Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms,

Early life#

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Eisenach, in present-day Germany, on 21 March 1685 O.S. He was the eighth and youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach, director of the town musicians, and Maria Elisabeth , daughter of a town councillor. The Bach family, traditionally traced to the patriarch Vitus “Veit” Bach (), produced three to four generations of musicians in the Thuringia region, whose insular cultural climate fostered conservative musicianship, with external influences arriving mainly via the courts. Nothing is definitively known about Bach’s early years before 1693; his musical education in particular is highly conjectural. His family, particularly the uncles, were all professional musicians who worked as church organists, court chamber musicians, and composers. Bach’s father presumably taught him the violin, Ambrosius’ own primary instrument, along with basic music theory principles. One uncle, Johann Christoph Bach (1645–1693), may have introduced him to the organ, though this is debated since the uncle may not have been close to Bach’s immediate family. Bach’s mother died in 1694, and his father eight months later in February 1695. The 10-year-old Bach moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach (1671–1721), the organist at St. Michael’s Church in Ohrdruf, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. There he studied, performed, and copied music, including his brother’s, despite being forbidden to do so because scores were so valuable and private and ledger paper was costly. He also received instruction on the clavichord from his brother. Johann Christoph exposed him to the works of composers of the day, including South Germans such as Johann Caspar Kerll, Johann Jakob Froberger, and Johann Pachelbel (under whom Johann Christoph had studied); North Germans such as Georg Böhm, Johann Reincken and Friedrich Nicolaus Bruhns from Hamburg, and Dieterich Buxtehude; Frenchmen such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis Marchand, and Marin Marais; and the Italian Girolamo Frescobaldi. He learned theology, Latin, and Greek at the local Gymnasium (Germany) . By 3 April 1700 Bach had begun studies at St Michael’s School in Lüneburg, two weeks’ travel north of Ohrdruf. His journey was probably undertaken mostly on foot. He also came into contact with sons of aristocrats from northern Germany who had been sent to the nearby Ritter-Academie to prepare for careers in other disciplines.

Marriages and children#

Four months after arriving at Mühlhausen in 1707, Bach married his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach. Later that year their first child, Catharina Dorothea, was born, and Maria Barbara’s elder, unmarried sister joined them, remaining to help run the household until she died in 1729. Three sons were also born: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard. All became musicians, and the first two composers. Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara had seven children. Their twins born in 1713 died within a year, and their last son, Leopold, also died within a year of his birth. On 7 July 1720, while Bach was in Carlsbad with Prince Leopold, Maria Barbara died suddenly. The next year, he met Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a gifted soprano 16 years his junior, while she was performing at the court in Köthen; they married on 3 December 1721. Together they had 13 children, six of whom survived into adulthood: Gottfried Heinrich; Elisabeth Juliane Friederica (1726–1781); Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, who both became musicians; Johanna Carolina (1737–1781); and Regina Susanna (1742–1809).

