visited Leipzig during Kuhnau's tenure: in 1714 he attended the service in St. Thomas Church on the First Sunday of Advent, and in 1717 he had sampled the organ of the Paulinerkirche. In 1716, Bach and Kuhnau had met on the occasion of the trial and inauguration of an organ in Halle.
After being offered the position, Bach was invited to Leipzig only after Georg Philipp Telemann indicated that he was not interested in moving to Leipzig. Telemann went to Hamburg, where he "had his own fights with the Senate of the city".
In 1723, Bach was appointed Thomaskantor and music director of the city's main churches, St Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) and St Paul's (Paulinerkirche). i>), the University Church. It was a prestigious position in the market town leader of the Electorate of Saxony, a neighboring electorate of Thuringia. Apart from his brief tenures in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, this was Bach's first state work, in a career that had been closely linked to service to the aristocracy. During this time, he gained further prestige through honorary appointments at the courts of Köthen and Weissenfels, as well as that of Elector Augustus II of Poland in Dresden. The composer frequently disagreed with his employer, the council of the city of Leipzig, whom he considered "stingy".
This position, which he held for 27 years until his death, brought him into contact with the political machinations of his employer, the Leipzig City Council, within which were two factions: the absolutists, loyal to the Saxon monarch in Dresden, Augustus II of Poland, and the city-state faction, which represented the interests of the merchant class, guilds, and minor aristocrats. The royalists were the ones who hired him, in particular by the mayor of that time, Gottfried Lange, a young lawyer who had served at the Dresden court. Coinciding with Bach's appointment, the city-state faction was granted control of the Thomasschule and was required to make various compromises regarding its working conditions.
Bach's job required him to instruct the students of the Thomasschule in singing and provide weekly sacred music to the main churches of the city. In addition, he had to teach Latin, but they allowed him to hire four assistants to do it for him, as well as to help him with musical instruction. liturgical year.
Bach regularly performed his own cantatas, many of which he composed during his first three years in Leipzig. The first of these was Die Elenden sollen essen, BWV 75, performed for the first time in the Nikolaikirche on May 30, 1723, the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday. He collected his cantatas in yearly cycles. Five are mentioned in their obituaries, though only three exist. Most of these works were used in the prescribed Gospel readings for each Sunday and feast day in the Lutheran year. A second annual cycle began on the first Sunday after Trinity. from 1724 and composed only cantatas with chorus; many of them were composed using chorales, traditional hymns of the Lutheran Church. These include O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, BWV 20; Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140; Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 62; and Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1.
For rehearsals and performances of these works in the church of Santo Tomás, he probably sat at the harpsichord or conducted facing the choir with his back to the congregation. Behind the choir and one level above was the organ and in two side galleries to the left and right would be the strings, the winds, the percussion and the basso continuo.
The city council only granted around eight permanent instrumentalists, a limitation that was a source of constant friction with Bach, who had to recruit the rest of the twenty or so musicians required for the medium or large scores, at the university, the Thomasschule and the audience. Bach selected the choristers: sopranos and altos from the Thomasschule and tenors and basses from the Thomasschule and anywhere in Leipzig. Interventions at weddings and funerals gave extra income to these groups. It is likely that for this purpose, and for school training, he wrote at least six motets, mostly for double choir. As part of his regular church work he conducted motets of the Venetian School and by Germans such as Heinrich Schütz, which would serve as formal models for their own motets.
Bach's predecessor as Thomaskantor, Johann Kuhnau, had also been music director of the Paulinerkirche, the church of the University of Leipzig. But when Bach was installed as Thomaskantor in 1723, he was put in charge of music for festive church services in the Paulinerkirche alone. His request to provide music for the regular Sunday services there as well (with a corresponding salary increase) reached the voter, but was denied. After this, in 1725, Bach "lost interest" in working even for festive services at the Paulinerkirche and appeared there only on "special occasions". The Paulinerkirche had a much better and newer organ (1716) than those in the Thomaskirche or the Nikolaikirche. Bach was not required to play any organ in his official duties, but it is believed that he liked to play on the organ in the Paulinerkirche "for his own pleasure".
