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In this podcast, we explore the lives and works of great classical composers. Beginning in the 16th century, we trace more than 500 years of music history, following the lives of over 150 composers along the way. Our focus is not only on their well-known works, but above all on the people behind the music: their childhood, their formative years, their artistic journeys, and the legacies they left behind. Through our audio biographies, we examine the influences that shaped their creativity and how, in turn, their music helped shape the course of classical music itself.
Welcome to today's episode. We are spending this hour with one of the most extraordinary human beings who ever put pen to paper. Johann Sebastian Bach. Born in Eisenach in the German state of Thuringia on the twenty-first of March, 1685, and dying in Leipzig on the twenty-eighth of July, 1750, Bach lived sixty-five years. In those six and a half decades, he produced a body of work so vast, so varied, and so technically astonishing that even today, nearly three hundred years later, scholars are still mapping its full dimensions.
The catalogue of his works — known as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or BWV for short — lists over one thousand and eighty individual compositions. These span every genre of his era: roughly two hundred surviving sacred cantatas, thirty secular cantatas, two large Passions, the Mass in B Minor, oratorios, motets, hundreds of organ works, keyboard suites, violin and cello works, concertos, orchestral suites, canons, and one of the most architecturally perfect sets of fugues ever conceived. He wrote no operas — a fact that is itself fascinating and deserves its own chapter. But he wrote everything else, and he wrote it with a thoroughness that no other composer in Western history has matched.
He married twice, had twenty children — ten of whom died in infancy or early childhood — and never once left the borders of Germany. He moved through eight cities across a radius of about three hundred kilometres. He was orphaned at ten, imprisoned at thirty-two, publicly insulted by a former student, spent much of his career fighting with municipal councils, and died in relative obscurity. He had to wait eighty years after his death for the world to properly rediscover him. And yet, when it did, composers from Beethoven to Brahms to Shostakovich all said the same thing: Bach is the foundation of everything. Chapter 1. Childhood and youth.
To understand Johann Sebastian Bach, you need to understand the world he came from. The Bach family of Thuringia was, by the seventeenth century, so thoroughly synonymous with music-making that local people reportedly used the words "Bach" and "musician" interchangeably. Sebastian's father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was court trumpeter and director of the town musicians in Eisenach. He had a twin brother — called Johann Christoph — who was likewise a professional town musician. According to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who updated the family genealogy many decades later, the twins were so identical in appearance and mannerisms that even their own wives could barely tell them apart. This is the family Johann Sebastian was born into: a dynasty of professional musicians spanning multiple generations, all living within a few hundred kilometres of each other, all making their living from sound.
Eisenach, the town of his birth, was no ordinary backwater. It was the town where Martin Luther had attended school two hundred years earlier, where Luther had translated the New Testament into German while hiding in the Wartburg castle on the hill above the city. That castle loomed over Bach's entire childhood. And the Latin Grammar School where young Sebastian studied was the same institution Luther had attended. Bach would spend the rest of his life identifying with Luther as a fellow Thuringian, a fellow defiant spirit, a man who had faced down powerful authority in the name of what he believed to be right.
His early musical education came from his father, who taught him violin and the basics of musical theory. From his uncle Johann Christoph Bach, the organist of the Georgenkirche in Eisenach, he received his first serious organ lessons. By all accounts, he was a gifted pupil from the very beginning — not in the flashy child-prodigy sense of Mozart, but in a quieter, more obsessive way. He absorbed everything he was given and immediately wanted more.
Then, in quick and devastating succession, both his parents died. His mother, Maria Elisabeth, died in May 1694, when Sebastian was nine years old. His father, Johann Ambrosius, died in February 1695, less than a year later. Sebastian was only ten. The double loss within a single year was catastrophic. He and his younger brother Johann Jakob were taken in by their eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, who lived in the small town of Ohrdruf, about thirty miles southeast of Eisenach. Biographers have argued — convincingly — that this double orphaning shaped Bach's entire psychological profile: his defiance of authority, his obsessive attachment to family, and his lifelong habit of creating ordered structures out of chaos all trace back, at least in part, to the terror of that year.
His brother, Johann Christoph, was a gifted organist who had studied with the great Johann Pachelbel in Erfurt. He owned a substantial collection of manuscripts — works by the leading composers of the day, carefully copied and locked away in a cabinet. This is where one of the most celebrated stories in all of Bach biography comes from. The young Sebastian, burning to study these manuscripts, discovered that the cabinet had a lock — but also gaps in its grillwork wide enough to reach a hand through. And so, night after night, by the light of a candle or the moon, he secretly withdrew the manuscript collection sheet by sheet and copied it out in full. He did this over many months. When Johann Christoph eventually discovered what had happened, he confiscated the copy. The story, which Bach himself apparently told and evidently wanted preserved, tells us everything about who he was: not someone who waited to be given knowledge, but someone who took it, at personal cost, in the dark.
