Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)

Organist, harpsichordist and cantor in Leipzig, Bach took Baroque counterpoint to a height never matched since. His inventions, preludes and fugues remain the daily bread of every pianist.

Born in Eisenach in 1685 into a large family of musicians, Johann Sebastian Bach lost both parents by about the age of ten and was raised by his elder brother Johann Christoph, an organist who taught him the keyboard. He became an organist himself in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, then served the court of Weimar, where he wrote much of his organ music.

From 1717 to 1723 he was court music director in Köthen: the years of the Brandenburg Concertos, the suites for solo cello and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1723 he became cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, a post he held until his death in 1750; there he wrote hundreds of cantatas and the St Matthew Passion, and later assembled the Mass in B minor.

His language is built on counterpoint: several independent lines, each a melody in its own right, interlocking to create the harmony. Bach mastered every form of his day — fugue, chorale, dance suite, Italian concerto — and fused them into a personal synthesis of rare rigour and expressive depth.

Somewhat neglected after his death, he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, notably through Mendelssohn’s 1829 revival of the St Matthew Passion. Chopin practised The Well-Tempered Clavier before his concerts, and no pianist today bypasses Bach.

For a student, Bach is a school of hand independence, polyphonic listening and fingering. From the little minuets of the Anna Magdalena Notebook to the inventions and on to the preludes and fugues, he accompanies a whole lifetime of learning.

Piano sheet music (243)

Guitar sheet music (19)