He broadened his compositional horizons beyond the liturgy when he took over, in March 1729, the direction of the Collegium Musicum, a student musical society founded in 1703 by Georg Philipp Telemann. This was one of dozens of private societies created by musically active university students that existed in the major German-speaking cities and which, led by each city's foremost professional musicians, became progressively more important in musical public life. In the words of Christoph Wolff, assuming the directorship was a shrewd move that "consolidated Bach's firm hold on Leipzig's leading musical institutions". Throughout the year, the Leipzig Collegium Musicum participated regularly in settings such as the Zimmermann Café (Zimmermannsches Caffeehaus), a café on Rue Sainte-Catherine facing the market square. Many of his works during the 1730s and 1740s were written for the Collegium Musicum and performed by him. Among those works are part of his Clavier-Übung and many of his concertos for violin and harpsichord.
While it is clear that no one in the town hall doubted his genius, there was constant tension between the Kantor, who considered himself the leader of church music in the city, and the faction of the city-state, which saw him as a schoolteacher and wanted to reduce the emphasis on music composition for both the church and the Thomasschule. Starting in 1730, the city-state faction would be headed by the theologian and philologist Johann August Ernesti. Professor at the University of Leipzig, Ernesti, together with a large part of the University faculty, advocated a change in the educational model that would be reoriented towards more enlightened disciplines such as natural sciences or philology. Bach's multiple prerogatives as Kantor of Santo Tomás clashed with this claim, which is why a bitter dispute soon arose between the two, which sought to relegate the importance of music to second place, and withdraw the Kantor any competence in educational matters. The level of the dispute reached such a point that Bach asked for help from the King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and Elector of Saxony, Augustus III, who intervened on his behalf. The fact that he involved the Elector of Saxony shocked the Leipzig corporation, which considered the matter a local issue and interpreted his attitude as that of someone with delusions of grandeur. Following the dispute, relations between Bach and his local patrons quickly deteriorated. Be that as it may, the council never followed through on its promise—made by Lange in the initial interview—to offer a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, although he and his family were offered a tax cut and a nice apartment in one of the wings of the Thomasschule, which they renovated at great expense in 1732.
In 1733, Bach composed the "Kyrie" and "Gloria" of the Mass in B minor. He presented the manuscript to Augustus III, in an ultimately successful attempt to persuade the monarch to appoint him Royal Court Composer. He later expanded the work into a full mass, adding a "Credo", "Sanctus" and "Agnus Dei"., whose music was drawn almost entirely from his own cantatas. Bach's appointment as court composer was part of his long-standing dispute for greater bargaining power with the Leipzig city council. Although the complete mass was probably never performed during the composer's lifetime, it is considered among the greatest choral works of all time. Between 1737 and 1739, Bach's former student Carl Gotthelf Gerlach took over as conductor of the Collegium Musicum.
In 1735, he began to prepare his first publication on organ music, which was printed as the third Clavier-Übung in 1739. From that year on he began compiling and composing the set of preludes and fugues for harpsichord that are would become his second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
From 1740 to 1748, he copied, transcribed, amplified, or programmed music in an older polyphonic style (stile antico) by, among others, Palestrina (BNB I/P/2), Kerll (BWV 241), Torri (BWV Anh. 30), Bassani (BWV 1081), Gasparini (Missa Canonica) and Caldara (BWV 1082). Bach's own style changed in the last decade of his life, showing a greater integration of polyphonic structures and canons and other elements of the stile antico. His fourth and final volume of Clavier-Übung, the Goldberg Variations, for two-manual harpsichord, contained nine canons and was published in 1741. During this period, Bach also continued to adopt music from contemporaries such as Händel (BNB I/K/2) and Stölzel (BWV 200), and made final revisions to many of his own earlier compositions, such as the St. Matthew Passions and St. John and the Eighteen Great Choral Preludes . He also programmed and adapted music by composers of a generation younger, which included Pergolesi (BWV 1083) and his own students as Goldberg (BNB I/G/2).
In 1747, Bach joined Lorenz Christoph Mizler's Correspondierende Societät der musicalischen Wissenschaften after the lengthy formal preparation necessary for admission to the Society. Mizler called his former professor one of his "guten Freunde und Gönner" ("good friends and patrons"). This is particularly notable because Mizler was a passionate representative of the German and Polish Enlightenment. of it had several effects. On the occasion of his entry into the Society, he composed the Canonical Variations on & # 34;Vom Himmel hoch da komm & # 39; ich her", BWV 769. In 1746, during the preparation of the composer's entry, Elias Gottlob Haussmann painted the famous portrait of Bach. A portrait was to be sent to each member of the Society. For this portrait, Bach dedicated the Canon triplex a 6 (BWV 1076) to the Society. The Society insisted on making an obituary for each member., so Mizler started the history of Bach biographies in the Musikalische Bibliothek.
