Johann Sebastian Bach - Biography, Style, Works, Performances, Legacy, Eponyms

Composer, one of the world's greatest musicians, born in Eisenach, C Germany. He was orphaned by the age of 10, and brought up by his elder brother, Johann Christoph Bach (16711721), organist at Ohrdruf, who taught him the organ and clavier. He attended school in Lüneburg, before in 1703 becoming organist at Arnstadt. He found his duties as choirmaster irksome, and angered the authorities by his innovative chorale accompaniments. In 1707 he married a cousin, Maria Barbara Bach (16841720), and left to become organist at Mühlhausen. In 1708 he transferred to the ducal court at Weimar, and in 1711 became Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, where he wrote mainly instrumental music, including the lsquo;Brandenburg Concertos (1721) and The Well-tempered Clavier (1722). Widowed in 1720, and left with four children, he married in 1721 Anna Magdalena Wilcke (170160), and had 13 children by her, of whom six survived. In 1723 he was appointed cantor of the Thomasschule in Leipzig, where his works included perhaps c.300 church cantatas, the St Matthew Passion (1727), and the Mass in B Minor. Almost totally blind, he died in Leipzig. One of his main achievements was his remarkable development of polyphony. Known to his contemporaries mainly as an organist, his genius as a composer was not fully recognized until the following century.

Born	March 21 (O.S.), 1685 Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany
Died	July 28 (N.S.), 1750 Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Johann Sebastian Bach (pronounced [ˈjoːhan zəˈbastjan ˈbax]) (21 March 1685 O.S. – 28 July 1750 N.S.) was a prolific German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Bach's works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the keyboard suites and partitas, the Mass in B Minor, the St Matthew Passion, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, Sonatas and partitas for solo violin, the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello,and a large number of cantatas, of which about 220 survive. See media help.

Biography

Early years (1685–1702)

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany to an extraordinary musical family--for more than 200 years, the Bach family had produced dozens of worthy performers and composers during a period in which the church, local government and the aristocracy provided significant support for professional music making in the German-speaking world, particularly in the eastern electorates of Thuringia and Saxony. Sebastian's father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was a talented violinist and trumpeter in Eisenach, a town of some 6,000 residents in Thuringia, and held a post involving the organisation of secular music and participation in church music. Contemporary documents indicate that, in some circles, the name Bach had come to be used as a synonym for "musician".

Sebastian was proud of his family's musical achievements, and around 1735 Bach drafted a geneaology, "Origin of the Musical Bach Family" (Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie), tracing the history of generations of successful musical Bachs. Bach's roots can be traced back to Hungary and his ancestor Veit (Vitus) Bach was a Hungarian who was expatriated from the country by the Habsburgs, because he was a Lutheran;

Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father died the following year. The 10-year-old orphan moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at Ohrdruf, a nearby town. He exposed him to the work of the great South German composers of the day—such as Pachelbel and Johann Jakob Froberger—and possibly to the music of North German composers, and of Frenchmen such as Lully, Louis Marchand, Marin Marais, and the Italian clavierist Girolamo Frescobaldi. Bach's obituary indicates that he copied music out of Johann Christoph's scores, but his brother had apparenty forbidden him to do so, possibly because scores were valuable and private commodities at the time.

At the age of 14, Johann Sebastian was awarded a choral scholarship, with his older school friend, Georg Erdmann, to study at the prestigious St Michael’s School in Lüneburg, not far from the largest city in Germany, the northern seaport of Hamburg. It is likely that during this stage, he became acquainted with the music of the North German tradition, especially the work of Dieterich Buxtehude, and with music manuscripts and treatises on music theory that were in the possession of these musicians.

Arnstadt to Weimar (1703–08)

In January 1703, shortly after graduating, Bach took up a post as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar, a large town in Thuringia. The Bach family had close connections with this oldest town in Thuringia, about 180 km to the southwest of Weimar at the edge of the great forest. At this time, Bach was embarking on the serious composition of organ preludes; these works, in the North German tradition of virtuosic, improvisatory preludes, already showed tight motivic control (where a single, short music idea is explored cogently throughout a movement). However, in these works the composer had yet to fully develop his powers large-scale organisation and his contrapuntal technique (where two or more melodies interact simultaneously). The trip reinforced Buxtehude’s style as a foundation for Bach’s earlier works, and that he overstayed his planned visit by several months suggests that his time with the old man was of great value to his art.

