Anyone who has ever stood in silence listening to an organ chorale in a church, without knowing the composer’s name, has probably heard something written by Johann Sebastian Bach. He never wanted to be remembered as a genius: he wanted his music to serve worship and point to God.
Born in Eisenach, Germany, on March 21, 1685, Bach was orphaned of both parents before he turned ten. He was raised by his older brother, an organist by trade, who taught him his first chords at the keyboard and set him on the path of music.
While still young, he became organist in Arnstadt and later in Mühlhausen, where he married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach in 1707. His intense temperament already showed itself: in 1705, after publicly calling a bassoonist at the church a poor musician, Bach became involved in a street brawl in Arnstadt that ended in a sword duel. The church council found the bassoonist guilty of the assault, but also reprimanded Bach for provoking the confrontation with the insult.
He passed through Weimar before taking up, in 1723, the post of cantor of St Thomas Church in Leipzig, where he would live until his death. His departure from Weimar was not peaceful either: when he asked to resign in order to take the post of Kapellmeister in Köthen, he was imprisoned for nearly a month by order of Duke Wilhelm Ernst for stubbornly insisting on the request; he was only released in December 1717, with a dishonorable discharge. Once in Leipzig, he composed most of his more than two hundred cantatas, along with the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B Minor.
Widowed at 35, he married again, to the singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke, sixteen years his junior; together they had thirteen children, in addition to the four surviving children from his first marriage. The Leipzig city council also considered him difficult and stubborn, and Bach did in fact resist orders he saw as interference in the music of the church.
His faith, however, was not merely a formality of office. Bach owned an annotated Bible, today preserved in the United States, in which he wrote in his own hand: “where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present.” At the end of nearly every score, he wrote the initials S.D.G, Soli Deo Gloria, glory to God alone.
Blinded by complications from two unsuccessful eye surgeries, he died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750, nearly forgotten outside church music circles. Almost a century later, the rediscovery of his work by Mendelssohn’s generation would reveal to the world the full scope of what he had composed to last.
Today his cantatas and passions continue to be heard and translated in dozens of countries, carrying biblical text and praise to audiences who would never set foot in a Lutheran church. Bach remains a reminder that talent and craft, when devoted to God, outlast centuries.
