Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach has done everything completely,
he was a man through and through

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

General

Johan Sebastian Bach was born on 21 March 1685 in Germany.

If Bach was alive today he would be 337 years old! He died at the age of 65 so he lived twice as long as Mozart.

He was born 70 years after William Shakespeare. He died 6 years before Mozart and he lived at the same time as the scientist Isaac Newton and the founding father of USA George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

Religious

I think we know a lot about Bach as a person; one thing that is important to know about him was Bach’s deep religious conviction. He was a devout Lutheran Christian and commended his music to God. That is why so much of his music is filled with a deep spirituality. And although Baroque music wasn’t as emotionally raw as Romantic music, you can hear profound and controlled emotion in many of Bach’s seminal pieces: his Chaconne (from Partita No.2 in D minor for violin) is widely considered one of the greatest pieces for solo violin, and was composed shortly after Bach learned of the death of Maria Barbara Bach.

So we actually have quite a complex man– yes, temperamental, strong-willed and stubborn. He was also a delinquent in his youth and was known to get into fights. However, he was deeply devoted to Lutheran Christianity, devoted to his music, a strict and attentive father, and a man affected by loss throughout his life: he lost both his parents, his siblings, his first wife and 10 of his 20 children. That’s a lot of grief, which he channeled into his music.

Death

Bach worked during the last years of the life, when his sight began to fail. He was almost totally blind when he died, leaving his wife in dire financial straits.

By the time of Bach’s death, musical fashions were fast changing, and his music was perceived as antiquated. During his life time he had been more celebrated as an organist than as a composer. Unlike Mozart of Beethoven, he had little posthumous influence until Mendelssohn rediscovered his choral masterpieces in the 19th century, and his works began to be performed once more.

He is now revered as one of the greatest of all composers.

Steven Isserlis says “If I must choose just the one composer, and stick with him for life, it would have to be Johann Sebastian Bach”.

What was so great about him was his music – it is – total genius. Every note that he ever wrote sounds completely right! And he wrote some of the saddest music there is, some of the happiest music, some of the most beautiful, the most exciting…

Facts about Bach

When he was young, he got into a sword-fight with a student whose bassoon-playing Bach didn’t like; and later in life, he got so furious with a musician for playing wrong notes that he snatched the wig off his ow head, and hurled it at him!

His great-great grandfather Veit Bach, was a baker, who couldn’t bear to be without his musical instrument, a very old sort of guitar called the cittern. His father Johann Ambrosius was a musician as well.

More than seventy-five Bachs became professional musician

Bach had two wives (not at the same time). The first, Maria Barbara, was his first cousin. They had seven children together.

His second wife was Anna Magdalena and they had thirteen children together.

He was the greatest organist and harpsichordist of his time.

Major works

Brandenburg Concertos (1721); 4 orchestral suites; 7 harpsichord concertos; 3 violin concertos; Goldberg Variations (1722); The Well Tempered Clavier (1722-44); over 200 cantatas; St John Passion (1723); St Matthew Passion (1729); Christmas Oratorio (1734); Italian concerto (1735); The Musical Offering ((1747); Mass in B minor (1749); The Art of Fugue (1750).

Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland, (born Nov. 14, 1900 Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S. – died Dec. 2, 1990, North Tarrytown, American composer who achieved a distinctive musical characterization of American themes in an expressive modern style.

Robert Alexander Schumann

To me, Schumann’s memory is holy.
The noble, pure artist forever remains my ideal.

Johannes Brahms (1833-97)

Henry Purcell

Mr Purcell, in whose person we have at length found an Englishman eqal with the best abroad

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Franz Joseph Haydn

So far as genius can exist in a man who is merely virtuous Haydn had it

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Ludwig van Beethoven

Nature would burst should she attempt to produce nothing save Beethovens.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

If you were living in Vienna in 1820 and had met Beethoven, you would have thought that he was very odd. His clothes, his hair, his hat were all messy. He would walk along very energetically, muttering and gesturing to himself, sometimes breaking into a loud lough, for no apparent reason. And then he would stop to sing, grunt or howl some notes, whip a notebook out of his pocket, write something down, and stomp off again.
If he had invited you to his rooms (very unlikely), you would have thought he was even odder! The place was full of sheets of music everywhere, a piano with most of its strings broken and ink spilled inside it, worn-down. Furniture placed higgledy-piggledy, the remains of half-eaten food lying around and much more we don’t want to describe!