By the age of fifteen, with his brother's household growing and the free schooling at Ohrdruf no longer available, Sebastian had to leave. Together with a school friend named Georg Erdmann — a name we will come back to — he walked roughly three hundred kilometres north to the city of Lüneburg, where he enrolled as a chorister at the choir school of Saint Michael's Church. The school had an excellent library of church music, a good choir, and access to some of the finest musicians in northern Germany.
It was in Lüneburg that Bach's musical world began to expand in all directions simultaneously. He came under the direct influence of Georg Böhm, the organist at the Johanniskirche, who introduced him to the French instrumental style — its elegance, its precise ornamentation, its dance-inflected suites. More remarkably, Bach made regular journeys to the nearby court at Celle, where the Duke maintained an orchestra of actual French musicians — almost certainly Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution. Bach's obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and a student named Agricola, describes this as "something totally new in those parts." This was critical: most composers of the era learned French style from written scores; Bach heard it live, from native performers.
He also travelled to Hamburg, forty-eight kilometres to the north, to hear Johann Adam Reincken, the legendary Dutch-born organist of the Catharinenkirche, who was already in his eighties but still playing with tremendous command. On one of these visits, Bach improvised a lengthy fantasy before the old master on a chorale tune. Reincken, astonished, is reported to have said: "I thought this art was dead, but I see it still lives in you." It is one of the great exchanges in music history.
By the time Bach left Lüneburg, probably in 1702, he had absorbed German, Italian, and French musical idioms more comprehensively than almost any composer alive. Not by traveling to Paris or Rome — he would never do that — but by an extraordinary combination of obsessive self-study, strategic positioning, and sheer musical intelligence. Chapter 2. Life and career.
Bach's adulthood is best understood as a series of postings — each one teaching him something the previous one could not, each one marked by a specific creative flowering and a specific institutional conflict. Let us walk through them in order.
After a brief and unremarkable first stint at the Weimar court in 1703, where he worked essentially as a servant-musician — the German term was Laquey — he received his first real appointment: organist of the Neukirche in Arnstadt, a small town in Thuringia, when he was eighteen years old. The appointment came about in a slightly unusual way: Bach had been hired to inspect and inaugurate a brand-new organ there, did so with such professional precision and such evident brilliance that the church council simply offered him the job on the spot, at twice the salary of his predecessor.
Arnstadt is where the first great anecdote of Bach's adult life takes place. In the autumn of 1705, he applied for four weeks' leave to travel north to Lübeck, to hear the legendary organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude, whom we already discussed in an earlier episode. He was granted the leave. He then stayed for nearly four months — overstaying by twelve weeks. When he eventually returned to Arnstadt, the church council called him before them and formally reprimanded him. Bach showed no remorse. What had kept him? Buxtehude's music: its harmonic boldness, its vast architectural scale, its capacity to transform a single chorale melody into something monumental. The encounter was not simply inspirational — it was structurally transformative. Bach returned to Arnstadt a different composer.
But there was another Arnstadt story, and it is considerably funnier — or at least more alarming. In 1705, the twenty-year-old Bach got into a street fight in the Arnstadt marketplace. He had called a student bassoonist a "Zippelfagottist" — a term which, as the Brothers Grimm dictionary confirms, was an obscene insult meaning roughly "prick of a bassoon player." The bassoonist and some friends confronted Bach. Bach pulled out his rapier. A brawl ensued. He was hauled before the consistory court. He remained, by all accounts, entirely unrepentant.
By 1707, Bach had grown frustrated with Arnstadt. The council complained that he harmonised the chorales in such strange and adventurous ways that the congregation could not follow the melody. He moved to Mühlhausen, a more prosperous town in northwestern Thuringia, as organist of the Saint Blasius Church. And there, in October of that year, he married his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach. She was the daughter of his father's first cousin. Bach was the only member of the Bach dynasty ever to marry another Bach. Scholars have interpreted this choice symbolically: by marrying a female Bach, the doubly-orphaned Sebastian was, in a sense, reconstituting the family he had lost. Together they would have seven children.
Mühlhausen was intellectually uncomfortable, however. The church was caught in a bitter doctrinal dispute between orthodox Lutherans and Pietists — the Pietists wanted simpler, plainer music; the orthodox Lutherans wanted elaborate polyphony. Bach was emphatically on the orthodox side. He left after little more than a year, writing to the council that he wished to pursue "a well-regulated church music to the glory of God." He left on good terms — he even continued advising on the organ renovation he had planned — but he left decisively.
The second Weimar period, from 1708 to 1717, was nine years of extraordinary intellectual intensity. Bach served first as court organist and then, from 1714, as Konzertmeister under Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. The court had a fine organ, a good ensemble, and — crucially — a magnificent library of Italian and French scores. It was here, around 1713 and 1714, that Bach systematically transcribed twenty-one concertos by Antonio Vivaldi and other Italian composers for keyboard and organ. He was not simply copying them — he was dissecting them from the inside, learning how Vivaldi organised musical time through the ritornello principle, how he built momentum and released it, how he balanced soloist and ensemble. Scholars now regard this encounter as the single most decisive turning point in Bach's entire artistic development.
The Weimar years also produced one of the most extraordinary musical stories of the Baroque era: the duel with Louis Marchand. In 1717, the celebrated French harpsichordist Marchand was at the Dresden court, universally admired. Bach was proposed as a challenger for a public keyboard contest. A hall full of aristocrats assembled, the Elector of Saxony was present, expectations were high. And then, in the early hours of the morning on the day of the contest, Marchand quietly slipped out of Dresden in a private coach before dawn and disappeared. Bach arrived and performed alone. The French virtuoso had heard Bach practise and decided he would rather not find out.
The Weimar period ended in the most dramatic possible way. By 1717, Bach had been offered and had accepted the position of Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold in Köthen — a better title, better pay, a more progressive patron. He requested his dismissal from Weimar. Duke Wilhelm Ernst, furious at what he regarded as insubordination, refused to let him go. Bach continued to insist. The Duke's response was to have Bach arrested and locked in the district judge's chamber. The court secretary's minutes record, with magnificent bureaucratic neutrality: "Bach, till now Konzertmeister and court organist, was put under arrest for obstinately demanding his instant dismissal." He was held for four weeks. He was then released with what the court records describe as "grudging permission to retire" — and formally dismissed in disgrace.
He arrived in Köthen, released from prison, and entered what many biographers describe as the happiest professional years of his life. Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen was young, musically educated, genuinely passionate, and maintained an excellent court ensemble of professional musicians. The court was Calvinist-Reformed — meaning no elaborate church music — so Bach was freed entirely from liturgical obligations. The result was a concentrated outpouring of purely instrumental music: the six Brandenburg Concertos, the six Violin Sonatas and Partitas, the six Cello Suites, the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the French and English Suites for keyboard. In five years, Bach composed some of the most important instrumental music in Western history.
But Köthen also brought the worst personal tragedy of his life. In the summer of 1720, Bach accompanied Prince Leopold to the fashionable spa resort at Carlsbad. On his return to Köthen, he discovered that his wife Maria Barbara had died suddenly while he was away — and had already been buried. He had received no word during the journey. She was thirty-five years old. She left four surviving children, the eldest of whom was eleven. The shock of returning home to find his wife gone — not just dead, but already in the ground, with no chance for farewell — reverberates through the biographical record. He was thirty-five years old and a widower with four children.
Within eighteen months, in December 1721, he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a twenty-year-old soprano and professional court singer. This was not simply a practical arrangement for a widower with four children, though it was certainly that too. Anna Magdalena was a genuine musical partner. She sang in court performances, copied an enormous quantity of Bach's manuscripts, and played keyboard instruments with skill. Their relationship was warm, close, and — this is easy to forget — surprisingly earthy. She copied a poem into her famous 1725 music notebook comparing Cupid's work to drilling holes and threshing wheat with large and tiny flails. Victorian editors, when they eventually published the notebook, simply omitted the verse entirely. It was suppressed in English translation until 1990.
Together Bach and Anna Magdalena would have thirteen more children, of whom seven survived. Among all twenty of Bach's children, four sons became significant composers in their own right: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian — the youngest, who would move to London and become one of the young Mozart's greatest heroes.
In 1723, Bach left Köthen for Leipzig. He had not been the city council's first choice. They had approached Georg Philipp Telemann, then Christoph Graupner. Both declined. One Leipzig councillor reportedly remarked, with magnificent condescension, that since the best could not be obtained, mediocre ones must be accepted. Bach received the position of Thomaskantor — director of the choir of the Saint Thomas Boys' School and director of church music for the city's four principal churches — and moved his family to Leipzig in May 1723. He would remain there for the rest of his life: twenty-seven years.
The duties were immense. Bach had to compose new music for services alternating between the Thomaskirche and the Nikolaikirche every Sunday and on feast days. He had to teach Latin and general subjects to the boys of the Thomasschule. He had to supervise roughly fifty-five choristers. He had to provide music for weddings, funerals, and civic occasions. He answered to three separate authorities: the city council, the school rector, and the church superintendent, each of whom had different priorities and all of whom were capable of making his life difficult. The council, in particular, was most interested in having a competent schoolteacher who could also provide music, not a genius who regarded teaching Latin grammar as an obstacle to composition.
