Portrait: Johann Sebastian Bach, a German composer and musician
Wednesday, 21 June 2023 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: Editorial / RedaktionCategory/Kategorie: Portrait Reading Time: 5 minutes Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schübler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician, Johann Ambrosia, in Eisenach. After being orphaned at the age of 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical education in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723, he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St Thomas’s) in Leipzig. There he composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university’s student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726, he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened during some of his earlier positions, he had difficult relations with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by his sovereign, Augustus III of Poland, in 1736. In the last decades of his life, he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.
Throughout the 18th century, Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some major Bach biographies, and by the end of that century all of his known music had been printed. Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals (and later also websites) exclusively devoted to him, and other publications such as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV, a numbered catalogue of his works) and new critical editions of his compositions. His music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including the Air on the G String and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring“, and of recordings, such as three different box sets with complete performances of the composer’s oeuvre marking the 250th anniversary of his death.
Read more on Bach in Thuringia, Wikipedia Bach House and Wikipedia Johann Sebastian Bach (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.
Recommended posts:
- Portrait: Johannes Brahms, composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period
- Portrait: Musician and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Portrait: Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most important composers and pianists
- Portrait: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, national poet and naturalist
- Portrait: Richard Wagner, composer, theatre director, polemicist, conductor
- Portrait: Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman
- Portrait: Josephus
- Portrait: Albert Schweitzer, a French-German theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician
- Portrait: Johann Jacob Schweppe
- Portrait: Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and Academic skeptic
- Portrait: Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright
- Portrait: Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism
- Portrait: Caspar David Friedrich, a German Romantic landscape painter
- Portrait: Hans and Sophie Scholl
- Portrait: Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher