Johann Sebastian Bach — Master of the Baroque
German composer and organist (1685-1750) whose sacred and instrumental works — the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the St Matthew Passion, and the Mass in B minor — synthesized and completed the Baroque style. Largely considered old-fashioned at his death, his music was revived in the 19th century and became foundational to Western concert life.
Events
Born into the Bach Musical Dynasty
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, the youngest of eight children of Johann Ambrosius Bach, the town music director. The Bach family had supplied central German towns and courts with musicians for generations, and the orphaned Sebastian was raised from age ten by his elder brother Johann Christoph in Ohrdruf, who taught him keyboard.
Location: Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany
First Organist Posts at Arnstadt and Muhlhausen
Bach took his first major post as organist of St Boniface Church in Arnstadt at eighteen, followed by a move to Muhlhausen in 1707. In Arnstadt his stylistically adventurous chorale improvisations drew complaints from church authorities, and he once obtained an extended leave to walk 400 km (250 mi) to hear Buxtehude play in Lubeck — early signs of the artistic independence that marked his career.
Location: Arnstadt, Germany
The Weimar Years
Bach joined the Weimar court as organist, rising to concertmaster, and produced much of his major organ music and early cantatas over nine years. In 1717 his insistence on resigning to take the Coethen post led Duke Wilhelm Ernst to jail him for nearly a month for "too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal." He also married his first wife Maria Barbara in 1707; she bore him seven children before her sudden death in 1720.
Location: Weimar, Germany
Kapellmeister at Coethen — The Secular Masterpieces
At the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Coethen, where Lutheran liturgical music was not required, Bach concentrated on instrumental composition: the six Brandenburg Concertos (dedicated March 1721), the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (1722), and sonatas and suites for violin and cello. The Brandenburgs, ignored by their dedicatee, survive as the era's defining concerto grosso collection.
Location: Coethen, Germany
Remarriage and the Move to Leipzig
Widowed with four young children, Bach married the singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke in December 1721; she bore thirteen more children and became a copyist of his manuscripts. When Prince Leopold's household turned away from music after his remarriage, Bach sought the cantorship of Leipzig's St Thomas School — a demotion in court rank taken for stability and the city's university and church resources.
Location: Coethen, Germany
Thomaskantor of Leipzig
Bach was installed as Thomaskantor after Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner, the council's preferred candidates, declined the post. He remained twenty-seven years, supplying cantatas, passions, and motets for Leipzig's principal churches while in chronic conflict with the town council and the university over authority, salary, and musical standards — a documented dimension of his tenure rather than a footnote.
Location: Leipzig, Germany
The St Matthew Passion
The St Matthew Passion, a double-chorus setting of the Gospel narrative, was first performed at St Thomas Church on Good Friday 1727 (with later revisions). It stands among the largest and most elaborate sacred works of the Baroque, representing the annual passion-cycle duty of his Leipzig office at its fullest ambition.
Location: Leipzig, Germany
The Musical Offering and the King's Theme
Bach visited the court of Frederick II of Prussia, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel served, and improvised on a theme supplied by the king. He later elaborated the theme into the Musical Offering, a collection of canons and fugues inscribed to Frederick. The meeting, between the aging master of strict counterpoint and the fashionable galant court, has been read as a symbolic passing of musical epochs.
Location: Potsdam, Prussia
The Mass in B minor
Bach assembled the full Mass in B minor near the end of his life, expanding the 1733 Kyrie-Gloria missa he had presented to the Saxon elector with a complete ordinary setting — unusual for a Lutheran composer and partly an act of career and confessional diplomacy with the Catholic court. The work, mostly unperformed in his lifetime, became one of the most celebrated choral compositions in Western music.
Location: Leipzig, Germany
Failed Eye Surgery and Death
In early 1750 Bach underwent cataract surgery performed by the itinerant English oculist John Taylor — the same operator who had earlier operated on Handel — and remained nearly blind afterward, suffering a stroke before dying on July 28 at age 65. At his death his music was regarded by many contemporaries as learned but old-fashioned in an age turning toward lighter galant styles.
Location: Leipzig, Germany
The Mendelssohn Revival
Twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of the St Matthew Passion since Bach's lifetime, in a Berlin concert that ignited the 19th-century Bach revival. The revival, driven by the Bach-Gesellschaft's complete edition (begun 1850) and a growing nationalism that claimed Bach as a German monument, transformed a working church musician into the canonized foundation of Western concert music.
Location: Berlin, Germany