What Bach produced in his first six years in Leipzig is, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary creative achievements in the history of music. He composed four complete annual cycles of church cantatas — meaning a new cantata, fully scored for soloists, choir, and orchestra, every single week. Modern scholarship by Alfred Dürr and Georg von Dadelsen has established that the vast majority of Bach's surviving Leipzig church music was composed between 1723 and 1727, meaning Bach was producing roughly one major choral work per week, often based on texts he received only days before the first performance. To put that in perspective: a professional opera composer today would consider six months a fast turnaround for a work of similar scale.
His principal collaborator in Leipzig was the poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote under the pen name Picander. Picander was a Leipzig postal official by day and a poet by inclination — a combination that was, apparently, entirely normal in the eighteenth century. He provided texts for many of Bach's most important cantatas and, most significantly, wrote the libretto for the Saint Matthew Passion of 1727, which many consider the greatest choral work ever composed. Picander himself noted, with a mixture of self-deprecation and entirely justified pride: "I flatter myself that the lack of poetic charm may be compensated for by the loveliness of the music of our incomparable Kapellmeister Bach." Together they also collaborated on secular cantatas, including the Coffee Cantata — a comic piece about a father trying to break his daughter's coffee addiction — which we will return to shortly.
By 1730, the relationship between Bach and the Leipzig city council had deteriorated badly. In October of that year, Bach sat down and wrote a long letter to his old school friend Georg Erdmann, who was now working as an Imperial Russian diplomatic agent in Danzig. It is one of only two personal letters by Bach that survive, and it is a document of startling frankness. He described the authorities as "odd and little interested in music." He said living in Leipzig was expensive, the fees from funerals had been reduced because the city had been unusually healthy — meaning fewer deaths, meaning less supplemental income — and that the post had not proved as lucrative as described. He openly contemplated seeking a new position elsewhere. That same year, the Leipzig council reprimanded him formally for neglecting his teaching duties. One councillor wrote that "he shows little inclination to work." Bach's counter-response — filed as an official memorandum — was that he had offered the council "an incomparably more difficult service than any other Cantor." Which was, of course, absolutely true.
The year 1737 brought a different kind of conflict. The music critic and theorist Johann Adolph Scheibe published an anonymous essay in his journal attacking Bach — without naming him — for writing music that was "bombastic and confused," where "excessive art obscures beauty," and where every ornament was written out in full so that "none of the voices could be recognised as the principal one." What makes this particularly delicious is that Scheibe had actually been a former student of Bach's who had failed an organist audition for which Bach had served as examiner. Bach, too proud to respond personally, enlisted his friend Johann Abraham Birnbaum, professor of rhetoric at the University of Leipzig, to publish a twenty-eight-page rebuttal. A pamphlet war dragged on for two years. Bach's own contribution to the controversy was his private description of his church music as "incomparably more difficult and more intricate than that of other composers" — which he offered not apologetically, but with evident satisfaction. He regarded the criticism as confirmation that he was doing something no one else could.
In May 1747, Bach made one of the most famous journeys of his life: to the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel was employed as a court musician. Frederick, who was himself an accomplished flautist, had been waiting for this visit with evident anticipation. When Bach arrived, the king handed him a long, deliberately chromatic and awkward theme on his new fortepiano and demanded that Bach improvise a fugue on it immediately. Bach obliged to universal astonishment — a fully-formed three-voice fugue, on the spot. He then returned to Leipzig and transformed the royal theme into the Musical Offering, a published collection of ricercars, canons, and a trio sonata, with the royal theme as the foundation of everything. It is one of the wittiest and most compressed masterworks in the repertoire. Chapter 3. Final years.
There was no real retirement for Johann Sebastian Bach. He continued composing into his mid-sixties with undiminished ambition — if anything, his final works are more concentrated and encyclopaedic than anything he had written before. In his last years he devoted himself to completing what might be called his architectural monuments: the Mass in B Minor, which he assembled from earlier movements and newly composed sections into a single coherent whole in 1748 and 1749; the Art of Fugue, an unfinished exploration of fugal counterpoint using a single theme of extraordinary versatility; and revisions and refinements of earlier masterworks.
The Mass in B Minor deserves a particular word here. It is sometimes described as Bach's "summing up," and in a way it is — a work that moves from the ancient “stile antico” of Renaissance polyphony to harmonies so bold and chromatic that they seem to belong to a different century. Scholars who have analysed the Confiteor section of the Credo describe it as reaching toward what they call "triadic atonality" — harmonic writing that bypasses the entire Romantic era and anticipates twentieth-century experiments. Bach, in his sixties, was not looking back. He was looking forward, even if no one around him could see it.