Weimar, Arnstadt, and Mühlhausen (1703–1708)#

In January 1703, shortly after graduating from St. Michael’s in 1702 and being turned down for the post of organist at Sangerhausen, Bach was appointed court musician in the chapel of Johann Ernst III, Duke of Saxe-Weimar. His role there is unclear, but it probably included menial, non-musical duties. During his seven-month tenure at Weimar, his reputation as a keyboardist spread so widely that he was invited to inspect the new organ and give the inaugural recital at the New Church (now Bach Church) in Arnstadt, about 30 km southwest of Weimar. On 14 August 1703 he became the organist at the New Church, with light duties, a relatively generous salary, and a new organ tuned in a temperament that allowed music written in a wider range of keys to be played. Although Johann Ernst III was musically enthusiastic, the relationship grew tense. In 1705–1706, Bach upset the duke when, after obtaining a four-week leave of absence, he was away for about four months, taking lessons from the organist and composer Johann Adam Reincken and wanting to hear Reincken and Dieterich Buxtehude play in Lübeck. The visit to Buxtehude and Reincken involved a 450 km journey each way, reportedly on foot. Buxtehude probably introduced Bach to his friend Reincken so that he could learn from his compositional technique (especially his mastery of fugue), his organ playing, and his improvisational skill. Bach knew Reincken’s music very well; he copied Reincken’s monumental when he was 15 years old. When Bach revisited Reincken in 1720 and showed him his improvisational skill on the organ, Reincken reportedly remarked: “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that it lives in you.” In 1706 Bach applied for a post as organist at the Blasius Church in Mühlhausen. As part of his application, he had a cantata performed at Easter, 24 April 1707, that resembles his later . Bach’s application was accepted a month later, and he took up the post in July. This is the only extant Bach cantata published in his lifetime. Bach returned to Weimar in 1708, after Johann Ernst’s death, as court organist. He worked with one of Johann Ernst’s sons, also named Johann Ernst, who had a keen interest in music. The prince’s interest in collecting music was sufficiently well known that in 1713, when one of Bach’s pupils, P. D. Kräuter, requested a leave of absence to study in Weimar, he mentioned the French and Italian music the prince was expected to introduce there. The prince also composed, and Bach wrote the Organ Concerto No.1 in G Major, BWV 592, and Concerto for Organ solo in C major, BWV 595, after a theme by the prince.

Return to Weimar (1708–1717)#

Bach left Mühlhausen in 1708, returning to Weimar this time as organist and from 1714 (director of music) at the ducal court, where he could work with a large, well-funded contingent of professional musicians. Bach’s time in Weimar began a sustained period of composing keyboard and orchestral works. He attained the proficiency and confidence to extend the prevailing structures and include influences from abroad. He learned to write dramatic openings and employ the dynamic rhythms and harmonic schemes used by Italians such as Vivaldi, Corelli, and Torelli. Bach absorbed these stylistic aspects to a certain extent by transcribing Vivaldi’s string and wind concertos for harpsichord and organ. He was particularly attracted to the Italian style, in which one or more solo instruments alternate section-by-section with the full orchestra throughout a movement. In Weimar Bach continued to play and compose for the organ and perform concert music with the duke’s ensemble. In early 1714 Bach was promoted to , an honour that entailed performing a church cantata monthly in the castle church. The first three cantatas in the new series Bach composed in Weimar were , for Palm Sunday, which coincided with the Annunciation that year; , for Jubilate Sunday; and , for Pentecost. Bach’s first Christmas cantata, , premiered in 1714 or 1715. In 1717 Bach fell out of favour in Weimar and, according to the court secretary’s report, was jailed for almost a month before being dismissed from his position: “On November 6, 1717, the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge’s place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavorable discharge.”

Köthen (1717–1723)#

Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, hired Bach to serve as his (director of music) in 1717. Himself a musician, Leopold appreciated Bach’s talents, paid him well, and gave him considerable latitude in composing and performing. Leopold was a Calvinist and thus did not use elaborate music in his form of worship, so most of Bach’s work from this period is secular, including the orchestral suites, Cello Suites, Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, and the Brandenburg Concertos. Bach also composed secular cantatas for the court, such as . In 1719, Bach made the 35 km journey from Köthen to Halle with the intention to meet Handel, but Handel had left town. In 1730, Bach’s oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, travelled to Halle to invite Handel to visit the Bach family in Leipzig, but the visit did not take place.

Appointment#

In 1723 Bach was appointed (director of church music) in Leipzig, a mercantile Saxon city with “the leading cantorate in Protestant Germany”. A cantata was required for the church services on each Sunday and additional church holidays during the liturgical year. Johann Kuhnau had been Thomaskantor in Leipzig from 1701 until his death on 5 June 1722. Bach had visited Leipzig during Kuhnau’s tenure: in 1714 he attended the service at the St. Thomas Church on the first Sunday of Advent, and in 1717 he tested the organ at St. Paul’s Church. In 1716 Bach and Kuhnau met on the occasion of the testing and inauguration of an organ in Halle. Bach was required to instruct the students in singing. He was also assigned to teach Latin but was allowed to employ four “prefects” (deputies) to do that for him. The prefects also aided with musical instruction. Bach held the position for 27 years, until his death. During that time, he gained further prestige through honorary appointments at the courts of Köthen and Weissenfels, as well as that of the Elector Frederick Augustus (who was also King of Poland) in Dresden. Bach frequently disagreed with his employer, Leipzig’s city council, whom he regarded as “penny-pinching”.