Despite his comfortable position in Arnstadt, by 1706 Bach appeared to have realised that he needed to escape from the family milieu and move on to further his career. Four months after arriving at Mühlhausen, he married his second cousin from Arnstadt, Maria Barbara Bach. Two of them—Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach—became important composers in the ornate rococo style that followed the baroque.

The church and city government at Mühlhausen must have been proud of their new musical director. They readily agreed to his plan for an expensive renovation of the organ at St Blasius’s, and were so delighted at the elaborate, festive cantata he wrote for the inauguration of the new council in 1708—God is my king BWV 71, clearly in the style of Buxtehude—that they paid handsomely for its publication, and twice in later years had the composer return to conduct it. However, that same year, Bach was offered a better position in Weimar.

Weimar (1708–17)

After barely a year at Mühlhausen, Bach left to become the court organist and concert master at the ducal court in Weimar, a far cry from his earlier position there as ‘lackey’. The munificent salary on offer at the court and the prospect of working entirely with a large, well-funded contingent of professional musicians may have prompted the move. It was in Weimar that two musically significant sons were born—WF and CPE Bach.

Bach’s position in Weimar marked the start of a sustained period of composing keyboard and orchestral works, in which he had attained the technical proficiency and confidence to extend the prevailing large-scale structures and to synthesize influences from abroad. Bach inducted himself into these stylistic aspects largely by transcribing for harpsichord and organ the ensemble concertos of Vivaldi; In 1713, the Duke returned from a tour of the Low Countries with a large collection of scores, some of them possibly transcriptions of the latest fashionable Italian music by the blind organist Jan Jacob de Graaf.Template:An He was particularly attracted to the Italian solo-tutti structure, in which one or more solo instruments alternate section-by-section with the full orchestra throughout a movement.

In Weimar, he had the opportunity to play and compose for the organ, and to perform a varied repertoire of concert music with the duke’s ensemble. This is a monumental work for its masterful use of counterpoint and its exploration, for the first time, of the full range of keys—and the means of expression made possible by their slight differences from each other—available to keyboardists when their instruments are tuned according to systems such as that of Andreas Werckmeister.

During his tenure at Weimar, Bach started work on The little organ book for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann; See media help.

Cöthen (1717–23)

Bach began once again to search out a more stable job that was conducive to his musical interests. Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen hired Bach to serve as his Kapellmeister (director of music). thus, most of Bach’s work from this period was secular, including the Orchestral suites, the Six suites for solo cello and the Sonatas and partitas for solo violin. See media help.

On 7 July 1720 while Bach was abroad with Prince Leopold, tragedy struck: his wife, Maria Barbara, died suddenly.

Leipzig (1723–50)

In 1723, Bach was appointed Cantor of the Thomasschule, adjacent to the Thomaskirche (St Thomas’s Lutheran Church) in Leipzig, as well as Director of Music in the principal churches in the town. Bach was the nominee of the monarchists, in particular of the Mayor at the time, Gottlieb Lange, a lawyer who had earlier served in the Dresden court. In return for agreeing to Bach’s appointment, the City-Estate faction was granted control of the School, and Bach was required to make a number of compromises with respect to his working conditions. Although it appears that no one on the Council doubted Bach’s musical genius, there was continual tension between the Cantor, who regarded himself as the leader of church music in the city, and the City-Estate faction, which saw him as a schoolmaster and wanted to reduce the emphasis on elaborate music in both the School and the Churches. The Council never honoured Lange’s promise at interview of a handsome salary of 1,000 talers a year, although it did provide Bach and his family with a smaller income and a good apartment at one end of the school building, which was renovated at great expense in 1732.

Bach’s job required him to instruct the students of the Thomasschule in singing, and to provide weekly music at the two main churches in Leipzig, St Thomas's and St Nicholas's.

To rehearse and perform these works at St Thomas’s Church, Bach probably sat at the harpsichord or stood in front of the choir on the lower gallery at the west end, his back to the congregation and the altar at the east end.

