Biography of Bach (1685-1750)
Bach almost had
to be a musician—everyone else in his family was and many relatives to him
still are. He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany. His father taught him to
play the violin. Both of Johann’s parents died before he was ten, and he went
to live with his older brother. By age fifteen, he was supporting himself.
Bach
spent most of his life as an organist, choir director, orchestra conductor, and
composer, for either a church or court, or both at once. After some smaller
jobs, he became the main musician for the Duke of Weimar, in Germany. This
meant doing all the work of a church musician plus composing instrumental music
for palace concerts. As a church musician, Bach had to write all his own music
for every Sunday, until his collection became large enough that he could
occasionally reuse it. The reason why Bach (and other composers by his time)
composed his own music for all the church events is that otherwise, he would
have had to copy another composer’s music by hand. A less interesting and, to a
genius like Bach, almost as much effort as composing himself.
When Bach wanted
to leave the Duke for a job in Cöthen, the Duke threw him in jail. This
happened in the days before labor unions. After his release, he started working
for the court of the prince in Cöthen, who favored instrumental music over
fancy church music. As a result, Bach wrote more instrumental music than church
music during his time in Cöthen.
The 23-year-old
Prince Leopold was himself a highly-gifted musician who made his court an
important musical center. Besides recognizing Bach's artistic genius, the
Prince formed a warm personal attachment to the Bach family, even being
godfather to one of Bach's children. Since the Cöthen court was in a Calvinist
region of Germany, music was barred from local churches. Bach's work therefore
was almost exclusively for Prince Leopold's household band - 18 musicians of
the highest caliber - and was devoted to instrumental music. During his stay in
Cöthen Bach composed concertos, inventions, sonatas, suites, including the
Brandenburgs and the Well-Tempered Clavier. As a side-note, I cannot help
mentioning that Bach only named the first Volume of 24 preludes and fugues
Well-Tempered Klavier (or rather "Das Wohl Temperierte Clavier"). The
second volume was only named by Bach as "24 preludes and fugues".
This period would
have been the happiest of Bach's life had it not been for the untimely
death of Maria Barbara in 1720. Bach lost a wife in the same year that Leopold
found his, and both events proved unhappy occurrences for Bach. Leopold's new
bride had no appreciation of music and, smitten with her, the prince neglected,
and then finally disbanded his fine orchestra. In 1723, nearly 40 years old,
remarried to professional singer Anna Magdalena and with a growing family, Bach
started looking for another job.
He would spend
the longest portion of his career, the last 27 years of his life, in Leipzig.
Ironically, the Bach's illustrious present-day reputation is so identified with
Leipzig; yet back in 1723, in appointing Bach, the town felt it had been
unsuccessful in hiring the best candidate and had to "settle for a
mediocre one". For his part, Bach accepted the post with hesitation,
feeling that the title of cantor was a significant step down from that of
capellmeister. Nevertheless, the job at Leipzig was considered a very prestigious
one, because of the caliber of men who had filled the position, and because of
Leipzig's long-standing reputation as a commercial center and a bastion of
learning and religion.
Bach had twenty
children with two different wives. Only nine children survived to see
adulthood. His first wife, Maria Barbara, was also his cousin. After she died,
he married his second wife, Anna Magdalena. She was a singer and keyboard
player, and helped Bach with his work. Many of the children also were trained
to help Bach copy out music parts for Sunday mornings.
In later life,
Bach became blind, and his compositions lost their popularity.
He died of a stroke in 1750, and his music would remain unappreciated
for many decades. However, Felix Mendelssohn's celebrated performance
of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829 was important in
putting Bach's name back on the musical map, and his popularity has only
increased since.
Bach's music
Bach's music
reconciles these two aspects; the horizontal (melodic) and the vertical
(harmonic) in complete balance. While his music often has the linear complexity
of Renaissance polyphony, it also has a sure and inevitable harmonic
architecture that always gives the music a sense of solid form and direction.
Bach's music also synthesizes the prevailing French and Italian styles that
dominated the Baroque era. The Italian style, with its emphasis on operatic
singing and string playing, tends to be more rhythmically straight forward,
emotionally extroverted, and prone to the use of repeating harmonic sequences.
French music, on the other hand, grows out of a love for wind instruments and
dancing, and the emotional quality is often subtle and less overt.
