Johann Sebastian Bach

Biography

[edit] Childhood (1685-1703)

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, a town of some 6,000 residents in the German-speaking electorate of secular music and participation in church music. His uncles were all professional musicians, whose posts ranged from church organists and court chamber musicians to composers. Bach was proud of his family's musical achievements, and around 1735 he drafted a geneaology, "Origin of the musical Bach family",[1] tracing the history of generations of 53 musical Bachs, beginning with Veit (Vitus) Bach (d. 1619) "a white-bread baker in Hungary" who was forced to flee that country because he was a Lutheran and who "found the greatest pleasure in a little Cittern". His son Johannes (d. 1626) became a piper, his son Christoph (1613-61) was an instrumentalist, and his twin son was JS Bach's father.

The house in Eisenach where Bach is said to have been bornBach's mother died in 1694, and his father died the following year. The nine-year-old orphan moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at nearby Ohrdruf. There he copied, studied and performed music, and apparently received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord. He exposed him to the work of the great South German composers of the day--such as Pachelbel and Johann Jakob Froberger--and possibly to the music of North German composers, and of Frenchmen such as Lully, Louis Marchand, Marin Marais, and the Italian clavierist Girolamo Frescobaldi. The young Bach probably witnessed and assisted in the maintenance of the organ. Bach's obituary indicates that he copied music out of Johann Christoph's scores, but his brother had apparenty forbidden him to do so, possibly because scores were valuable and private commodities at the time.

At the age of 14, Bach, along with his older school friend, Georg Erdmann, was awarded a choral scholarship to study at the prestigious St Michael's School in Lьneburg, not far from the northern seaport of Hamburg, the largest city in Germany.[2] This involved a long journey with his friend, probably undertaken partly on foot and partly by coach. His two years there appear to have been critical in exposing him to a wider palette of European culture than he would have experienced in Thuringia. In addition to singing in the a cappella choir, it is likely that he played the School's three-manual organ and its harpsichords. He probably learned French and Italian, and received a thorough grounding in theology, Latin, history, geography and physics. He would have come into contact with sons of noblemen from northern Germany sent to the highly selective school to prepare for careers in diplomacy, government and the military. It is likely that he had significant contact with organists in Lьneburg, in particular Georg Bцhm, and that he visited several of them in Hamburg, such as Reincken and Bruhns. Through these musicians, he probably gained access to the largest and finest instruments he had played thus far. It is likely that during this stage, he became acquainted with the music of the North German tradition, especially the work of Dieterich Buxtehude, and with music manuscripts and treatises on music theory that were in the possession of these musicians.

[edit] Arnstadt to Weimar (1703-08)

Bach (?) as a young manIn January 1703, shortly after graduating, Bach took up a post as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar, a large town in Thuringia. His role there is unclear, but appears to have included menial, non-musical duties. During his seven-month tenure at Weimar, his reputation as a keyboard player spread. He was invited to inspect and give the inaugural recital on the new organ at St Boniface's Church in Arnstadt. The Bach family had close connections with this oldest town in Thuringia, about 180 km to the southwest of Weimar at the edge of the great forest. In August 1703, he accepted the post of organist at that church, with light duties, a relatively generous salary, and a fine new organ tuned to a modern system that allowed a wide range of keys to be used. At this time, Bach was embarking on the serious composition of organ preludes; these works, in the North German tradition of virtuosic, improvisatory preludes, already showed tight motivic control (where a single, short music idea is explored cogently throughout a movement). However, in these works the composer had yet to fully develop his powers large-scale organisation and his contrapuntal technique (where two or more melodies interact simultaneously). Strong family connections and a musically enthusiastic employer failed to prevent tension between the young organist and the authorities after several years in the post. He was apparently dissatisfied with the standard of singers in the choir; more seriously, there was his unauthorised absence from Arnstadt for several months in 1705-06, when he visited the great master Buxtehude and his Abendmusik in the northern city of LÑŒbeck. This well-known incident in Bach's life involved his walking some 400 km each way to spend time with the man he probably regarded as the father-figure of German organists. The trip reinforced Buxtehude's style as a foundation for Bach's earlier works, and that he overstayed his planned visit by several months suggests that his time with the old man was of great value to his art.

St Boniface's Church in ArnstadtDespite his comfortable position in Arnstadt, by 1706 Bach appeared to have realised that he needed to escape from the family milieu and move on to further his career. He was offered a more lucrative post as organist at St Blasius's in MÑŒhlhausen, a large and important city to the north. The following year, he took up this senior post with significantly improved pay and conditions, including a good choir. Four months after arriving at MÑŒhlhausen, he married his second cousin from Arnstadt, Maria Barbara Bach.[3] They had seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Two of them--Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach--became important composers in the ornate rococo style that followed the baroque.

The church and city government at MÑŒhlhausen must have been proud of their new musical director. They readily agreed to his plan for an expensive renovation of the organ at St Blasius's, and were so delighted at the elaborate, festive cantata he wrote for the inauguration of the new council in 1708--God is my king BWV 71, clearly in the style of Buxtehude--that they paid handsomely