Bach drew the soprano and alto choristers from the School, and the tenors and basses from the School and elsewhere in Leipzig. As part of his regular church work, he performed motets of the Venetian school and Germans such as Heinrich Schütz, which would have served as formal models for his own motets. The audio excerpt is from the opening of Singet dem Herrn (Sing to the Lord), showing the rich, energetic textures that Bach could produce with two choirs, each in four parts. See media help.

Having spent much of the 1720s composing cantatas, Bach had assembled a huge repertoire of church music for Leipzig’s two main churches. Many of Bach’s works during the 1730s, 40s and 50s were probably written for and performed by the Collegium Musicum;

During this period, he composed the Kyrie and Gloria of theMass in B Minor, and in 1735, he presented the manuscript to the elector of Saxony in an ultimately successful bid to persuade the monarch to appoint him as Royal Court Composer. He later extended this work into a full Catholic Mass, by adding a Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, the music for which was almost wholly taken from some of the best of his cantata movements. Bach's appointment as court composer appears to have been part of his long-term struggle to achieve greater bargaining power with the Leipzig Council. Although the mass was probably never performed during the composer’s lifetime, it is considered to be among the greatest choral works of all time. See media help.

In 1747, Bach went to the court of Frederick II of Prussia in Potsdam, where the king played a theme for Bach and challenged him to improvise a fugue based on his theme. Bach improvised a three-part fugue on Frederick’s pianoforte, then a novelty, and later presented the king with a Musical Offering which consists of fugues, canons and a trio based on the "royal theme", nominated by the monarch.

The Art of Fugue, published posthumously but probably written years before Bach's death, is unfinished.

The final work Bach completed was a chorale prelude for organ, dictated to his son-in-law, Altnikol, from his deathbed. when the notes of the final cadence are counted and mapped onto the Roman alphabet, the word "BACH" is again found.

Bach died in Leipzig in 1750, at the age of 65. During his life he had composed more than 1,000 works.

At Leipzig, Bach seems to have maintained active relationships with several members of the faculty of the university. Interestingly, George Frideric Handel, who was born in the same year as Bach in Halle, only 50 km from Leipzig, made several trips to Germany, but Bach was unable to meet him, a fact that Bach appears to have deeply regretted.

Style

Bach’s musical style arose from his extraordinary fluency in contrapuntal invention and motivic control, his flair for improvisation at the keyboard, his exposure to South German, North German, Italian and French music, and his apparent devotion to the Lutheran liturgy. His access to musicians, scores and instruments as a child and a young man, combined with his emerging talent for writing tightly woven music of powerful sonority, appear to have set him on course to develop an eclectic, energetic musical style in which foreign influences were injected into an intensified version of the pre-existing German musical language.

There are several more specific features of Bach's style. Although this practice varied considerably between the schools of European music, Bach was regarded at the time as being on one extreme end of the spectrum, notating most or all of the details of his melodic lines—particularly in his fast movements—thus leaving little for performers to interpolate. Bach's contrapuntal textures tend to be more cumulative than those of Händel and most other composers of the day, who would typically allow a line to drop out after it had been joined by two or three others. Bach's harmony is marked by a tendency to employ brief tonicisations—subtle references to another key, particularly of the supertonic, that last for only a a few beats at the longest—to add colour to his textures.

At the same time, Bach, unlike later composers, left the instrumentation of major works including The Art of Fugue and A Musical Offering open.

Bach’s apparently devout, personal relationship with the Christian God in the Lutheran tradition and the high demand for religious music of his times inevitably placed sacred music at the centre of his repertory;

Bach's deep knowledge of and interest in the liturgy led to his developing intricate relationships between music and linguistic text.

Sound clip: the opening of the first movement of Cantata 106

On the largest level, the large-scale structure of some of his sacred vocal works is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning: for example, the overall form of the St Matthew Passion illustrates the liturgical and dramatic flow of the Easter story on a number levels simultaneously;[ref] the text, keys and variations of instrumental and vocal forces used in the movements of Cantata 11 (Lobet Gott in alle Landen) may form a structure that resembles the cross.[ref]

Beyond these specific musical features arising from Bach’s religious affiliation is the fact that he was able to produce music for an audience that was committed to serious, regular worship, for which a concentrated density and complexity was accepted.