Cantata cycle years (1723–1729)#

In 1723, and until 1729, Bach was appointed as Thomaskantor and director musices in Leipzig, which made him responsible for the music at four churches. He provided church music for the two main churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, and occasionally also for two others, the New Church and St. Peter. Bach took office in the middle of the liturgical year, on the first Sunday after Trinity. In Leipzig, cantata music was expected on Sundays and on feast days, except during the tempus clausum (“silent periods”) of Advent and Lent. In 1725, the feast fell on Palm Sunday. Annunciation was the only occasion for festive music during Lent. The prescribed readings were, as the epistle, Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of the Messiah (), and from the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel announcing the birth of Jesus (). In his first twelve months in office, Bach decided to compose new works for almost all liturgical occasions. These works became known as his first cantata cycle. In his second year in office, Bach composed a cycle of chorale cantatas, with each cantata based on one Lutheran hymn, for the liturgical occasions. The choice of hymn for each of the cantatas was probably made according to the wishes of a local minister, who based the choices upon the prescribed readings and his plans for sermons. Compared to the first cycle, the music has less emphasis on biblical texts, but more on the use of chorale text and melody. Bach’s earliest extant chorale cantata, , written more than a decade before arriving in Leipzig, followed the principle, that is, it adopted the text of all stanzas of the hymn without modification, the hymn’s melody being used throughout. Most of the chorale cantatas Bach wrote in his second year in Leipzig, including , were formatted differently. In this structure, the outer stanzas of the hymn, and its melody, were retained in the outer movements of the cantata: typically the first stanza was set as an opening chorale fantasia, and the last as a closing four-part chorale. The inner stanzas of the hymn were rephrased into recitatives and arias for the cantata’s inner movements, their setting mostly not based on the hymn tune.

Middle years in Leipzig (1730–1739)#

Before starting on the Gospel of Mark after 1730, Bach had composed the St John Passion and the St Matthew Passion; the latter was first performed on Good Friday 11 April 1727. The 1731 St Mark Passion (), BWV 247, is a lost Passion setting by Bach, first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, 23 March 1731. Though Bach’s music is lost, the libretto by Picander is extant, and the work can to some degree be reconstructed from it. In 1733 Bach composed a Kyrie–Gloria Mass in B minor for the court in Dresden, which had become Catholic, that he later used in his Mass in B minor. He presented the manuscript to the Elector in a successful bid to persuade the prince to give him the title of Court Composer. In 1735 Bach started preparing his first organ music publication, which was printed as the third in 1739. From around that year he started to compile and compose the set of preludes and fugues for harpsichord that became the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. He received the title of “Royal Court Composer” from Augustus III of Poland in 1736. Between 1737 and 1739 Bach’s former pupil Carl Gotthelf Gerlach held the directorship of the Collegium Musicum.