In the same year, Bach visited the court of Frederick II the Great at Sanssouci Palace (Potsdam), where one of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, was in the monarch's service as court harpsichordist. The king performed a theme for him and challenged him to improvise a fugue based on it. The composer improvised a three-part fugue on the monarch's pianoforte, then a novelty, and later presented King Frederick with the Musical Offering, which consisted of fugues, canons, and a trio based on that Thema Regium. The six-part fugue from him includes a slightly altered theme, more suitable for lengthy elaboration. The Schübler Chorales, a set of six choral preludes transcribed from cantata movements that Bach had composed some two decades earlier, were published the following year. Around the same time, the set of five canonical variations that Bach had presented upon entering Mizler's society in 1747.
It has often been argued that other late works by the composer may have had a connection to Society-based music theory. Two large-scale compositions took center stage in Bach's later years. From about 1742 he wrote and revised the various canons and fugues of The Art of Fugue, which he continued to prepare for his publication until shortly before his death. Bach was unable to complete his final fugue. It consists of 18 complex fugues and canons based on a single theme and was published posthumously in 1751. After extracting a cantata, Gloria in excelsis Deo, BWV 191, from his 1733 Kyrie-Gloria Mass for the Dresden court in the mid-1740s, extended that setting to his Mass in B minor in recent years. years of his life. Stauffer describes it as "Bach's most universal ecclesiastical work. Consisting primarily of movements recycled from cantatas written over a period of thirty-five years, it allowed him to examine his vocal pieces one last time and select select movements for later revision and refinement." Although the complete mass was never performed during the life of the composer, it is considered one of the best choral works in history.
Death (1750)
In January 1749, the composer's daughter, Elisabeth Juliane Friederica, married his student Johann Christoph Altnickol. Bach's health worsened. On June 2, Heinrich von Brühl wrote to one of Leipzig's burgomasters asking that his music director, Gottlob Harrer, take over the posts of Thomaskantor and music director "in the eventual [... ] death of Herr Bach". He became progressively blinder, for which the British surgeon John Taylor operated on him during his visit to Leipzig in March and again in April 1750.
Bach's last completed work was a choral prelude for organ, entitled Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, BWV 668a, which he dedicated to his son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol from his deathbed. In the notes of the three staves of the final cadence, read according to the German denomination, are the initials "JSB".
On July 28, 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach died at the age of 65. A newspaper of the time reported that "the unhappy consequences of his very unsuccessful operation" were the cause of his death. Historians modern speculation that the cause of death was a stroke, complicated by pneumonia. His blindness is now believed to have been caused by untreated diabetes. According to some doctors, he suffered from blepharitis, an eye disease visible in portraits of his last years.
The composer's son Carl Philipp Emanuel saw to it that The Art of Fugue, though still unfinished, was published in 1751. Together with one of the composer's former students, Johann Friedrich Agricola's son also wrote the obituary ("Nekrolog"), which was published in Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, in 1754.
An inventory drawn up a few months after Bach's death shows that his estate included five harpsichords, two harpsichord-lutes, three violins, three violas, two cellos, one viola da gamba, one lute, one spinet, and fifty-two "holy books", including works by Martin Luther and Flavius Josephus. He was initially buried in the old St. John's Cemetery in Leipzig. His grave lay unidentified for nearly one hundred and fifty years until, in 1894, his coffin was finally found and moved to a crypt in St. John's Church. This building was destroyed during a bombing by the Allied side during World War II, so since 1950 the remains of Johann Sebastian Bach rest in a tomb in the church of Saint Thomas in Leipzig.
Work
Style
Bach's work can be divided into three large, well-differentiated periods, marked by the influences and assimilation of the styles of his time, the development, search and evolution of his personal style, and the professional positions he held.
