His timeless "Christmas Oratorio," the cantatas composed while cantor of St. Thomas church in Leipzig, the "Well Tempered Clavier" set of preludes and "The Art of Fugue" all retain a lasting influence on the music world.
In his bilingual English-German illustrated biography, titled "Bach," Bach Festival Leipzig artistic director Michael Maul takes a look at other aspects of the great 18th-century composer's life.
He describes a man who repeatedly offended his employers and in later years increasingly withdrew from church music. "There are many Bach biographies where Bach is portrayed as an eternal winner," says Michael Maul, who reviewed documents that allow for a different interpretation. "My impression is that there were much stronger cultural-political conflicts in Bach's time that people didn't know about," the renowned Bach researcher told DW.
A daily dose of Bach
Maul has researched Johann Sebastian Bach for more than 20 years — and feels he is far from done. Too many questions remain unanswered, and new notes or fragments of manuscripts still turn up.
In his biography, Maul put together many of these pieces of the mosaic in chronological order. "I have tried to reflect the state of Bach research and to insert things that I have not yet seen written anywhere," he says.
Bach instructed the famous St. Thomas Boys' ChoirImage: Matthias Knoch
The Bach expert tells readers about lesser know sides of Bach — who skipped class in school, beat up amateur bassoonists, and used bogus applications to play potential employers off against each other and demand more salary. He uncovers "aberrations in Bach research," including theories exaggerating Bach's attachment to number symbolism.
Rare facts about Bach
Michael Maul grew up surrounded by Bach's music. His father was an avid piano player, "and he had two musical household gods, one was Beethoven and the other was Bach," Maul says.
Unlike Ludwig van Beethoven, however, Johann Sebastian Bach left few personal writings or statements, just one letter to his friend Georg Erdmann.
The world of Bach in images
Only one historically verified portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach exists, but the great composer left us with diverse visual motifs — and inspired a new one! DW presents a sample, from Leipzig to Lübeck and God to Google.
Image: Imago
At the Thomaskirchhof in Leipzig
For years nobody knew for certain where Johann Sebastian Bach's earthly remains were buried. After they were finally exhumed and verified around the turn of the 20th century, the "New Bach Memorial" was erected in 1908 just steps away from the side entrance to St. Thomas Church, where Bach had been the music director. The bust was patterned after the size and shape of the composer's skull.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Jan Woitas
Computer-aided guesstimate
Due to a lack of authentic historical sources, we have only a rough idea of what Bach looked like. This image of his possible physiognomy, generated for an exhibition at the Bach House in Eisenach in 2008, was based on a plaster cast of the composer's skull and new forensic methods. He looks friendlier here than in the more traditional, severe, bewigged depictions.
The name "Bach" was once synonymous for "musician" in the central German region of Thuringia. There were Bachs in cities and towns everywhere, from Erfurt to Weimar, Ohrdruf to Eisenach, where Johann Sebastian was born in 1685 in the above house. He later listed 53 musician family members, most of them in the service of a court or a church. At family get-togethers, they — what else? — made music.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Angry young man?
Having lost both parents by age ten, Johann Sebastian went to live in Ohrdruf with his 14-year-older brother and received musical tutelage. Little is known about his youth other than that he snapped up every scrap of music he could get his hands on. At one point he described a fellow musician's playing in unflattering terms. The quarrel escalated, but a duel was averted at the last moment.
Image: picture-alliance/empics/D. Lawson
St. Mary's Church in Lübeck
Hearing your favorite music today is easy: just don your headphones. To hear the music he wanted, the young Bach traveled over 200 miles (321 km) — by foot. Destination: Lübeck, on Germany's north coast. It was there the great organist Dieterich Buxtehude held his legendary "Abendmusiken" (evening concerts) in St. Mary's Church. Buxtehude left deep marks on Bach's organ playing and composing.
Image: picture-alliance/Helga Lade Fotoagentur GmbH, Ger
Court orchestra director in Weimar
In 1708, at age 23, Bach landed a prestigious gig in Weimar (above). He wrote his first cantata masterpieces and the greater part of his organ works in the following nine years there. In 1717 he opted to move on to even greener fields, but Weimar didn't want to let him go. In those days, quitting a job could mean imprisonment for insubordination, and Bach did in fact spend a month behind bars.
Image: Imago/W. Otto
Happiest years in Köthen
In the first part of his tenure as orchestra director at the court in Köthen (above), Bach had a superbly equipped orchestra at his disposal and, in Prince Leopold, a music-loving patron and friend. Many of his instrumental works were written there. But when Leopold took a wife who was less interested in music, Bach's working conditions suffered, so he began looking for a different job.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
St. Thomas School
Today Leipzig is proud of Bach, but this was less so during his lifetime. He was only third choice to be cantor of the prestigious St Thomas Church and School (above). His grueling work regimen included writing, rehearsing and performing a new cantata week after week. Bach eventually found himself at odds with church and city authorities, leading him to apply for jobs elsewhere — unsuccessfully.