Final years (1740–1750)#

From 1740 to 1748 Bach copied, transcribed, expanded or programmed music in an older polyphonic style (stile antico) by, among others, Palestrina ( BNB I/P/2 ), Kerll ( BWV 241 ), Torri ( BWV Anh. 30 ), Bassani ( BWV 1081 ), Gasparini ( Missa Canonica ), and Caldara ( BWV 1082 ). Bach’s style shifted in the last decade of his life, showing an increased integration of elements of the stile antico, including polyphonic structures and canons. His fourth and last Clavier-Übung volume, the Goldberg Variations for two-manual harpsichord, contains nine canons and was published in 1741. During this period, Bach also continued to adapt music of contemporaries such as Handel ( BNB I/K/2 ) and Stölzel ( BWV 200 ), and gave many of his own earlier compositions, such as the St Matthew and St John Passions and the Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, their final revisions. He also programmed and adapted music by composers of a younger generation, including Pergolesi ( BWV 1083 ), and his own students, such as Goldberg ( BNB I/G/2 ). In 1746 Bach was preparing to enter Lorenz Christoph Mizler’s . To be admitted, he had to submit a composition. He chose his Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her”, and a portrait painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann that featured Bach’s Canon triplex á 6 Voc. In May 1747, Bach visited the court of King Frederick the Great in Potsdam. The king played a theme for Bach and challenged him to improvise a fugue based on it. Bach obliged, playing a three-part fugue on one of Frederick’s early prototypes of a new instrument, the fortepiano. Upon his return to Leipzig he composed a set of fugues and canons and a trio sonata based on the Thema Regium (“King’s Theme”). Within a few weeks this music was published as The Musical Offering and dedicated to Frederick. The Schübler Chorales, a set of six chorale preludes transcribed from cantata movements Bach had written two decades earlier, were published within a year. Around the same time, the set of five canonic variations Bach had submitted when entering Mizler’s society in 1747 were also printed. After extracting a cantata, BWV 191, from his 1733 Kyrie-Gloria Mass for the Dresden court in the mid-1740s, Bach expanded that setting into his Mass in B minor in the last years of his life. The complete mass was not performed during his lifetime. It is considered among the greatest choral works in history. In January 1749, with Bach in declining health, his daughter Elisabeth Juliane Friederica married his pupil Johann Christoph Altnickol. On 2 June Heinrich von Brühl wrote to one of the Leipzig burgomasters to request that his music director, Gottlob Harrer, fill the Thomaskantor and posts “upon the eventual … decease of Mr. Bach”. His eyesight failing, Bach underwent eye surgery in March 1750 and again in April by the British eye surgeon John Taylor, a man widely understood today as a charlatan and believed to have blinded hundreds of people, including Bach’s contemporary George Frideric Handel.

Death and burial#

Bach died on 28 July 1750 from complications due to unsuccessful eye surgery. He had a stroke a few days before his death. He was originally buried at Old St John’s Cemetery in Leipzig, where his grave went unmarked for nearly 150 years. In 1894, his remains were found and moved to a vault in St John’s Church. This building was destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and in 1950 Bach’s remains were taken to their present grave in St Thomas Church. An inventory drawn up a few months after Bach’s death shows that his estate included five harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, three violins, three violas, two cellos, a viola da gamba, a lute, a spinet, and 52 “sacred books”, including works by Martin Luther and Josephus. C. P. E. Bach saw to it that The Art of Fugue, though unfinished, was published in 1751. Together with one of J. S. Bach’s former students, Johann Friedrich Agricola, C. P. E. Bach also wrote the obituary (“Nekrolog”), which was published in Mizler’s , a periodical journal produced by the Society of Musical Sciences, in 1754.

