Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Wikipedia Born: 31 March 1685, Eisenach, Germany Died: 28 July 1750, Leipzig, Germany Education: St. Michael's School (1699–1701) Children: Johann Christian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Christiana Benedicta Louise Bach, Christiana Dorothea Bach, Maria Sophia Bach, more Spouse: Anna Magdalena Bach (m. 1721–1750), Maria Barbara Bach (m. 1707–1720) Influenced by: Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Pachelbel, Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Kaspar Kerll
He was a member of a remarkable family of musicians who were proud of their achievements, and about 1735 he drafted a genealogy, Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie (“Origin of the Musical Bach Family”), in which he traced his ancestry back to his great-great-grandfather Veit Bach, a Lutheran baker (or miller) who late in the 16th century was driven from Hungary to Wechmar in Thuringia, a historic region of Germany, by religious persecution and died in 1619. There were Bachs in the area before then, and it may be that, when Veit moved to Wechmar, he was returning to his birthplace. He used to take his cittern to the mill and play it while the mill was grinding. Johann Sebastian remarked, “A pretty noise they must have made together! However, he learnt to keep time, and this apparently was the beginning of music in our family.”
Unfinished as it was, The Art of the Fugue was published in 1751. It attracted little attention and was reissued in 1752 with a laudatory preface by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, a well-known Berlin musician who later became director of the royal lottery. In spite of Marpurg and of some appreciative remarks by Johann Mattheson, the influential Hamburg critic and composer, only about 30 copies had been sold by 1756, when Emanuel Bach offered the plates for sale. As far as is known, they were sold for scrap.
Emanuel Bach and the organist-composer Johann Friedrich Agricola (a pupil of Sebastian’s) wrote an obituary; Mizler added a few closing words and published the result in the journal of his society (1754). There is an English translation of it in The Bach Reader. Though incomplete and inaccurate, the obituary is of very great importance as a firsthand source of information.
Bach appears to have been a good husband and father. Indeed, he was the father of 20 children, only 10 of whom survived to maturity. There is amusing evidence of a certain thriftiness—a necessary virtue, for he was never more than moderately well off and he delighted in hospitality. Living as he did at a time when music was beginning to be regarded as no occupation for a gentleman, he occasionally had to stand up for his rights both as a man and as a musician; he was then obstinate in the extreme. But no sympathetic employer had any trouble with Bach, and with his professional brethren he was modest and friendly. He was also a good teacher and from his Mühlhausen days onward was never without pupils.