The first period, that of learning and study, goes from 1700 to 1713, when he was already in Weimar; in it he wrote keyboard music and sacred cantatas, and formed his own style, which synthesized the entire tradition of preceding European classical music: classical polyphony established in the days of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina; the first Baroque by Girolamo Frescobaldi; French music of the XVIIth century; and that of German and Italian authors of his time such as Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Pachelbel and Antonio Vivaldi. From the latter he copied and adapted works from his youth: he did so in Weimar, when, thanks to the duke, he was able to version some of his works in his Concerts BWV 592-597 and BWV 972-987. Bach was also interested in contemporary composers, whom he studied and with many of whom he had a direct personal relationship. Among them were Jan Dismas Zelenka, Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann, Reinhard Keizer and Georg Friedrich Händel.
The second period, already fully mature, begins in 1713, in Weimar, and ends in 1740, already settled in Leipzig. Bach mastered the two main styles of his time, the French and the Italian (harmonic progressions) already fully tonal, melodic clarity and rhythmic dynamism, and, in fact, his production was greatly influenced by the Italian concerto and the French suite. in his works elements of both along with autochthonous German traits such as complex counterpoint and internal texture and choral, which he makes extensive use of in his religious works. The result of all this is an easily recognizable style, modern, but with clear roots in the past. In Leipzig and Köthen, already forged his personal style, he acquired a deep technical mastery. This is how he made extensive use of German technique and forms organ (plays, preludes, fugues, chorales), French harpsichord (suites, overtures) and Italian violin (concerts, sonatas, symphonies).
The last period of his music goes from the publication of Clavier-Übung III, in 1739, until his death in 1750. At this stage he composed the The Art of the Fugue. During the last years of his life—already dominated in Germany by the aesthetics of the Enlightenment—his work was considered old-fashioned, arid, difficult, and saturated with ornaments. In this period he wrote singularly dense instrumental works, as Beethoven would later do, and his personal style became more contrapuntal, with only a slight influence of the new gallant music or pre-classical style emerging at that time, which was characterized by its homophonic character and he hardly used the charged counterpoint that Bach used. Thus, on May 14, 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe, a music critic of the new Enlightenment mindset, sharply criticized his music in his Der Critischer Musikus: "his pieces are extremely difficult to play; for he demands that singers and instrumentalists do with their throats and instruments exactly what he can play on the harpsichord ».
He wrote in almost all genres and forms of his time, in a multitude of instrumental and vocal combinations. He culminated and produced notable works in all of them and even created new genres, such as the keyboard sonata and an instrument. The only exception was opera, a genre for which he did not compose, although the language and influence of opera seria of the century XVIII is present in all his vocal production. The influence of the opera is reflected, however, especially in the cantatas, passions and oratories. Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211 (known as the Café Cantata) from 1735 is practically a small opera without a stage performance, and its passions (such as the Matthew Passion, BWV 244, from 1727) contain many operatic elements.
After Bach, some musical forms, such as the passions, sacred cantatas, toccatas, and fugues, fell out of use for the great composers. After his death, music took a direction in which his work did not had a place; he is the final point regarding a way of understanding music that dates back to the Middle Ages, when polyphony was more important than harmony or timbre. But he was also an innovator and blazed trails for the music of the future: for example, he was the first grandmaster of the keyboard concerto. In fact, the fifth Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, BWV 1050 (1719), in which the keyboard takes on a solo role that it had never had until then, can be considered the first concerto written for the keyboard., which continued in the concert series BWV 1052-1065 (1735). In this sense, Bach played a leading role in the development of the genre.
Compositions
In 1950, Wolfgang Schmieder compiled a register or catalog of his works, which covers a total of 1,128 works. It is known by the initials "BWV", which stands for "Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis" or "Catalogue of Bach's Works". It is a numbering system used to identify the works of the German composer, which are grouped into two large sections.
First, vocal music (BWV 1-524), which includes cantatas (BWV 1-224); large-scale choral works (BWV 225-249), including passions (BWV 250-524), oratorios and chorales, and other sacred works.
Then instrumental music (BWV 525-1127), including works for organ (BWV 525-748), other works for keyboard (BWV 772-994), music for lute (BWV 995-1000), chamber music (BWV 1001-40), orchestral music (BWV 1041-71), and canons and fugues (BWV 1072-1126), as well as other types of instrumental music such as concertos (several for a single soloist and others with up to four soloists), sonatas, suites, overtures, preludes, fantasies, ricercares, variations and parades. In turn, within each of these two divisions, works are grouped by genre, and not by date of composition. For this reason, a lower BWV number does not indicate a chronologically early work. The first edition of the catalog it listed 1,080 surviving compositions undisputedly composed by Bach. There is also a catalog by Christoph Wolff, of lesser circulation.
