Johann Caspar Vogler

Johann Caspar Vogler (23 May 1696 – 3 June 1763) was a German organist and composer taught by Johann Sebastian Bach. Biography He was born in Hausen, near Arnstadt; from 1706 he studied with Johann Sebastian Bach, who was organist there between 1703 and 1707. He also taught, in Rudolstadt, by P. H. Erlebach and Nicolaus Vetter. He moved to Weimar to study further with Bach from 1710 to 1715, during which time he copied Jacques Boyvin’s two livres d’orgue. He was appointed organist at Stadtilm in 1715, leaving in May 1721 to take up Bach’s former post of organist to the Weimar court. He failed in two applications in 1729 for organ posts at the Nikolaikirche, Leipzig, and Sts Peter und Paul, Görlitz, which were filled by Bach pupils Johann Schneider and David Nicolai. The Leipzig judges remarked that he ‘played too fast and confused the congregation’; this did not deter him from boasting of his ‘swiftness of hand and feet’ in the second application. He was selected for the post of organist of the Marktkirche in Hanover in 1735, but forbidden from leaving Weimar by Duke Ernst August, the same prohibition that Duke Wilhelm Ernst had imposed years before on Bach. Nevertheless, he became