Take a look at our current subscription offers.
Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750
Johann Sebastian Bach was music's most sublime creative genius. Yet despite the sheer vastness of his output, Bach sustained a rarefied level of musical inspiration that continues to amaze his most gifted successors.
Life and Music
- During his lifetime his talent went largely unrecognised and by the time of his death he was viewed as something of a musical dinosaur who had stubbornly refused to move with the times.
- With the notable exception of opera, Bach composed towering masterpieces in every major Baroque genre: sonatas, concertos, suites and cantatas, as well as innumerable keyboard, organ and choral works.
- In his later years Bach faced harsh criticism. During the 1720s and 1730s when he was composing his most important works - the Passions and Goldberg Variations among them - a new Italian style invaded Germany, making his work appear outdated.
- Bach's music was widely studied by academics and composers of the succeeding generation, one of his fans was Beethoven.
- In spite of his popularity, public performances of Bach's music were scarce at this time, but for composers of his generation there was nothing unusual in that.
- On 11 March 1829, Felix Mendelssohn directed the Berliner Singakademie in the first complete performance of the St Matthew Passion in almost a century and Bach's reputation took off.
- Perhaps the main reason that Bach meant so much to 19th-century composition was his extraordinary adaptability to Romantic style.
- The likes of Edward Elgar and Leopald Stokowski would later pay homage to Bach by making gargantuan orchestral arrangements of his organ music.
- Bach's music has proved indestructible. Whether jazzed up by Jacques Loussier, transcribed for doo-be-doo vocals in the manner of the Swing Singers, given the Mantovani strings treatment, played on panpipes or steel drums, Bach still comes up sounding magnificent.
Did you know?
Bach once walked two hundred and thirteen miles to hear a performance by an organist whom he admired. Once he had heard the concert, he turned round and walked the same distance home again!
