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This chapter explores the nature of the filial and sibling relationships that prevailed between and among J. S. Bach and his five musical sons: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, Johann Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian. By examining the often unflattering explicit (and implicit) testimony contained in the surviving epistolary and musical sources, the author seeks to understand how these uniquely privileged, and uniquely challenged, musicians came to terms with their paternal legacy and to determine how, and with what degree of success, they sought to emerge from their father’s artistic shadow.

This chapter is the first of three chapters to look at the relationship between a Thomaskantor, who oversaw the church music, and a Kapellmeister (music director) of the public concerts. Thomaskantor Johann Friedrich Doles and Kapellmeister Johann Adam Hiller are highlighted. The chapter examines developments in church music repertoire under Johann Sebastian Bach; his immediate successor, Gottlob Harrer; and Doles. Hiller began his career in Leipzig as director of the public Grosse Concert in 1743. After directing the Musikübende Gesellschaft and the Gewandhaus orchestra, he became Thomaskantor in 1789. Public concert music under Hiller continued to be heavily influenced by trends in church music. Hiller replaced Doles as Thomaskantor in 1789.

This chapter examines the early life of German composer and organist Johann Sebastian Bach during the period from 1685 to 1703. Bach was born on March 21, 1685, was christened later at the front of the historic Georgenkirche. Nothing is known for certain about Bach's early years until 1693, when he was listed in the fifth class of the Lateinschule at Eisenach. He came from a musical family and he was taught and learned how to play the organ, harpsichord, and violin at an early age. By 1703, Bach was employed as court organist at Weimar.

This chapter examines Johann Sebastian Bach's travels to Arnstadt and Muhlhausen during the period from 1703 to 1708. In Arnstadt, Bach worked as organist of the town's third church and he was even selected to test the church's new organ in 1703. In 1706, Bach came to Muhlhausen to compete for the post of chief organist for the church of Blasiuskirche. In June 1707, he was accepted for the post and given a salary of 85 gulden. He later requested his dismissal from the Arnstadt consistory. Once established in Muhlhausen, Bach pursued and eventually married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach.

This chapter explores the musical and aesthetic implications of Johann Sebastian Bach’s previously unrecognized borrowing from a movement by Telemann. To wit, the middle movement of Bach’s F-minor harpsichord concerto BWV 1056, justly celebrated as one of the composer’s “most memorable, singable melodies”, is substantially based upon the first movement of Telemann’s concerto for solo oboe or flute and strings, 51:G2. Unlike many intertextual correspondences that are perhaps too readily presumed to be borrowings, this one goes well beyond the sharing of common melodic and harmonic formulae to suggest a conscious modeling process.

This chapter explores Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 revival of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion (Matthaus-Passion). Musicologist Michael Marissen has argued that in preparing for the revival, Mendelssohn cut Bach's work to remove anti-Semitic references. It is shown instead that Mendelssohn's cuts were intended to make the work more accessible to a 19th-century audience that was largely unfamiliar with Bach's works. Mendelssohn's cuts were also similar to those of other Christian conductors who performed the work later, suggesting that he did not make his changes out of any lingering affinity for Judaism, or to lessen the work's anti-Semitism. Mendelssohn, in fact, was a close disciple of prominent Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who viewed Judaism as an outdated religion.

This chapter examines a collection of Bach chorale harmonizations copied in Dresden sometime during the 1730s, with the goal of clarifying both its likely provenance and purpose. “Sebastian Bach’s Choral-Buch” is a collection of chorales—melodies with figured bass, intended to accompany singing—given in a sequence similar to that found in many hymnals. The mid-eighteenth-century manuscript was purchased from Hans P. Kraus, Vienna, in September 1936 by the Sibley Library at the Eastman School of Music. This chapter first describes the Sibley Choralbuch before reviewing its provenance and content. It then considers the manuscript’s significance as a possible source of evidence for the practices of the circle of organists who studied with Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1730s and 1740s. It argues that Choralbuch served as a workbook for learning how to create four-part settings but had a double usefulness: Bach could assign particular chorale melodies for the pupil to work on as test pieces, while the anthology could serve to accompany chorale singing at services.