Bach's
cosmopolitan style is a result of the fact that he travelled very little,
although in his youth he did famously walk 200 miles to hear Buxtehude play the
organ. Most of Bach's working life was spent as a Kapellmeister of various
important churches, where he was responsible for the music performed at weekly
Sunday services. However, it could have ended as early as when he was 17 years
old as he once, when the church was closed, invited a girl up to the organ,
which in these days, was a strictly forbidden place for a woman to be. It is
told that they were caught "making out" by the holy father himself
and the event was reported to a higher instance. If it had not been for his
known extrem capabilities of composing and his virtuosic abilities on the organ,
he would have been forced to change his direction of life and we would never
have known his beautiful art. Maybe an act of God after all?
Bach's devout
Lutheran faith pervades all his works and one cannot fully understand him
without knowing many of the over two hundred sacred cantatas he wrote for
Sunday services (such as Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet; and Jesu, Joy of Man's
Desiring from "Herz Und Mund Und Tat Und Leben"), or the great masses
and passions, such as the Mass in b and the St. Matthew Passion, written for
Easter and other high holy days. Here one can discover the elaborate use of
musical figures employed to express text, which also pervade the purely
instrumental music.
Throughout his
life, Bach seemed to be driven to systematically explore all the possibilities
of a given style or genre. In his organized and numerologically based way there
are six Brandenburg Concerti - the essence of the Italian style as opposed to
the four Orchestral Suites, (including the Allegro from the Brandeburg Concerto
No.1; the Adagio from No.2, and the Allegro from No.5), six of each of the
keyboard suites mentioned above, six cello suites, six solo violin works, etc.
Each of the pieces in these collections explores or emphasizes another
possibility within the type. A veritable bible for musicians, the two books of
The Well-Tempered Klavier (includes the Prelude and Fugue No.1 in C and Prelude
and Fugue No.17 in Ab from Book 1, and the Prelude and Fugue No.13 in F# from
Book 2) twice present preludes and fugues of every imaginable type in every
key. The miracle of these pieces is that the overwhelming intellectual mastery
is always in the service of an even higher emotional character and spirit,
explored with unending variety. At the end of his life Bach was still exploring
the ultimate possibilities of counterpoint in The Art of the Fugue (contains
Contrapunctus 12 rectus and Contrapunctus 12 inversus) and The Musical
Offering.
Bach left supreme
works in every genre of his age except opera. Ironically this great
conservative who really did nothing new, but only better and more completely,
is for many musicians the true beginning of modern music. In many works (for
example in the chromatic variations of the Goldberg Variations) we can see the
the future's harmonic possibilities.
- Robert Ståhlbrand
Recordings
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Relevant Websites
Bach Central - A Johann
Sebastian Bach MIDI page
Cello Suites
Cello Suite no.1 - BWV 1007
I. Prelude (MP3, 2:41, Masecki, M.)
II. Allemande (MP3, 2:25, Masecki, M.)
III. Courante (MP3, 2:43, Masecki, M.)
IV. Sarabande (MP3, 3:31, Masecki, M.)
V. Menuet (MP3, 3:50, Masecki, M.)
VI. Gigue (MP3, 1:27, Masecki, M.)
Chorale Preludes
Chorale Preludes (transcribed by Ferrucio Busoni)
Ferrucio Busoni
transcribed a number of the organ chorale preludes from the Clavier-Übung III for
piano. These marvellous and idiomatic transcriptions are favourites of every
virtuoso pianist.
Nun freut euch, lieben Christen. (MP3, 1:51, Debbie Hu, Pandora Records)
Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland (MP3, 5:50, Kingma, J.) (New
recording)
Bach - Clavier-Übung III
Clavier-Übung III is the third installment
of Johann Sebastian Bach's ambitious series of Clavier-Übungen. Unlike the
other three volumes, which contain music for the harpsichord (the 6
Partitas in Volume I, the Italian Concerto and the Ouverture in French Style in
Volume II, and the Goldberg Variations in Volume IV), Clavier-Übung III is
written for the organ.
This heterogenous collection consists of
multiple settings of the German Kyrie and Gloria, BWV 669-677, the Four Duets
for organ manualiter, BWV 802-805, and the imposing prelude and fugue BWV 552
which is also known as St. Anne's prelude and fugue. The collection of Chorale
Preludes is often referred to as the German Organ Mass.