Music#

Bach’s music encompasses every genre of his time aside from opera. His body of work includes more than 200 sacred and secular cantatas; dozens of other (often large-scale) vocal works, including oratorios, passions, motets, and various Latin church music; a large body of both organ and keyboard music; and several collections of orchestral and chamber music, which are often hard to distinguish. Musicologists often loosely link specific genres to different career stages: organ music during his positions as organist in Weimar, Arnstadt, and Mühlhausen; chamber and orchestral works during his tenure as Kapellmeister in Köthen; and choral music during his years as cantor in Leipzig. Although these emphases reflected professional duties, Bach’s artistic ambitions typically far exceeded the practical requirements of his positions. Wolff observes that Bach’s career trajectory shows a deliberate progression from organist to Konzertmeister, reflecting his evolving musical interests. Bach had extensive awareness of contemporary European music and developed his musical voice from a synthesized conglomerate of styles. Among his most important early influences were three Germans he knew personally, Dieterich Buxtehude, Georg Böhm, and Johann Reincken. C. P. E. Bach also gives as later influences the Germans Reinhard Keiser, Johann Adolph Hasse, Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann Gottlieb Graun, and Georg Philipp Telemann; the Bohemians active in Germany Jan Dismas Zelenka, and Franz Benda; and the British-German George Frideric Handel. Throughout his life, Bach was deeply interested in Italian and French music, seeking to unite the two traditions—particularly the Italian sonata and the French suite—into a “mixed style” (). He often incorporated the clarity of Italian melodic structure and the dance forms of the French. Representative influences included the Frenchmen Nicolas de Grigny, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marin Marais, and André Raison; the Italians and Girolamo Frescobaldi; the proponents of the so-called stile antico, Tomaso Albinoni, Antonio Caldara, and Antonio Lotti; and the latter group’s Renaissance forebear Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. From c. 1712 onwards, Antonio Vivaldi’s music was Bach’s most important influence, having—according to Forkel—“taught him to think musically”. Only a small number of Bach’s compositions were printed during his lifetime, mostly for keyboard or organ. His music for keyboard—and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for organ—also occupied him most consistently throughout his life. In addition, Bach’s experience as a violinist, violist, and (at least early on) singer contributed to a versatile output that is frequently technically demanding and often virtuosic, although Wolff writes that “technical virtuosity never predominates; it becomes a functional element within the composition as a whole.” Another essential component of Bach’s style is his compositional craftsmanship, which spans a fluency of highly complex counterpoint and harmony in both homophonic and polyphonic textures. To this end, Bach’s music incorporates frequent modulations, often achieved through harmonic sequences; intricate four-part harmony, including the more than 400 chorales throughout his output; and contrapuntal structures such as the canon and particularly fugue, which feature in many of his compositions.

Creative range#

Bach’s creative range and musical style encompassed four-part harmony, modulation, ornamentation, use of continuo instruments solos, virtuoso instrumentation, counterpoint, and a refined attention to structure and lyrics. Like his contemporaries Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi, Bach composed concertos, suites, recitatives, da capo arias, and four-part choral music, and employed basso continuo. Most of the prints of Bach’s music that appeared during his lifetime were commissioned by the composer. His music is harmonically more innovative than his peers’, employing surprisingly dissonant chords and progressions, often extensively exploring harmonic possibilities within one piece. Bach’s hundreds of sacred works are usually seen as manifesting not just his craft but also a deep faith in God. His commitment to the Lutheran faith was reflected in his teaching Luther’s Small Catechism as the in Leipzig, and some of his pieces represent it. The contents of Luther’s Small Catechism contain such religious themes as the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, the Office of the Keys and Confession, and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The Lutheran chorale was the basis of much of his work. In elaborating these hymns into his chorale preludes, he wrote more cogent and tightly integrated works than most, even when they were massive and lengthy. The large-scale structure of every major Bach sacred vocal work is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning to create religiously and musically powerful expression. Bach published or carefully compiled in manuscript many collections of pieces that explored the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in almost every genre of his time except opera. For example, The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises two books, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key.

Four-part harmony#

Four-part harmony predates Bach, but he lived during a time when modal music in Western tradition was largely supplanted by the tonal system. In this system a piece of music progresses from one chord to the next according to certain rules, with each chord characterised by four notes. The principles of four-part harmony are found not only in Bach’s four-part choral music; he also prescribes it for instance in figured bass accompaniment. The new system was at the core of Bach’s style. Some examples of this characteristic of Bach’s style and its influence: * When in the 1740s Bach staged his arrangement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, he upgraded the viola part (which in the original composition plays in unison with the bass part) to fill in the harmony, thus adapting the composition to four-part harmony. * When, starting in the 19th century in Russia, there was a discussion about the authenticity of four-part court chant settings compared to earlier Russian traditions, Bach’s four-part chorale settings, such as those ending his Chorale cantatas, were considered foreign-influenced musical precedents, but such influence was deemed unavoidable. Bach’s insistence on the tonal system and contribution to shaping it did not imply he was less at ease with the older modal system and the genres associated with it: more than his contemporaries (who had “moved on” to the tonal system without much exception), he often returned to the then-antiquated modes and genres. His Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, emulating the chromatic fantasia genre used by earlier composers such as John Dowland and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in D Dorian mode (comparable to D minor in the tonal system), is an example. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, wrote of Bach’s original approach to this: “I have expended much effort to find another piece of this type by Bach. But it was in vain. This fantasy is unique and has always been second to none.”