Vocal music
Bach's surviving vocal music consists of 525 works, though only 482 of these are complete. Most of it is sacred—only 24 cantatas, four lieder, and one quodlibet are secular—and composed for the liturgy of the German Lutheran Church, in which music occupies an important place.
The vast majority of his vocal music was composed in Leipzig between the years 1723 and 1741, when Bach was Kantor and had among his duties composing cantatas, passions and motets for the five largest churches in Europe. the city, as well as for civil and religious acts, such as funerals.
The composer made little difference in style between his profane and religious works. An example of this is the use of the same texts for sacred and secular music, as happens with the music of the "Hosanna" of the Mass in B minor, BWV 232, which he had previously used in a cantata in homage to Augustus II of Poland on the occasion of one of his official visits to Leipzig, Es lebe der König, der Vater im Lande, BWV Anh. 11.
Instrumental music
227 pieces for organ, 189 pieces for harpsichord, 20 for solo instruments, 16 for chamber instruments, 30 orchestral pieces and 18 speculative pieces have been preserved from his instrumental music. In total, there are 494 complete instrumental works by him. They are composed for a wide range of instruments of their time, including some experimental ones, such as the lute-harpsichord, although especially significant are the organ, the harpsichord and the violin.
Of his instrumental music only the organ chorales are intended for use in the church. Much of it, especially the one for the keyboard, is of a didactic nature, frequently written for the learning of his son Wilhelm Friedemann. The didactics include The Well-Tempered Clavier and the series of English Suites and French Suites.
Keyboard
The organ and the harpsichord occupy a central role in Bach's work with more than 400 works dedicated to them, apart from being the support as a continuo bass for orchestral works, cantatas, masses, passions and some works camera (which he used to direct from the keyboard). The harpsichord plays an important role as a soloist in concertos for strings and one, two, three or four keyboards.
His contribution to musical literature, technical advances and interpretation, evolution and history of these two instruments was capital, since he exploited their capabilities to the limit, investigated and improved their tuning, resources and execution, and explored the 24 major keys and minors in The Well-Tempered Harpsichord, BWV 846-893. His didactic works for harpsichord include Inventions for two voices and Symphonies for three voices.
Among Bach's organ music, his choral preludes also stand out, approximately 170 of them. and in Köthen, he includes brief choral preludes, which he often used for educational purposes. In fact, after the title of the Orgelbüchlein it says that this “little book for organ, by means of which a beginner on the organ receives instructions to develop a choir in very different ways, and at the same time acquires ease in the study of pedaling, since the chorales contained in it treat pedaling as an obbligato (that is, essential, not optional)".
During his stay in Leipzig he compiled three choral anthologies for organ: the six Schübler Chorales, which are transcriptions of cantata movements, and eighteen chorales, which he revised between 1747 and 1749 and which were composed in previous eras. All of them include compositions for organ, such as variations, fugues, fantasias, trios and various choral preludes.
Rope
Bach was well acquainted with string instruments, the basis of the Baroque orchestra —whose music was usually written for two groups of violins, one group of violas, and a basso continuo that usually included cello and double bass. He wrote repertoire for solo violin (sonatas and partitas) and cello (suites), still fully valid today and of high technical difficulty. He wrote sonatas for a solo instrument, such as the viola da gamba, accompanied by harpsichord or continuo, as well as sonatas trio (two instruments and continuo).
Orchestral and chamber music
Bach wrote for individual instruments, duets, and small ensembles. The Musical Offering and The Art of the Fugue are late contrapuntal works that contain pieces for unspecified combinations of instruments. The art of the fugue is a work that corresponds very well with the contemporary conception of music and for this reason it has gone from being performed by baroque ensembles, today all with period instruments, to being a part of the repertoire of the main string quartets. It is also frequently performed on the piano, where the transcendent character of the composition can be appreciated.