Image: public domain
The family that plays together, stays together
20 children issued forth from Bach's two marriages. Nine survived him, and four of his sons became musicians of renown. Johann Sebastian Bach did everything he could to pass on the musical family tradition, as this image likely depicting him at the keyboard captures, but it ended with his sons. The generation to follow brought forth no musicians of stature.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images (Ausschnitt)
The sound of money
With all those hungry mouths to feed, Bach complained about the high cost of living in Leipzig. He even dryly noted that in one year, the city's healthy air meant fewer deaths, less funerals and a regrettable loss of income through a resultant decline in fees for a musician's services.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
Zimmermann's Coffee House
Restive schoolchildren, bickering with authorities, burdensome tasks and scant respect: The life of a cantor at St. Thomas wasn't easy. For a change of pace, Bach would go to the local coffee house, Cafe Zimmermann (above), and make music with friends and students in Leipzig's Collegium Musicum musical society.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
The portrait by Haussmann
Only one authentic image of Johann Sebastian Bach exists: the painting by Elias Gottlob Haussmann from the year 1748. For over 60 years it hung in the living room of the musicologist, historian and arts patron William Scheide in Princeton, New Jersey, in the US. Scheide left the precious object to the Bach Archive in Leipzig, and it was returned to the city by his widow Judith in 2015 (above).
Image: Imago
Soli Deo Gloria
Bach signed many of his compositions with the initials "S.D.G." (Soli Deo Gloria — To the glory of God alone). This declaration is found even on a number of his works of secular music and points to a deeply felt, personal religiosity. Even in his everyday compositions, Bach always strove for perfection. That in itself could be taken as an expression of his faith.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Can you Bach?
On Johann Sebastian Bach's 334th birthday, Google greeted users with this doodle, inviting them to engage in an interactive exercise and compose a short melody. After cross-comparing hundreds of compositions by Bach, the software then embellished that melody by adding a multivoiced accompaniment in style of the composer. It seems doubtful that the results were as ingenious as the original, though.
Image: google.de
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Bach's childhood is hinted at in the obit his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote, including that he would secretly borrow his brother's music book to copy the pieces of "famous masters."
The gaps in Bach's biography become apparent everywhere, Maul argues in the preface to his illustrated chronicle.
But even sheet music on yellowed paper can provide fascinating insights into Bach's working methods. Marginal notes on one of the music sheets show Bach already had the next idea in mind while he was still writing a work.
"He spends most of his time finding a theme, that's the creative part," Maul says, adding that the rest is craftsmanship, when "the brain obviously switches to autopilot mode" and the composer penned what he had in mind.
He must have been under enormous pressure: from 1723, in his early days as cantor at St. Thomas church in Leipzig, Bach wrote a new cantata every week.
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Too demanding for the St.Thomas choir
As cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote music for church services, but it was so demanding that musicians and singers were often overwhelmed, in particular the famous St. Thomas Boys' Choir, which he trained.
When the city council decided to open the St. Thomas School to more children from the poorer classes, Bach protested because musical talent was no longer to play a major role in the choice of students, leading to a fierce dispute between the composer and his employer.
The council minutes give a glimpse of Bach's personality from the perspective of the council, which labeled him as unruly and obstinate, as a cantor who didn't seem that interested in working.
Is the man portrayed on the right the young composer?Image: Lehmstedt Verlag/Bach-Archiv Leipzig
"Imagine being extremely gifted like Bach was, exploring areas where hardly anyone could follow him," says Michael Maul. Bach was not very diplomatic, so as a result, he increasingly withdrew.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a tragic figure in this respect, despite his musical genius, Maul argues.
In his last years, Bach devoted himself more to secular music and created demanding works including the "Clavier-Übungen" volume of keyboard practice, the famous "Goldberg Variations" and "The Art of Fugue."
Why Bach is still fascinating
Bach's appearance is as elusive. On the cover of Maul's biography is a famous painting by Gottlob Haussmann, one of the rare portraits of the composer.
But the Bach expert mentions a possible portrait of the composer as a young man. The Bach Archive has a portrait by an unknown 18th-century artist that surfaced in 2016, with a handwritten note on the back suggesting it is a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach. "The picture is currently being examined with all kinds of technical aids," Maul says, adding that the eyes appear to bear a resemblance to the Haussmann painting.
A Bach canon at Harvard University's Houghton Library Image: Lehmstedt Verlag
Research into Johann Sebastian Bach's life seems to be a never-ending story. Maul hopes his biography will bring the human side of the composer to life for readers, pointing out the fascination of "this mixture of music god and a man with rough edges, who made it anything but easy for those around him."
To round off the biography, Maul quotes what he calls a "divine" musician joke at the end.
A musician goes to heaven and is looking forward to finally getting an answer to the question of whether God prefers to listen to Mozart or Bach, the joke goes. As he stands before the throne of God, he hears a Mozart melody, leading him to reflect to the Lord: "On earth, many people think you must love to listen to Bach, but I see now that you rather listen to Mozart." Whereupon the creator of the world looks at him kindly and replies, "I am Bach."