Early years

Beethoven was born into a musical family. His grandfather had been music director to the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, and his father was also employed at the electoral court, though in the lowlier position of singer and instrumentalist. As with the Mozart family, the majority of the seven children born to Johann van Beethoven and his wife died in infancy.
Three boys survived: Ludwig, born on 16 or 17 December 1770, and two younger brothers, Caspar Carl and Nikolaus.
Beethoven’s father Johann, was an alcoholic bully, who was determined that his eldest son should follow in the your Mozart’s footsteps as a child prodigy (although Beethoven didn’t have Mozart’s natural talent).
Johann, unlike Leopold Mozart, lacked abilities as a teacher, and forced his son to practice the keyboard constantly at the expense of his general education. He was even locking him at the basement of the house to practice is he was not satisfied enough with his progress.
From around 1780 Beethoven received more kindly and sympathetic instruction from the court composer and organist Christian Neefe, who organised the publication of his pupil’s first composition.
In 1787 Neefe suggested that Beethoven should travel to Vienna to take lessons from Mozart, who was much impressed with his talent.
Unfortunately his trip had to be postponed because of news about his mother’s illness.
She died of tuberculosis in the summer of that year, leaving him to cope with his father’s violence and alcoholism.
At the age of 18 Beethoven assumed responsibility for the family affairs, being granted half his father’s court salary as well as his own. He also found an influential patron, Count Ferdinand Waldstein, who persuaded the elector to allow Beethoven leave to study with Haydn in Vienna. The elector agreed, and in 1792 Beethoven arrived in Vienna, the city which meant to be his permanent home.

Vienna

On his arrival in Vienna, Beethoven took advantage of introductions provided by Waldstein and Haydn. Musical life still owed much to phenomenally rich patrons, a number of whom were to figure prominently in Beethoven’s life, such as the Lichnowskys, Archduke Rudolph (brother of Emperor Francis), and the Lobdowitz, Browne, Razumovsky and Kindsky families.
Virtuoso performers, such as Beethoven, were much in demand in the drawing rooms.
Beethoven found that his lessons with Haydn were not a great success, but he quickly began to make a name as a pianist, with a formidable reputation for improvisation.
Beethoven gave his first public concert, playing a new piano concert of his own, at the Burgtheater on 29 March 1795, astonishing the audience with his fiery virtuosity and establishing a pattern which would continue for several years.
Over the next four years he went on occasional concerts in Vienna, and issued his chamber works in print, sonatas for piano (including the magnificent Pathetique Sonata No 8 in C minor), violin and cello, and the Op. 16 Quintet for piano and wind.
Nobody knows for certain when Beethoven’s birthday was. His birth was registered on December 17th, which probably means that he was born on the 16 th ; but he might have been born on the 17th – and he himself used to celebrate his birthday on the 15th.
For years, he wasn’t even sure how old he was – partly because his father, to make him seem more of a prodigy than he was, claimed that he’d been born in 1772! It wasn’t until Beethoven was almost forty that he commissioned a friend to find his birth certificate and found out his true age.

His first major orchestral work, the First Symphony, premiered in 1800, and his first set of string quartets was published in 1801. Despite his hearing deteriorating during this period, he continued to conduct, premiering his Third and Fifth Symphonies  in 1804 and 1808, respectively. His  Violin Concerto  appeared in 1806. His last piano concerto (No. 5, Op. 73, known as the Emperor), dedicated to his frequent patron Archduke Rudolf of Austria, was
premiered in 1811, without Beethoven as soloist. He was almost completely deaf by 1814, and he then gave up performing and appearing in public. He described his problems with health and his unfulfilled personal life in two letters, his  Heiligenstadt Testament (1802) to his brothers and his unsent love letter to an unknown “Immortal Beloved”(1812).
After 1810, increasingly less socially involved, Beethoven composed many of his most admired works, including later symphonies, mature chamber music and the late piano sonatas. His only opera, Fidelio, first performed in 1805, was revised to its final version in 1814. He composed  Missa solemnis  between 1819 and 1823 and his final Symphony, No. 9, one of the first examples of a choral symphony, between 1822 and 1824. Written in his last years, his late string quartets, including the Grosse Fuge, of 1825–1826 are among his final achievements. After some months of bedridden illness, he died in 1827. Beethoven’s works remain mainstays of the classical music repertoire.