New Illustrated Lives of Great Composers: Bach

By Tim Dowley

A new and fascinating biography of the most outstanding composer in musical history, covering Bach's earliest efforst in Eisenach, his cultural inheritance, his series of posts as organist or musician, and his stormy career in Leipzig.

It also traces the significant stages of development in his family and his music. Reproductions of engraving and portraits of the time help to recreate the era in which Bach flourished. The origins of all the composer's major works are discussed and put into the context of the contemporary world. Written both the general reader and the specialist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857128485

Tim Dowley

Dr Tim Dowley is a historian and a prolific author and editor of Bible resources for adults and children. He holds a bachelor's degree in History and a doctorate in Church History, both from the University of Manchester, England. He has written a number of children's stories and books on biblical subjects and the history of Christianity, as well as works on music and literature. Tim has traveled extensively, particularly in Israel, Turkey and other biblical lands. He lives in South London with his wife and family.

Book preview

1. A Family Business: Eisenach 1685–95

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on 21 March 1685, at Eisenach, in the region of Thuringia, central Germany. By coincidence, this was little more than a month after the birth of Georg Frideric Handel, at Halle, a mere thirty miles away. However unlike his great contemporary Handel, who travelled widely, Bach never moved very far from his birthplace. And while Handel attracted considerable fame in his lifetime, Bach was scarcely recognized outside his native region, and little of his music was published during his life.

Eighteenth-century Germany

Any semblance of unity within German-speaking lands had been shattered by the turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War, 1616–48. Petty princelings and domineering dukes ruled autocratically over independent states, some as small as a few square miles in area. In the more than 300 such states, the local ruler frequently aped the magnificence of that supreme arbitrary monarch, the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, r. 1643–1715. Each strove to provide himself with a suitable palace, appropriate ceremonial and extravagant works of art – financed largely from heavy taxation on an oppressed peasantry. The merchants and bourgeoisie similarly preened themselves, seeking to project affluence and style; this was a period when commercial and dynastic prosperity was extravagantly expressed in lavish architecture, elaborate fine art and pompous powdered wigs.

Contemporary view of the town of Eisenach, Thuringia, where Bach was born.

A cittern, or zither. Sebastian’s great grandfather was a keen cittern player.

Germany was riven with religious rivalries. In much of southern Germany, the Roman Catholic church still held sway, and was rallying to fight back against Protestant inroads. Over the majority of the rest of Germany, Lutheranism prevailed, with local strongholds of Reformed – or Calvinist – Protestantism. In many universities and churches, Lutheranism had petrified into a rigid, dry-as-dust doctrinal system, a deadness challenged by the warm devotion of the ‘Pietists’, who stressed the cultivation of a holy life and the imitation of Christ before all else, giving rise to a rich vein of meditative writings.

The Germans were open to diverse artistic influences. Devastated by the savagery of the Thirty Years’ War, there was space for cultural stimulation from abroad. Italian Baroque architecture, and the music of such composers as Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), reached northwards to influence Catholic Austria and Bavaria. By contrast, the more sober tastes and architectural styles of the prosperous Protestant Netherlanders spread south into the largely Lutheran states of northern Germany, to leave their mark on the churches and public buildings of that area. With France resurgent, the triumphal styles and forms of French architecture and painting were also reflected in imitations and nuances throughout Germany.

Germany stood at the crossroads of musical influences too. She had her own strong tradition of polyphonic singing, the heritage of the Middle Ages and of the Lutheran Reformation. From Italy came melodies of sensual charm and dramatic strength – the unique tradition of bel canto singing; but also the musical form of the concerto, featuring one or more solo instrument, and of the trio sonata, in which two instruments played melodically, while the third provided a bass and a keyboard instrument usually filled in the harmonies. From France came the overture, with its slow introduction, quick fugue and emphatic coda; the dance suite, made up of a series of different dance-types; and ‘programme music’, attempting to describe musically natural phenomena or events. The French also led the rest of Europe in techniques of orchestral organisation and performance. While some German musicians preferred one style to another, in the first part of the eighteenth century the various influences were gradually combined and assimilated to produce the rich musical style characteristic of late Baroque.

The Bach family’s home in Eisenach.

Bach’s early years

Sebastian’s birth is recorded in the Eisenach church book:

To Mr Johann Ambrosius Bach, Town Musician, a son; godfathers Sebastian Nagel, Town Musician at Gotha, and Johann Georg Koch, Ducal Forester of this place. Name: Joh. Sebastian.