From 1749, his health declined severely. He developed an acute eye condition — the specific diagnosis remains debated, though some scholars suggest it may have been a form of diabetes, noting that his father's late handwriting also showed a similar deterioration. By early 1750, his eyesight had failed almost completely. In April of that year, he underwent two eye operations by the itinerant English ophthalmologist John Taylor — the very same surgeon who had previously operated, equally disastrously, on George Frideric Handel. Both operations failed. Bach briefly recovered some vision after the second procedure, but a stroke followed within days.
Johann Sebastian Bach died on the twenty-eighth of July, 1750. He was sixty-five years old. The funeral record read simply: "Mister Johann Sebastian Bach, sixty-seven years of age, Kapellmeister and cantor at the school of Saint Thomas, deceased on Tuesday." The age was wrong by two years — even his death certificate got him wrong.
He left no will. His estate was modest: household furniture, a few pieces of silver plate, and nineteen musical instruments, including five harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, and a spinet. The most valuable harpsichord was assessed at eighty thalers — roughly one-seventh of his annual salary. The total estate was auctioned for 1122 thalers, to be divided among nine surviving children from two marriages.
What happened to Anna Magdalena after his death is one of the sadder stories in musical biography. Despite being a professional musician who had devoted thirty years to copying, performing, and supporting her husband's work, she was evicted from the Kantor's quarters at the Thomasschule within a year of his death. She had no income. Her stepchildren and children did not support her. She spent her final ten years in poverty and died in an almshouse in February 1760. She was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. No one wrote a funeral ode for her.
The Art of Fugue was left unfinished. According to a long-standing and deeply suggestive legend, the final fugue breaks off at the precise moment the B-A-C-H musical motif enters — those four notes in German notation, B-flat, A, C, B-natural — as though the composer died with his own name in his hands. Whether or not this is literally true, it is one of the great symbolic images in the history of music: a man who had encoded his identity into sound, leaving the world mid-signature. Chapter 4. Musical development and historical impact.
To understand what Bach did to music, you first need to understand the world of musical styles in early eighteenth-century Europe. There were, broadly speaking, three distinct national traditions. There was the French style: elegant, precise, dance-inflected, built on ornamentation and clarity of texture. There was the Italian style: theatrical, melodically lyrical, structurally driven by the ritornello principle in the concerto and the “da capo” form in the aria. And there was the German style: austere, harmonically complex, rooted in the Lutheran chorale tradition and the dense counterpoint of the church. Most composers worked within one of these traditions, occasionally borrowing from another. Bach absorbed all three simultaneously — and synthesised them into something for which no single national label was adequate.
The synthesis did not happen all at once. It was the result of each successive posting pushing him in a specific direction. In Lüneburg, he absorbed French style through Georg Böhm and the live French orchestra at Celle. In the first Weimar period and in Arnstadt, he deepened his North German organ roots through Buxtehude and Reincken. In the second Weimar period, the Vivaldi transcriptions gave him the Italian concerto form from the inside. In Köthen, freed from liturgical obligations, he applied all three traditions to instrumental music at its most concentrated: the cello suites, the violin partitas, the Brandenburg Concertos. In Leipzig, he applied everything to the grandest vocal forms: the Passions, the Mass, the cantata cycles.
At each stage, his harmonic language also evolved. The early organ works show the bold, somewhat extravagant fingerprints of the North German school — sudden unexpected dissonances, improvisatory flourishes, a willingness to go to remote harmonic places and find the way back through sheer contrapuntal logic. The Köthen instrumental works are more formally balanced — you can feel the Italian influence in their clarity and proportion. The Leipzig works are where the synthesis becomes complete: the Saint Matthew Passion weaves together North German chorale harmonisation, Italian dramatic aria, and French orchestral colour into a fabric so unified that it is almost impossible to hear the seams.
The counterpoint — the art of combining independent melodic lines so that each functions both autonomously and in perfect relationship to the others — is where Bach stands entirely alone in music history. His command of fugue, the most rigorous contrapuntal form, is simply without peer. The Well-Tempered Clavier, two volumes of twenty-four preludes and fugues in every major and minor key, has been in continuous pedagogical use for three hundred years. It is still assigned in conservatories worldwide as the foundational text of keyboard training. No other single work of Western music has had a longer unbroken pedagogical life.
Bach's name was already well known to professional musicians during his lifetime — primarily as a brilliant organist and as an almost frightening contrapuntist. But much of his vocal music, including the Passions and the cantatas, was essentially unknown outside Leipzig. After his death in 1750, that vocal music fell almost entirely silent. What kept his name alive for the next eight decades was his keyboard music, which circulated among professional musicians as a kind of technical touchstone. Beethoven studied the Well-Tempered Clavier as a child. Mozart encountered Bach's keyboard music through the Baron van Swieten in Vienna and said, by all accounts, something to the effect of "thank God, I have learnt something absolutely new." Beethoven called Bach "the father of all harmony" — and made the pun that his name ought to be Meer, meaning ocean, rather than Bach, meaning brook.