This chapter examines various independent trio movements that Johann Sebastian Bach either composed or transcribed, probably prior to the composition of the Six Sonatas for organ. The Six Trio Sonatas for Organ, BWV 525–530, were assembled for the use of Bach’s oldest son, ilhelm Friedemann, to give final polish to his organ technique. This chapter first describes the Six Trio Sonatas before discussing Bach’s miscellaneous free organ trios in more detail. It then considers Bach’s Leipzig workshop and suggests that the miscellaneous organ trios and Six Sonata variants represent a unified repertory arising from a single period of activity in Leipzig: 1725 to 1730 or so. Aside from serving as preparatory exercises for the Six Sonatas, the organ trios were used as display pieces for demonstrating the chamber music registers of the progressive Central German organ, as well as a teaching material for students like Johann Tobias Krebs and Gottfried August Homilius.

This chapter examines the musical heritage of Johann Sebastian Bach. It mentions a commentary by a critic who recognized in Bach's music the perfection and culmination of all that his predecessors had been striving towards. Bach's craftsmanship was universally acknowledged and the pedagogical value of his chorale harmonizations and keyboard fugues were recognized. His compositions are still being listened to and played in churches. But despite this, Bach had very minimal influence on other composers.

This chapter examines developments in the musical career of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig during the period from 1742 to 1750. During this period, Cantatas 34 and 191 were only his contributions to the regular church services. This chapter suggests that at this time Bach entered his final phase as a composer, after the publication of the last part of Clavier-Ubung in 1742. After this Bach wrote not for the church nor for a princely court, nor even for the collegium musicum.

This chapter examines developments in the personal life and musical career of Johann Sebastian Bach during the period from 1708 to 1717. Six of the seven of Bach's children were born in Weimar, where he worked as court organist. Bach later moved to Cothen, and when he saw an opportunity for career advancement he requested Duke Wilhelm for his release. The duke became enraged at Bach's insistence and placed him under arrest and held him prisoner. After this imprisonment the duke granted Bach an ignominious dismissal.

This chapter examines developments in the musical career of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig during the period from 1730 to 1741. The year 1730 was a crucial one for Bach, which culminated in an appeal for help to Georg Erdmann in Danzig. Most of Bach's problems during this time were related to the conflict between civic and universities, low level of resources available for church music, and the low morale among Thomasschule staff and students.

This chapter argues that even the so-called pure instrumental music of Johann Sebastian Bach can share a great deal with his liturgical vocal music in projecting religiosity. Questions of meaning in his secular chamber music need not be deemed somehow fundamentally different from those in his church music. Both types of music warrant being viewed as religious, as opposed to the one being religious and the other secularistic (or, for that matter, to both types being at base no more than aesthetically oriented). This chapter puts forward the view, then, that Bach’s Musical Offering (BWV 1079) was not, as is often declared, a pro-Enlightenment homage of “abstract” chamber music (that is, of art for art’s sake), designed to honor its dedicatee, King Frederick the Great of Prussia, but was a carefully scored defense of anti-Enlightenment Lutheranism, designed primarily, as was all of Bach’s music, to honor God.

The German musicians Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Mattheson faced off against each other time and again over the course of the early eighteenth century, though they did so each in his own way. While Mattheson addressed Bach numerous times in various public printed fora, Bach produced music, refusing to exchange the composer's pen for that of the wordsmith. The two can be taken as tokens of two types of musician within the musical community, though the types are hardly mutually exclusive. Professionals focus on their discipline and restrict their words to those that are pragmatically necessary. Humanists link music to the arts and society generally, spinning out words to make their point. Each type has its own characteristic way of speaking of music.

This chapter examines the orchestral, instrumental, and keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The distinction between orchestral and chamber music was not very clear during Bach's time. The public face of Bach as an orchestral composer can be seen in his four orchestral suits and in secular cantatas he composed during the 1730s. However, most of these compositions were intended for the same kind of music-making as the chamber works.