108 Facts About Johann Sebastian Bach

The Bach family already had several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician, Johann Ambrosius, in Eisenach.

Johann Sebastian Bach died of complications after a botched eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.

Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 children with his two wives, Maria Barbara and Anna Magdalena, with 10 surviving into adulthood.

Johann Sebastian Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.

Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, and motets.

Johann Sebastian Bach often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works but, for instance, in his four-part chorales and his sacred songs.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote extensively for organ and for other keyboard instruments.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed concertos, for instance for violin and for harpsichord, and suites, as chamber music as well as for orchestra.

Johann Sebastian Bach's music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including the Air on the G String and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", and of recordings such as three different box sets with complete performances of his oeuvre marking the 250th anniversary of his death.

Johann Sebastian Bach was the eighth and youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach, the director of the town musicians, and Maria Elisabeth Lammerhirt.

Johann Sebastian Bach's uncles were all professional musicians who worked as church organists, court chamber musicians, and composers.

One uncle, Johann Christoph Bach, introduced him to the organ, and an older second cousin, Johann Ludwig Bach, was a well-known composer and violinist.

Johann Sebastian Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father died eight months later.

Johann Sebastian Bach received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord.

Johann Sebastian Bach learned theology, Latin and Greek at the local gymnasium.

Johann Sebastian Bach 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.

Johann Sebastian Bach felt discontented by the calibre of musicians he was collaborating with.

Johann Sebastian Bach called one of them, Geyersbach, a "Zippel Fagottist".

Johann Sebastian Bach knew Reincken's music very well; he copied Reincken's monumental An Wasserflussen Babylon when he was 15 years old.

Johann Sebastian Bach later wrote several other works on the same theme.

In 1706, Johann Sebastian Bach applied for a post as organist at the Blasius Church in Muhlhausen.

Four months after arriving at Muhlhausen, Johann Sebastian Bach married Maria Barbara Johann Sebastian Bach, his second cousin.

Johann Sebastian Bach convinced the church and town government at Muhlhausen to fund an expensive renovation of the organ at the Blasius Church.

In 1708, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote, a festive cantata for the inauguration of the new council, which was published at the council's expense.

Johann Sebastian Bach remained to help run the household until she died in 1729.

Johann Sebastian Bach attained the proficiency and confidence to extend the prevailing structures and include influences from abroad.

Johann Sebastian Bach learned to write dramatic openings and employ the dynamic rhythms and harmonic schemes found in the music of Italians such as Vivaldi, Corelli, and Torelli.

Johann Sebastian Bach absorbed these stylistic aspects to a certain extent by transcribing Vivaldi's string and wind concertos for harpsichord and organ; many of these transcribed works are still regularly performed.

Johann Sebastian Bach 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, Johann Sebastian Bach continued to play and compose for the organ and perform concert music with the duke's ensemble.

Johann Sebastian Bach began to write the preludes and fugues that were later assembled into his monumental work The Well-Tempered Clavier, consisting of two books, each containing 24 preludes and fugues in every major and minor key.

In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach was offered a post in Halle when he advised the authorities during a renovation by Christoph Cuntzius of the main organ in the west gallery of the Market Church of Our Dear Lady.

Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Kothen, hired Johann Sebastian Bach to serve as his in 1717.

Himself a musician, Leopold appreciated Johann Sebastian Bach's talents, paid him well, and gave him considerable latitude in composing and performing.

In 1719, Johann Sebastian Bach made the 35-kilometre journey from Kothen to Halle with the intention to meet Handel, but Handel had left town.

In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed Thomaskantor director of church music in Leipzig.

Johann Sebastian Bach had to direct the St Thomas School and provide four churches with music, the St Thomas Church, the St Nicholas Church, and to a lesser extent, the New Church and St Peter's Church.

Johann Sebastian Bach frequently disagreed with his employer, Leipzig's city council, which he regarded as "penny-pinching".

Johann Sebastian 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 had tested the organ of the St Paul's Church.

Johann Sebastian Bach was required to instruct the students in singing and provide church music for the main churches in Leipzig.

Johann Sebastian Bach was assigned to teach Latin but was allowed to employ four "prefects" to do this instead.

Johann Sebastian Bach usually led performances of his cantatas, most composed within three years of his relocation to Leipzig.

