Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in the small Thuringian town of Eisenach, into a sprawling family that had supplied Germany with professional musicians for more than a century.His father Johann Ambrosius, the town's director of music, taught him the violin and the rudiments of harmony, and from his earliest years the boy was surrounded by the sound of organs, trumpets, and chorales.

Tragedy struck before he was ten, when both parents died within a year of each other, and he was taken in by his older brother Johann Christoph, an organist who introduced him to the keyboard literature of the age.The first turning point came in 1705, when at the age of twenty Bach walked more than two hundred and fifty miles on foot from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear the legendary organist Dietrich Buxtehude play.

He stayed four months instead of the four weeks he had been granted, returning with a vastly expanded harmonic imagination and a reputation for stubborn independence.Positions at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, and finally the Weimar court followed, where he composed some of his greatest organ works and mastered the Italian concerto style through his study of Vivaldi.

A move to Cöthen in 1717 gave him a prince who adored chamber music, and under that patronage he produced the Brandenburg Concertos, the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the solo violin and cello suites.His second turning point came in 1723, when he accepted the demanding post of cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, responsible for the music of four city churches.

There, for nearly three decades, he produced cantata after cantata for the Lutheran liturgical year, along with the monumental St.Matthew Passion, the Mass in B minor, and, near the end, the Goldberg Variations and the Musical Offering.

His final years were marked by failing eyesight and a catastrophic eye operation by a traveling English surgeon that left him blind and broken, and he died in Leipzig in 1750.For nearly eighty years his music slipped out of fashion, until Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 revival of the St.

Matthew Passion restored him to the center of Western music, where he has remained ever since as the foundation upon which Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin all built.

“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”

“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”