Surviving works in concerto form include two Violin Concertos (BWV 1041 and BWV 1042) and one Concerto for Two Violins, BWV 1043, often referred to as Bach's "double" concerto. This concerto is unique in that the second violin part is more virtuosic than the first soloist, which means that great soloists have no objection to collaborating and perhaps has contributed to its popularity among the public.
Legacy
Offspring
Johann Sebastian Bach headed a large family with a total of twenty children, born between the ages of 23 and 57. He had seven children from his first marriage, of whom four survived, and thirteen from his second, of whom only five survived. His first wife was his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach (1684-1720), whom he married in 1707. His second wife was the singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke (1701-1760), with whom he married in 1721.
Five of the children devoted themselves to music, although one of them (Johann Gottfried Bernhard) abandoned his career and died prematurely at the age of 24. The other four went on to become renowned composers and performers in their own right: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel (of whom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart held a very high opinion), Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian, an epigone of the pre-classical era and one of the main influences being Mozart himself. Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian became more famous in their day than their father had been.
On the composer's death, his family divided his musical legacy. Wilhelm Friedemann lost or sold several works composed by his father to pay off debts. Instead, Carl Phillip Emanuel kept a good part of them.
Students
Bach had numerous pupils and students throughout his life; according to the scholar Hans Löffler, more than eighty. Among them is Johann Christoph Altnickol, his son-in-law, who in the last years of the maestro was a copyist of his works, as well as helping him write his latest compositions, as in the case of one of his last chorales for organ, the BWV 668, the last choral of the Leipzig Cycle BWV 651-668.
In his old age, when people referred to the Bach surname, they did so with his famous son Carl Phillip Emanuel in mind. In the generations after the composer, only a few composers and musicians knew of his work. They were basically his children and his students. Thanks to them it was preserved and not forgotten, while the rest of the world would not take many years to forget it after his death, in the middle of the century XVIII .
Lorenz Christoph Mizler, a former student, published a detailed obituary of Bach in 1754, four years after his death, in the Musikalische Bibliothek, a music journal. The obituary remains probably "the richest and most reliable" of the early documentary sources on the composer.After his death, Bach's reputation as a composer declined at first. His work was considered old-fashioned in comparison to the emerging gallant style.Initially, he was best remembered as a performer and teacher.
Posthumous Works
The lack of printed material prevented a greater diffusion of his work. Only very small print runs of a few instrumental works for organ and harpsichord were published.Many of his works were composed for specific events; therefore they performed them only once or twice and it did not occur to him that he might interest anyone to hear them again. That's why he didn't bother to publish them.
The only piece of which there were many handwritten copies was The Well-Tempered Clavier. Even Beethoven had a copy at eleven years old. Mozart knew him from having heard of his work, but he had never seen anything of his in print. Once he heard a choir singing it he was so impressed that he asked to see his sheet music, but it didn't exist.
In 1844, the first modern interpretation of the Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 was given. 199. In 1924, a cantata fragment was discovered, cataloged as Bekennen will ich seinen Namen, BWV 200. In 1985, a manuscript was found in Halle containing the BWV chorales 1090-1120, previously unpublished. In 2005, a manuscript containing a vocal aria Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' was found; ihn, BWV 1127.
In 2008, a modern reconstruction of his head and face was made in Berlin with computer modeling techniques, giving an image of fidelity very close to the real one. That same year a manuscript was found containing an organ choir unpublished to date.
Subsequent recognition
Late 18th century and early XIX, Bach was widely recognized for his keyboard work. Famous musicians such as Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann or Frédéric Chopin were among his most outstanding admirers and had great appreciation for the works they knew of Bach; they began writing in a more contrapuntal style after learning of his music. Mozart, having heard the motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225 during a visit to Leipzig, requested to examine what was there of the composer., exclaiming "At last something to learn from!" Beethoven, without knowing the entirety of his work, described him as the "Urvater der Harmonie" ("Original Father of Harmony"). "). He also defined it with a play on words in German: "Nicht Bach, sondern Meer sollte er heissen", whose translation is "It should not be called Bach (& #39;stream', in German), but Meer ('sea')".