Johann Sebastian Bach started a second annual cycle on the first Sunday after the Trinity of 1724 and composed only chorale cantatas, each based on a single church hymn.

Johann Sebastian Bach drew the soprano and alto choristers from the school and the tenors and basses from the school and elsewhere in Leipzig.

Bach's predecessor as cantor, Johann Kuhnau, had been music director for the St Paul's Church, the church of Leipzig University.

In 1725, Johann Sebastian Bach "lost interest" in working even for festal services at St Paul's Church and decided to appear there only on "special occasions".

Johann Sebastian Bach was not required to play any organ in his official duties, but it is believed he liked to play on the St Paul's Church organ for his own pleasure.

Apart from showcasing his earlier orchestral repertoire, such as the Brandenburg Concertos and orchestral suites, many of Johann Sebastian Bach's newly composed or reworked pieces were performed for these venues, including parts of his, his violin and keyboard concertos, and the Coffee Cantata.

Johann Sebastian Bach presented the manuscript to the Elector in a successful bid to persuade the prince to give him the title of Court Composer.

Johann Sebastian Bach's appointment as Court Composer was an element of his long-term struggle to achieve greater bargaining power with the Leipzig council.

In 1735, Johann Sebastian Bach started preparing his first organ music publication, which was printed as the third Clavier-Ubung in 1739.

Johann Sebastian Bach's style shifted in the last decade of his life, showing an increased integration of polyphonic structures and canons and other elements of the stile antico.

Johann Sebastian Bach programmed and adapted music by composers of a younger generation, including Pergolesi, and his own students, such as Goldberg.

In 1746 Johann Sebastian Bach was preparing to enter Lorenz Christoph Mizler's Society of Musical Sciences.

Johann Sebastian Bach 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 a 6 Voc.

The king played a theme for Johann Sebastian Bach and challenged him to improvise a fugue based on it.

Johann Sebastian Bach obliged, playing a three-part fugue on one of Frederick's fortepianos, a new type of instrument at the time.

The Schubler Chorales, a set of six chorale preludes transcribed from cantata movements Johann Sebastian Bach had written two decades earlier, were published within a year.

Around the same time, the set of five canonic variations Johann Sebastian Bach had submitted when entering Mizler's society in 1747 were printed.

Johann Sebastian Bach saw to it that The Art of Fugue, though unfinished, was published in 1751.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the obituary, which was published in Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, a periodical journal produced by the Society of Musical Sciences, in 1754.

From an early age, Johann Sebastian Bach studied the works of his musical contemporaries of the Baroque period and those of earlier generations, and those influences are reflected in his music.

Johann Sebastian Bach had taught Luther's Small Catechism as the in Leipzig, and some of his pieces represent it.

The St Matthew Passion, like other works of its kind, illustrated the Passion with Bible text reflected in recitatives, arias, choruses, and chorales, but in crafting this work, Johann Sebastian Bach created an overall experience that has been found over the intervening centuries to be both musically thrilling and spiritually profound.

Johann Sebastian 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.

Johann Sebastian Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, emulating the chromatic fantasia genre used by earlier composers such as Dowland and Sweelinck in D dorian mode, is an example.

Modulation, or changing key in the course of a piece, is another style characteristic where Johann Sebastian Bach goes beyond the norm in his time.

The major development in Johann Sebastian Bach's time to which he contributed in no small way was a temperament for keyboard instruments that allowed their use in every key and modulation without retuning.

The second page of the Klavierbuchlein fur Wilhelm Friedemann Johann Sebastian Bach is an ornament notation and performance guide that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for his eldest son when he was nine years old.

Johann Sebastian Bach was generally quite specific on ornamentation in his compositions, and his ornamentation was often quite elaborate.

Apart from the 5th Brandenburg Concerto and the Triple Concerto, which already had harpsichord soloists in the 1720s, Johann Sebastian 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.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote virtuoso music for specific instruments as well as music independent of instrumentation.

Notwithstanding that the music and the instrument seem inseparable, Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed some pieces in this collection for other instruments.

Similarly, the virtuoso cello suites seem tailored to the instrument, the best of what is offered for it, but Johann Sebastian Bach arranged one of the suites for lute.

Johann Sebastian Bach exploited an instrument's capacities to the fullest while keeping the core of the music independent of the instrument on which it is performed.