Modulation#

Modulation, or changing key in the course of a piece, is another style characteristic where Bach goes beyond the norm in his time. Baroque instruments vastly limited modulation possibilities: keyboard instruments, before a workable system of temperament, limited the keys that could be modulated to, and wind instruments, especially brass instruments such as trumpets and horns, about a century before they were fitted with valves and crooks, were tied to the key of their tuning. Bach pushed the limits: he added “strange tones” in his organ playing, confusing the singers, according to an indictment he had to face in Arnstadt, and Louis Marchand, another early experimenter with modulation, seems to have avoided confrontation with Bach because the latter went further than anyone had done before. For example, in the Suscepit Israel of his 1723 Magnificat, he used a sophisticated compositional form in which the trumpets in E-flat play a melody in unfamiliar, variable-size quarter tones in the enharmonic scale of C minor. The major development in Bach’s time to which he was a significant contributor was a temperament for keyboard instruments that allowed their use in every key (12 major and 12 minor) and modulation without retuning. His Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, a very early work, showed a gusto for modulation unlike any contemporary work it has been compared to, but the full expansion came with The Well-Tempered Clavier, using all keys, which Bach apparently had been developing since around 1720, the being one of its earliest examples.

Ornamentation#

The second page of the is an ornament notation and performance guide that Bach wrote for his eldest son, then nine years old. Bach was generally quite specific on ornamentation in his compositions (in his time, much ornamentation was not written out by composers but rather considered a liberty of the performer), and his ornamentation was often quite elaborate. For instance, the “Aria” of the Goldberg Variations has rich ornamentation in nearly every measure. Bach’s approach to ornamentation can also be seen in a keyboard arrangement he made of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto: he added explicit ornamentation, which centuries later is still played. Although Bach wrote no formal operas, he was not averse to the genre or its ornamented vocal style, as in his Coffee Cantata. In church music, Italian composers had imitated the operatic vocal style in genres such as the Neapolitan mass. In Protestant surroundings, there was more reluctance to adopt such a style for liturgical music. Kuhnau had notoriously shunned opera and Italian virtuoso vocal music. Bach felt differently, and a performance of his St Matthew Passion was described as sounding like opera.

Continuo instrument solos#

In concerted playing in Bach’s time, the basso continuo, consisting of instruments such as viola da gamba or cello, and harpsichord or organ, usually had the role of accompaniment, providing a piece’s harmonic and rhythmic foundation. Beginning in the 1720s Bach had the organ play concertante (i.e., as a soloist) with the orchestra in instrumental cantata movements, a decade before Handel published his first organ concertos. Apart from the fifth Brandenburg Concerto and the Triple Concerto, which already had harpsichord soloists in the 1720s, Bach wrote and arranged his harpsichord concertos in the 1730s, and in his sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord neither instrument plays a continuo part: they are treated as equal soloists, far beyond the figured bass. In this way, Bach played a key role in the development of genres such as the keyboard concerto.

Instrumentation#

Bach wrote virtuoso music for specific instruments as well as music independent of instrumentation. For instance, the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin are considered among the finest works written for violin, within reach of only accomplished players. The music fits the instrument, using the full gamut of its possibilities and requiring virtuosity but without bravura. In this sense, it is no surprise that Bach’s music is easily and often performed on instruments it was not written for, that it is transcribed so often, and that his melodies turn up in unexpected places, such as jazz music. Apart from this, Bach left several compositions without specified instrumentation: the canons BWV 1072–1078 are in that category, as is the bulk of the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue.

Era: Baroque
Lived: 1685–1750
From: Saxe-Eisenach, Holy Roman Empire
Born in: Eisenach · died Leipzig
Known as: composer, organist, harpsichordist, violinist, conductor, choir director
Instruments: organ, harpsichord, violin, viola, pipe organ
Genres: Baroque music, classical music