Bach's reputation among the general public was enhanced in part by Johann Nikolaus Forkel's 1802 biography of the composer. Felix Mendelssohn was instrumental in restoring Bach's reputation with his performance of the St. Matthew Passion on March 11, 1829 in Berlin. This fact is noteworthy, since it was very old music for its time. Today, it is customary to perform works from other centuries, whereas in the Romantic period it was not customary. In 1850, the Bach Gesellschaft (Bach Society) was founded to promote the composer's works; in 1899, the Society published a complete edition of the composer's works with little editorial intervention. In 1838, the Suites for Orchestra were reinterpreted for the first time. In 1900, the Neue Bachgesellschaft, once the old society achieved its goal.
During the XX century, the process of recognizing both the musical and the pedagogical value of some of his works continued, perhaps most notably in the promotion of his Suites for Solo Cello by Pau Casals, the first major artist to record such suites. Another development has been the growth of the "authentic" or "historicist interpretation" movement. », which attempts to present the music as originally understood by the composer. Examples include playing keyboard works on a harpsichord instead of a modern piano, using small choirs or solo voices instead of large casts in the style favored by performers in the XIX and early XX, as well as the recordings of integral organ music on instruments from the Baroque period made by Marie-Claire Alain, who also dedicated herself to studying Bach's work in depth to interpret it with the baroque standards of her time.
His music influenced many composers of the 20th century, including Astor Piazzolla, who used counterpoint and fuga, or Brian Wilson (of The Beach Boys), who was inspired by Bach's choral music to compose Pet Sounds (1966), an album titled baroque pop.
According to Christoph Wolff, "Bach now assumes a place in music comparable to that of Shakespeare in literature or Raphael and Michelangelo (in Germany also Dürer) in the fine arts."
In popular culture
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the best-known composers of Baroque music. His likeness has been used in a variety of artistic and other formats, including posters, cartoons, and postcards. Postage stamps and other philatelic and numismatic documents have been issued in numerous countries around the world, in many cases to commemorate the anniversaries of his birth and death. Commemorative coins, medals, and medallions have also been minted.
It also appears on various merchandising items, such as watches, objects to smoke (such as pipes, cigar bands or tobacco packs), cups and jugs, toy dolls, or candies and chocolates.
In Germany, during the 20th century, many streets were named after him. In addition, commemorative statues and plaques have been erected in various countries around the world, including Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Busts and statuettes have also been made with his image and appears in the stained glass windows of several churches.
His music has been included three times—more than any other composer—on the Voyager Gold Record, a phonograph recording containing a comprehensive set of images, common sounds, languages, and music from Earth, sent into space exterior with the Voyager space probes.
The asteroid (1814) Bach, discovered on October 9, 1931 by Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth, is named after the composer. Likewise, the impact crater on the planet Mercury called "Bach crater" also bears his Name. In Antarctica, there is the Bach Ice Shelf, an ice shelf named after him.
As a religious music author, his name appears among the celebrations in the Lutheran Calendar of Saints and shares a date with Georg Friedrich Händel and Heinrich Schütz. In addition, he is honored with a holiday from the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Saints. He is celebrated on July 28 and shares it with Händel and Henry Purcell. Bach and Handel are also commemorated in the calendar of saints prepared by the Order of Saint Luke for use by the United Methodist Church.
In 1985, the 300th anniversary of his birth, the first complete record of all the sacred cantatas was published, conducted by Helmuth Rilling. The edition consisted of 69 CDs and was made by the German record label Hänssler. In 1989, the cycle begun in 1971 of the recording of cantatas by Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt was completed and it was released on 60 CDs from the Teldec record label. This recording was revolutionary, since the historical conception of interpretation was applied and it was changed forever. In 2000, the 250th anniversary of his death was celebrated and three record labels (Brilliant, Hänssler and Teldec) published commemorative editions with all recorded music by the German composer, on 155, 172 and 160 CDs, respectively. In addition, during that year innumerable events of all kinds dedicated to the study and dissemination of the artist and his work were held, especially in his native Germany.
The composer has been shown biographically on numerous occasions in the cinema, on stage and on television, such as: Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), by Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Johann Sebastian Bachs vergebliche Reise in den Ruhm (1980) by Victor Vicas, Johann Sebastian Bach (1983) by Lothar Bellag, Ein Denkmal für Johann Sebastian (1984) by Peter Milinski, My Name Is Bach (2003) by Dominique de Rivaz and The Silence Before Bach (2007) by Pere Portabella. In addition, his music has been used in more than 1,500 films and television shows.