Four duets
Duetto Nr. 1 in E minor, BWV 802 (MP3, 2:34, Breemer, C.)
Duetto Nr. 2 in F major, BWV 803 (MP3, 3:58, Breemer, C.)
Duetto Nr. 3 in G major, BWV 804 (MP3, 2:46, Breemer, C.)
Duetto Nr. 4 in A minor, BWV 805 (MP3, 2:49, Breemer, C.)
Chorale Preludes
BWV672 - Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit (MP3, 1:09, Breemer, C.)
BWV673 - Christe, aller Welt Trost (MP3, 1:41, Breemer, C.)
BWV674 - Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist (MP3, 1:49, Breemer, C.)
BWV683 - Vater unser im Himmelreich (MP3, 1:32, Breemer, C.)
BWV685 - Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam (MP3, 1:32, Breemer, C.)
Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of the Fugue) BWV1080
"Die Kunst
der Fuge", BWV 1080, is an unfinished work by Johann Sebastian Bach,
composed in 1748-1750 and published in 1751, a year after his death. In writing
the fourteen fugues and four canons contained in this work Bach demonstrated
his complete mastery of the most complex musical counterpoint, achieving
particularly elaborate and ingenious combinations of relatively simple themes
in pieces which attain the highest musicality.
When Bach died in
1750, almost blind, he was still working on the mighty triple fugue which
is now known as Contrapunctus 14. As legend has it, he was dictating the notes
to his pupil and son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol. The fugue breaks off,
touchingly, shortly after introducing the motto theme B-A-C-H. At that location
in the autograph manuscript, Carl Philipp Emmanuel wrote a comment
stating that 'the composer had died over this fugue, where the name BACH is
brought in as a countersubject'. When Bach's sons submitted the work for
publication, they apologised for the unfinished fugue and substituted the organ
chorale "Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein" in place of it. Later
editions removed this irrelevant chorale and gave the unfinished fugue its
rightful place as the technical and emotional culmination of the
cycle.
The recordings
presented here use the Henle Urtext edtion, a revised edition by the renowned
Bach scholar Davitt Moroney, who also completed the unfinished fugue and
recorded a benchmark performance of Die Kunst der Fuge on the
harpsichord. The order of the fugues and canons, which has long been
unclear, follows the ordering from this edition.
Contrapunctus 1 (MP3, 3:35, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 2 (MP3, 3:01, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 3 (MP3, 3:12, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 4 (MP3, 5:55, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 5 (MP3, 3:38, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 6 (MP3, 4:17, Breemer,
C.) [per Diminutionem] in Stylo Francese
Contrapunctus 7 (MP3, 4:25, Breemer,
C.) per Augmentationem et Diminutionem
Contrapunctus 8 (MP3, 5:20, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 9 (MP3, 3:11, Breemer,
C.) alla Duodecima
Contrapunctus 10 (MP3, 5:38, Breemer,
C.) alla Decima
Contrapunctus 11 (MP3, 7:49, Breemer,
C.)
Contrapunctus 12a (MP3, 3:17, Breemer,
C.) [rectus]
Contrapunctus 12b (MP3, 3:23, Breemer,
C.) [inversus]
Contrapunctus 13a (MP3, 2:22, Breemer,
C.) [rectus]
Contrapunctus 13b (MP3, 2:23, Breemer,
C.) [inversus]
Contrapunctus 14 (MP3, 11:50, Breemer,
C.) (Completed by Davitt Moroney)
Canon 1 (MP3, 4:29, Breemer,
C.) In Hypodiapason (Canon alla Ottava)
Preludes, Fantasias and Fugues
Prelude and Fughetta in D minor, BWV889 (MP3, 3:15, Breemer, C.)
Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV904 (MP3, 10:52, Breemer, C.)
Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV905 (MP3, 5:11, Breemer, C.)
5 Kleine Praeludien BWV939-943 (MP3, 4:36, Breemer, C.)
Goldberg variations, BWV.988
Aria Variata BVW.989
Variation no.1 (MP3, 7:06, Kinsella, B.)
Variation no.2 (MP3, 3:50, Kinsella, B.)
Variation no.3 (MP3, 2:20, Kinsella, B.)
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