Johann Sebastian Bach devoted more attention than his contemporaries to his compositions' structure.

Johann Sebastian Bach's known preoccupation with structure led to various numerological analyses of his compositions, although many of these were later rejected, especially those that wandered into symbolism-ridden hermeneutics.

Johann Sebastian Bach sought collaboration with various text authors for his cantatas and major vocal compositions, possibly writing or adapting such texts himself to make them fit the structure of the composition when he could not rely on the talents of other text authors.

Johann Sebastian Bach's collaboration with Picander for the St Matthew Passion libretto is best known, but there was a similar process in achieving a multi-layered structure for his St John Passion libretto a few years earlier.

In 1950, Wolfgang Schmieder published a thematic catalogue of Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions called the.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed Passions for Good Friday services and oratorios such as the Christmas Oratorio, which is a set of six cantatas for use in the liturgical season of Christmas.

The St John Passion was the first passion Johann Sebastian Bach composed during his tenure as Thomaskantor in Leipzig.

Johann Sebastian Bach's motets are pieces on sacred themes for choir and continuo, with instruments playing colla parte.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for organ and for stringed keyboard instruments such as harpsichord, clavichord and lute-harpsichord.

Johann Sebastian Bach was best known during his lifetime as an organist, organ consultant, and composer of organ works in both the traditional German free genres and stricter forms.

Around this time, Johann Sebastian Bach copied the works of numerous French and Italian composers to gain insights into their compositional languages and later arranged violin concertos by Vivaldi and others for organ and harpsichord.

Later in his life, Johann Sebastian Bach extensively consulted on organ projects, tested new organs, and dedicated playing organs to afternoon recitals.

The Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her" and the Schubler Chorales are organ works Johann Sebastian Bach published in the last years of his life.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote sonatas for a solo instrument such as the viola de gamba accompanied by harpsichord or continuo, as well as trio sonatas.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed and transcribed concertos for one to four harpsichords.

For other works, Johann Sebastian Bach's authorship was put in doubt without a generally accepted answer to the question of whether or not he composed it: the best-known organ composition in the BWV catalogue, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, was indicated as one of these uncertain works in the late 20th century.

The 19th century started with the publication of the first biography of Johann Sebastian Bach and ended with the Johann Sebastian Bach Gesellschaft's completion and publication of all his known works.

The BACH motif, which Johann Sebastian Bach occasionally used in his compositions, has been used in dozens of tributes to him since the 19th century.

Johann Sebastian Bach was remembered more as a virtuoso organ player and a teacher.

Johann Sebastian Bach's surviving family members, who inherited many of his manuscripts, were not all equally concerned with preserving them, leading to considerable losses.

Johann Sebastian Bach's influence was felt in the next generation of early Romantic composers.

Johann Sebastian Bach's music was transcribed and arranged to suit contemporary tastes and performance practice by composers such as Carl Friedrich Zelter, Robert Franz, and Franz Liszt, or combined with new music such as the melody line of Charles Gounod's "Ave Maria".

In 1854, Johann Sebastian Bach was deemed one of the three Bs by Peter Cornelius, the others being Beethoven and Berlioz.

In 19th-century Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach was coupled with nationalist feeling, and he was inscribed in a religious revival.

In England, Johann Sebastian Bach was coupled with a revival of religious and baroque music.

Books such as Godel, Escher, Johann Sebastian Bach put the composer's art in a wider perspective.

Johann Sebastian Bach's music was extensively listened to, performed, broadcast, arranged, adapted, and commented upon in the 1990s.

Three works by Johann Sebastian Bach are featured on the Voyager Golden Record, a gramophone record containing a broad sample of the images, sounds, languages, and music of Earth, sent into space with the two Voyager probes: the first movement of Brandenburg Concerto No 2, the "Gavotte en rondeaux" from the Partita for Violin No 3, and the Prelude and Fugue No 1 in C major from The Well-Tempered Clavier.

High-resolution facsimiles of Johann Sebastian Bach's autographs became available at the Johann Sebastian Bach Digital website.

In 2019, Johann Sebastian Bach was named the greatest composer of all time in a poll of 174 living composers.

Johann Sebastian Bach was originally buried at Old St John's Cemetery in Leipzig.

Johann Sebastian Bach's grave went unmarked for nearly 150 years, but in 1894 his remains were found and moved to a vault in St John's Church.