The rediscovery of Bach's choral music came in 1829, when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a performance of the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin — the first public performance of the work in nearly a century. He had found a copy of the manuscript as a boy of fifteen, a gift from his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter. The performance was a sensation. Mendelssohn subsequently introduced Bach's organ works to Robert Schumann, who said: "Only from one might all composers find ever-new creative power — from Johann Sebastian Bach." In 1850, the centenary of Bach's death, the Bach-Gesellschaft was founded, and over the following fifty years published the first complete edition of his works. That edition, running to forty-seven volumes, brought Bach's music into every serious musician's library and effectively established him as the canonical foundation of Western musical tradition.
What Mendelssohn's revival could not have known — and what we now understand — is that Bach's harmonic language in the late works was not simply the summit of Baroque practice but a pointer toward something entirely different. The Confiteor of the Mass in B Minor, the late canons of the Musical Offering, the final contrapunctus of the Art of Fugue: all of these contain harmonic experiments that the nineteenth century, for all its extravagance, did not surpass. It took Brahms, Reger, and ultimately Schoenberg to catch up with what Bach had done in his sixties while the Leipzig council was complaining about his teaching.
One final note on something Bach did not write: opera. He was the only major composer of his era to produce no operas whatsoever, despite working in a world saturated with the form. The reasons are debated. Some scholars argue he had no access to opera-producing institutions. Others argue that his theological commitments made him suspicious of a genre associated with spectacle, secular entertainment, and Italian sensibility. What is clear is that the dramatic impulse did not disappear — it found expression in the Passions, which function as sacred music-dramas, and in the secular cantatas, several of which are essentially operas with different costumes. His greatest comic work, the Coffee Cantata, is operatic in everything but name. Bach found ways to be a dramatist without the stage, and the results are, arguably, more lasting than any opera he might have written.
Now, since this is an episode about exploring Bach in all his dimensions — let us talk about Bach in film and television. Because his music has been woven into the fabric of cinema in ways that are sometimes profound, sometimes surprising, and occasionally downright sinister.
The earliest significant film use of Bach was the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor — one of the most recognisable pieces of music ever written — which appeared as early as Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, establishing what became a lasting association between this particular work and darkness, mystery, and the macabre. Walt Disney's Fantasia in 1940 used the same work in a spectacular abstract visual sequence arranged by Leopold Stokowski, bringing it to mass audiences worldwide.
The Goldberg Variations have had a particularly cinematic afterlife. Jonathan Demme's “The Silence of the Lambs” from 1991 — one of the few films to win all five major Academy Awards — uses the Aria from the Goldberg Variations in one of its most unsettling sequences, forever linking Bach's most serene and introspective music with the character of Hannibal Lecter. Glenn Gould's famous recordings of the variations had already made them one of the most iconic keyboard works in popular culture, but the “Silence of the Lambs” association gave them a peculiar new dimension. The variations also appear in “The English Patient”, in “Before Sunset”, in “Captain Fantastic”, and in Solaris.
Francis Ford Coppola's “The Godfather” from 1972 uses the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor as the musical backdrop for the baptism scene — one of the most celebrated sequences in cinema history, where scenes of ritual religious ceremony are intercut with scenes of orchestrated murder. The gravitas and inevitability of Bach's passacaglia bass line, cycling beneath the action, gives the scene much of its terrible weight.
Other notable film appearances: the Air from the Third Orchestral Suite — popularly known as “Air on the G String” — appears in the film “Seven” and in numerous television productions. The Prelude from the First Cello Suite appears in the science fiction film “Ex Machina”, underscoring a scene of engineered beauty and latent menace. The Brandenburg Concertos — particularly the Fourth — have appeared in cult films including “Cruel Intentions”. Danny Boyle's Trainspotting used a Bach chorale piece on its soundtrack.
More serious cinematic engagements with Bach include Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's 1967 film “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach”, a rigorous and austere docu-fiction in which the harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt plays Bach and the film is structured around performances of complete Bach works. It remains one of the most intelligent films ever made about a composer. Pere Portabella's 2007 Spanish film “The Silence Before Bach” explores the idea that Bach changed the world, moving between contemporary and historical settings. And Jan Svankmajer's 1965 animated short “J.S. Bach: Fantasy in G Minor”, which won the prize at Cannes, demonstrates that Bach's counterpoint and the logic of surrealist animation have more in common than you might expect. Chapter 5. Life apart from music.