Bach’s inner personal drive to display his musical achievements was evident in a number of ways. Keyboard music occupied a central position in his output throughout his life, and he pioneered the elevation of the keyboard from continuo to solo instrument in his numerous harpsichord concertos and chamber movements with keyboard obbligato, in which he himself probably played the solo part. 4 (the opening of which is captured in an audio clip above), in which Bach himself may have been the first to play the rapid solo violin passages. Another example is in the organ fugue from BWV547, a late work from Leipzig, in which virtuosic passages are mapped onto Italian solo-tutti alternation within the fugal development. The English and French Suites, and the Partitas, all keyboard works from the Cöthen period, systematically explore a range of metres and of sharp and flat keys.

Works

J.S. Bach’s works are indexed with BWV numbers, an initialism for Bach Werke Verzeichnis (Bach Works Catalogue). The catalogue is organised thematically, rather than chronologically: BWV 1–224 are cantatas, BWV 225–249 the large-scale choral works, BWV 250–524 chorales and sacred songs, BWV 525–748 organ works, BWV 772–994 other keyboard works, BWV 995–1000 lute music, BWV 1001–40 chamber music, BWV 1041–71 orchestral music, and BWV 1072–1126 canons and fugues. In compiling the catalogue, Schmieder largely followed the Bach Gesellschaft Ausgabe, a comprehensive edition of the composer's works that was produced between 1850 and 1905. For a list of works catalogued by BWV number, see List of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Organ works

Bach was best known during his lifetime as an organist, organ consultant, and composer of organ works both in the traditional German free genres such as preludes, fantasias, and toccatas, and stricter forms such as chorale preludes and fugues. He established a reputation at a young age for his great creativity and ability to integrate aspects of several different national styles into his organ works. A decidedly North German influence was exerted by Georg Böhm, whom Bach came in contact with in Lüneburg, and Dieterich Buxtehude in Lübeck, whom the young organist visited in 1704 on an extended leave of absence from his job in Arnstadt. Around this time Bach also copied the works of numerous French and Italian composers in order to gain insights into their compositional languages, and later even arranged several violin concertos by Vivaldi and others for organ. His most productive period (1708–14) saw not only the composition of several pairs of preludes and fugues and toccatas and fugues, but also the writing of the Orgelbüchlein ("Little Organ Book"), an unfinished collection of forty-nine short chorale preludes intended to demonstrate various compositional techniques that could be used in setting chorale tunes. After he left Weimar, Bach's output for organ fell off, although his most well-known works (the six trio sonatas, the Clavierübung III of 1739, and the "Great Eighteen" chorales, revised very late in his life) were all composed after this time. Bach was also extensively engaged later in his life in consulting on various organ projects, testing newly built organs, and dedicating organs in afternoon recitals.

Other keyboard works

Bach wrote many works for the harpsichord, some of which may also have been played on the clavichord. The pieces were intended by Bach for instructional purposes.

Among Bach’s lesser known keyboard works are seven toccatas (BWV 910–916), four duets (BWV 802–805), sonatas for keyboard (BWV 963–967), the Six Little Preludes (BWV 933–938) and the Aria variata alla maniera italiana (BWV 989).

Orchestral and chamber music

Bach wrote music for single instruments, duets and small ensembles. Bach's works for solo instruments – the six sonatas and partitas for violin (BWV1001–1006), the six cello suites (BWV 1007–1012) and the Partita for solo flute (BWV1013) – may be listed among the most profound works in the repertoire. Bach has also composed a suite and several other works for solo lute.

Bach's best-known orchestral works are the Brandenburg concertos, so named because he submitted them in the hope of gaining employment from the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721. Other surviving works in the concerto form include two violin concertos; It is widely accepted that many of the harpsichord concertos were not original works, but arrangements of his concertos for other instruments now lost. In addition to concertos, Bach also wrote four orchestral suites, a series of stylised dances for orchestra. The work now known as the Air on the G string, for instance, is an arrangement for the violin made in the nineteenth century from the second movement of the Orchestral Suite No.

Vocal and choral works

Bach performed a cantata every Sunday at the Thomaskirche, on a theme corresponding to the lectionary readings of the week. Although he performed cantatas by other composers, he also composed at least three entire sets of cantatas, one for each Sunday and holiday of the church year, at Leipzig, in addition to those composed at Mühlhausen and Weimar.