The Bach family had been professional musicians for several generations; we know of nearly eighty by name, of whom more than half were organists. In his later years, Johann Sebastian wrote proudly of his ancestors, in an account he entitled the Origin of the Musical Bach Family. Vitus, or Veit, Sebastian’s great-great-grandfather, who died in 1619, had been a baker at Wechmar, in Thuringia, having fled there from Hungary to escape persecution for his Lutheran faith. Vitus ‘found his greatest pleasure in a little zither [or guitar], which he even took with him to the mill to play while the grinding was going on.’ Vitus’ son, Hans, a carpet-weaver, was also an itinerant violinist, widely known in central Germany for his performances at weddings. Of Hans’s three sons, Johannes (1604–73) was an organist and violinist, and leader of the Erfurt band; Heinrich (1615–92) was organist at Arnstadt; and Christoph (1613–61) a violinist in the Arnstadt town band. Each brother in turn produced a further family of musicians: Christoph was Sebastian’s grandfather.

There was plenty to keep the professional musician busy in eighteenth-century Germany. As we have seen, the land was still divided up into numerous small states, dukedoms, principalities and free cities, and almost every ruler boasted his own band of court musicians, and each city its official music-makers. The court musicians would be called upon to perform on ceremonial occasions and entertain at state functions. The municipal musicians were also asked to play at official events, but were needed particularly to provide music at the town’s principal church. The church also required an organist and cantor, or director of music. All such men practised music as a craft, producing music appropriate to the occasion, with skill and practised dexterity.

The interior of the Bachs’ home, Eisenach.

The Wartburg, Eisenach, where Martin Luther was concealed from the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Eisenach, Bach’s birthplace, is also famous as the hideout of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther during his period of greatest peril, in 1531. It was here, in the fortress of the Wartburg, that he was concealed from officers of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, after having been excommunicated by Pope Leo X. Luther used this enforced solitude to translate the Bible into German, subsequently referring to Eisenach as ‘his dear city’. The town and region became infused with Lutheran theology and liturgy, as it was already with music. In 1698, the Annals of Eisenach bragged: ‘Our town was always celebrated for music – and what is the anagram of Isenacum [Eisenach] but en musica [look! Music] or canimus [we sing]?’

Contemporary view of Erfurt, Thuringia, where Sebastian’s older brother Johann Christoph studied with the celebrated organist Pachelbel.

Johann Sebastian’s father, Johann Ambrosius (1645–95), originally from Erfurt, also in Thuringia, appears to have been an accomplished singer, and was skilled on the violin and viola. He is described as having ‘the fleshy nose and thick jaw … [which] seem to proclaim the stubborn tenacity of the Bach clan’. Ambrosius worked as court trumpeter for the Duke of Eisenach, as director of the town’s musicians, who were required to play twice daily at the town hall, and also as an instrumentalist at the Georgenkirche (St George’s church). He was married to Maria Elisabetha (1644–94), the daughter of an Erfurt councillor named Lämmerhirt, and had eight children in all, Johann Sebastian being the youngest. Like the Bachs, the Lämmerhirt family was well represented locally in the music profession.

From the outset, young Sebastian was surrounded by music. His brothers were learning to play a variety of instruments, and the adults were constantly practising and rehearsing, copying and arranging music, repairing instruments and teaching apprentices. Young Sebastian may have learned the violin from his father, and listened to his father’s cousin, ‘the profound composer’ Johann Christoph (1642–1703), court harpsichordist at Eisenach from 1665, playing the organ at the Georgenkirche.

Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the mathematician and philosopher, was born in Leipzig, Saxony.

However little definite is known of Sebastian’s earliest years. At the age of eight, he entered Eisenach’s Lateinschule (Latin School), where two of his brothers were also pupils, and where Luther had been a student two centuries earlier. He was taught Bible History, the Catechism and Latin grammar, with classes lasting from six o’clock until nine in the morning, and from one o’clock until three in the afternoon, with an extra hour in winter. Sebastian evidently had a good singing voice; he was promoted to the Chorus musicus, which sang polyphonic music at church services and festivals, including settings by such German composers as Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) and Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672).

Death came often to the Bach family: by the time Sebastian was six, four of his siblings had died. The proximity of death – together with a Lutheran emphasis on Christ’s death and resurrection – coloured much of Bach’s later work. During Sebastian’s short time at the Lateinschule, a further series of deaths occurred in his family, possibly explaining his very frequent absences, noted in the school records. These losses culminated in the death of his mother, Elisabetha, on 3 May 1694, when Sebastian was still only nine years old. Ambrosius remarried the following January, to Barbara Margaretha Keul – who had been twice widowed before – but himself died, following a lengthy and serious illness, the following month, 20 February 1695, leaving his widow with at least five children to look after.

A concert for aristocrats in eighteenth-century France.

The Bach family seems to have become accustomed to supporting its members when in such straits. Sebastian and his brother Johann Jacob (1682–1722) were now taken into the home and care of their