Classical composers are sometimes presented to posterity as creatures of pure spirit — beings so devoted to their art that the mundane details of human life barely touched them. Bach was emphatically not that. He was argumentative, litigious, occasionally violent, genuinely funny, deeply pious, and earthily domestic all at once.
Let us start with his one and only documented hobby outside music: genealogy. Unlike Mozart, who loved billiards, card games, and horseback riding, Bach had essentially no recreational pastimes except one: around the age of fifty — precisely the age at which his father, his mother, and his elder brother Johann Christoph had all died — he compiled a document he called the Origin of the Musical Bach Family. It traced fifty-three Bach musicians over two hundred years, going back to the earliest identifiable ancestor, a Hungarian-born miller named Veit Bach, who lived around 1555 to 1619 and was said to play a cittern — a kind of plucked string instrument — while his grain was grinding. The obsessive timing of this project is not incidental. Bach was fifty when he began it: confronting the ages at which his closest relatives had died, tracing his lineage as a way of asserting continuity, of insisting that the family he had lost at ten years old had not, in fact, disappeared.
The extended Bach family met annually for boisterous reunions, and these gatherings had a tradition that tells you a great deal about the family's character. They would sing what they called Quodlibets — improvised multi-part harmonies mixing pious Lutheran chorales with bawdy songs full of sexual double-entendres. A surviving Quodlibet from a Bach family wedding opens, in the original German, with a word meaning "backside" or "rump." This fact was suppressed in all English-language publications until 1990. Bach included a Quodlibet as the penultimate variation of the Goldberg Variations — the thirty-first of thirty-two variations — mixing two popular German songs in a way that is superficially jolly but structurally perfect. The joke and the architecture coexist without friction. That is Bach.
He also had a notable relationship with coffee. Coffee-house culture was a defining feature of Leipzig intellectual life in the early eighteenth century, and Bach directed concerts at Zimmermann's “Coffee House and Gardens” for over a decade. He evidently liked the place. The Coffee Cantata — a comic secular cantata in which a frustrated father tries to break his daughter Liesgen's coffee addiction, while she secretly agrees to marry whoever allows her to keep drinking it — was almost certainly performed at Zimmermann's. It remains one of the funniest pieces of music ever written, and one suspects it drew on lived experience.
His material world was modest by any measure. At his death, his estate included nineteen musical instruments, of which five were harpsichords. The most valuable was assessed at eighty thalers — about one-seventh of his annual salary. He owned several stringed keyboard instruments, lutes, and string instruments across the family. He was a highly sought organ examiner throughout his career, consulted on instrument construction from his teenage years onward. His understanding of the organ's mechanical and acoustic properties was as expert as his understanding of its musical possibilities.
Then there is his faith — and this is perhaps the most important aspect of his non-musical life to understand, because it was in fact musical. For Bach, there was no separation between music and theology. He inscribed compositions with the abbreviations "J.—J." — Jesu juva, meaning "Jesus, help" — at the top and "S.D.G." — Soli Deo Gloria, "To God alone be the glory" — at the bottom. He wrote on the title page of his organ book: "To the honor of Almighty God alone, and for the instruction of my neighbor." This was not a formality. Luther had written that music was the highest gift next to theology, and Bach took this literally and personally.
He owned at least eighty theological volumes, including Luther's Complete Works in multiple editions. In 1742, he purchased a seven-volume set of Luther's works at auction for ten thalers — roughly one-sixth of his monthly income. There is some evidence that he may have altered the price on the receipt to conceal the expenditure from Anna Magdalena. He owned and heavily annotated a copy of the Calov Bible commentary, a massive scholarly edition of the Lutheran Bible, which was rediscovered in a library in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1934. In his copy, next to a passage in First Chronicles describing David's musicians, he wrote in the margin: "This chapter is the true foundation of all God-pleasing music." Next to a passage about disputes with authority, he underlined the text — the man who spent twenty-seven years fighting municipal councils was finding theological validation for his defiance in Scripture.
Bach grew up in Eisenach, where Luther had attended school two hundred years earlier. He attended the same Latin school. The Wartburg castle where Luther had translated the New Testament loomed over his childhood. This was not background scenery — it was a shaping context. Bach identified with Luther as a fellow Thuringian, a fellow craftsman of language and sound, a fellow man who had defied worldly authority in the service of a higher obligation. When critics attacked his music, when employers imprisoned him, when councils reprimanded him for excessive complexity, Bach's response was always essentially the same: I am answerable to God, not to you.
This was not arrogance — or not merely arrogance. It was a coherent theological position, consistently held for sixty-five years. And it explains why his secular music — the Brandenburg Concertos, the cello suites, the keyboard suites — carries the same quality of attentiveness, the same refusal of the merely adequate, as his Passions. For Bach, there was no music written for God and music written for the world. There was only music written well and music written badly. He wrote it well. Chapter 6. Where to find him today.
Bach died in 1750 in relative obscurity. But today, three centuries after the peak of his creative life, the institutional apparatus devoted to his study and performance is enormous. Let us take a tour.
The most important single institution for Bach research is the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, located on the Thomaskirchhof — the square in front of the Thomaskirche — in Leipzig. Founded in 1950 and incorporated into the University of Leipzig in 2008, it is the world's pre-eminent centre of Bach scholarship. It houses the Bach Museum, a specialist library, the editorial offices of the new scholarly complete edition, and organises both the annual Bachfest Leipzig and the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. The museum is an extraordinary place — the Bose House, where it is located, was the home of Bach's neighbour and friend Georg Heinrich Bose, and the building itself dates from Bach's time in Leipzig.
In Eisenach, Bach's birthplace, the Bachhaus is the world's oldest Bach museum. The building traditionally identified as his birthplace was later found to be a neighbouring house, but the museum itself occupies the site and context of his childhood and contains instruments from his era, manuscripts, and a remarkable reconstruction of domestic and musical life in late seventeenth-century Thuringia.
In Köthen, the Schloss Köthen — the castle where Prince Leopold held court — has been partially restored and houses a Bach memorial. In the Aula Palatina of the castle, you can stand in the room where Bach directed the prince's ensemble and where the Brandenburg Concertos may have been rehearsed.
The Thomaskirche itself in Leipzig is, of course, the site of Bach's grave. He was originally buried at the Johanniskirche, but his remains were transferred to the Thomaskirche in 1950, on the two hundredth anniversary of his death. The Saint Thomas Boys' Choir was founded in 1212 and continues to this day, performing a weekly Motette service that regularly includes Bach cantatas. The choir has been performing Bach continuously since his time as Thomaskantor, making it the longest-running institutional custodian of his work anywhere in the world.
Outside Thuringia, there are several remarkable institutions. The Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, founded in 1981 by the conductor Helmuth Rilling, combines a performance ensemble with educational programmes and has done as much as any single institution to bring Bach's complete choral output to international concert audiences. The American Bach Society, founded in 1972, supports scholarship and performance in North America, publishes the journals “Bach Notes and Bach Perspectives”, and co-sponsors the biennial “Bach Vocal Competition” for young American singers. The New Bach Society is the modern successor to the original Bach-Gesellschaft of 1850 and remains based in Leipzig.
Perhaps the most innovative Bach project of recent years is the “All of Bach” initiative of the Netherlands Bach Society. Founded in 1921, the Netherlands Bach Society is one of the world's most respected historically informed performance ensembles. In 2014, they embarked on a project to perform, film, and release online — entirely free of charge — every single one of Bach's more than one thousand works. By 2026, they have recorded and published over three hundred and fifty of them, with more released regularly on their website and YouTube channel. It is one of the most generous and significant acts of musical philanthropy in the internet age.
There are also two major annual festivals worth knowing about. The Bachfest Leipzig takes place every summer and draws audiences from around the world for ten days of intensive Bach performance across Leipzig's historic churches and concert halls. The Thuringian Bach Weeks span multiple cities including Eisenach, Weimar, Erfurt, and Arnstadt, tracing Bach's biographical geography through performance. The Oregon Bach Festival, associated with the University of Oregon since 1970, offers both concerts and the Berwick Academy for historically informed performance practice. Summary.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685 and died in Leipzig in 1750. In sixty-five years, he produced over one thousand catalogued compositions, raised twenty children, married twice, was imprisoned, fought constantly with his employers, and never once left Germany. He was orphaned at ten, found his first wife already buried on his return from a summer journey, spent twenty-seven years in a job that consistently undervalued him, and died nearly blind after two failed eye operations.
His music was largely forgotten within decades of his death. It survived the next eighty years almost solely through the devotion of professional musicians who passed his keyboard works from teacher to student like a private inheritance. Then Mendelssohn performed the Saint Matthew Passion in 1829, and the world began, slowly, to understand what it had set aside.
What it had set aside was a body of work that synthesised every musical tradition of early eighteenth-century Europe into a single, unprecedented idiom — French elegance, Italian architecture, German counterpoint — and pushed each of them further than any composer before or since. A body of work that was simultaneously a Lutheran theological project and a purely human investigation of what sound can do. A body of work whose harmonic language, in its most advanced passages, pointed toward experiments that the nineteenth century could not yet make and the twentieth century was still learning to interpret.
The man himself was a street fighter, a family man, a genealogist, a theologian, a keyboard demonstrator, a prolific father, a furious letter-writer, and the composer of some of the most transcendent music in the Western tradition — all at the same time, in a very small part of Germany, over sixty-five years.
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