His cantatas vary greatly in form and instrumentation.

In addition, Bach wrote a number of secular cantatas, usually for civic events such as weddings.

Bach’s large choral-orchestral works include the famous St Matthew Passion and St John Passion, both written for Holy Week services at the St Thomas’s Church, the Christmas Oratorio (a set of six cantatas for use in the Liturgical season of Christmas).

Bach's other large work, the Mass in B minor, was assembled by Bach near the end of his life, mostly from pieces composed earlier (such as Cantata 191 and Cantata 12).

All of these works, unlike the motets, have substantial solo parts as well as choruses.

Performances

Present-day Bach performers largely divide into two camps: those who follow authentic performance practice, and those who use modern instruments and playing techniques and tend towards larger ensembles. In Bach’s time orchestras and choirs were usually smaller than those known to, for example, Brahms, and even Bach's most ambitious choral works, such as his Mass in B minor and Passions, are composed for relatively modest forces. Some of Bach's important chamber music does not indicate instrumentation, which gives even greater latitude for variety of ensemble.

"Easy listening" realisations of Bach's music and its use in advertising also contributed greatly to Bach's popularisation in the second half of the twentieth century. Among these were the Swingle Singers' versions of Bach pieces that are now well-known (for instance, the Air on the G string, or the Wachet Auf chorale prelude) and Wendy Carlos' 1968 recording Switched-On Bach using the then recently-invented Moog synthesizer. Jazz musicians have also adopted Bach's music, with Jacques Loussier and Uri Caine among those creating jazz versions of Bach works.

Legacy

In his later years and after his death, Bach's reputation as a composer declined; Bach. During this time, his works for keyboard were those most appreciated and composers ever since have acknowledged his mastery of the genre. Forgetting everything else, he did not stand up again until he had looked through all the music of Sebastian Bach". Beethoven was a devotee, learning the Well-Tempered Clavier as a child and later calling Bach the "Urvater der Harmonie" ("Original father of Harmony") and, in a pun on the literal meaning of Bach's name, "nicht Bach, sondern Meer" ("not a brook, but a sea"). Before performing, Chopin used to lock himself away before his concerts and play Bach's music. Several notable composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn began writing in a more contrapuntal style after being introduced to Bach's music.

Today the "Bach style" continues to influence musical composition, from hymns and religious works to pop and rock. Goethe became acquainted with Bach's works relatively late in life, through a series of performances of keyboard and choral works at Bad Berka in 1814 and 1815; in a letter of 1827 he compared the experience of listening to Bach's music to "eternal harmony in dialogue with itself". But it was Felix Mendelssohn who did the most to revive Bach's reputation with his 1829 Berlin performance of the St Matthew Passion. Hegel, who attended the performance, later called Bach a "grand, truly Protestant, robust and, so to speak, erudite genius which we have only recently learned again to appreciate at its full value". Mendelssohn's promotion of Bach, and the growth of the composer’s stature, continued in subsequent years. The Bach Gesellschaft (Bach Society) was founded in 1850 to promote the works, publishing a comprehensive edition over the subsequent half century. During the twentieth century, the process of recognising the musical as well as the pedagogic value of some of the works has continued, perhaps most notably in the promotion of the Cello Suites by Pablo Casals. Examples include the playing of keyboard works on the harpsichord rather than a modern grand piano and the use of small choirs or single voices instead of the larger forces favoured by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performers.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s contributions to music, or, to borrow a term popularised by his student Lorenz Christoph Mizler, his "musical science", are frequently bracketed with those by William Shakespeare in English literature and Isaac Newton in physics. Scientist and author Lewis Thomas once suggested how the people of Earth should communicate with the universe: "I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again.

Some composers have paid tribute to Bach by setting his name in musical notes (B-flat, A, C, B-natural; Liszt, for example, wrote a praeludium and fugue on this BACH motif. Bach himself set the precedent for this musical acronym, most notably in Contrapunctus XIV from the Art of Fugue. Whereas Bach conceived this cruciform melody as a compositional form of devotion to Christ and his cross, later composers have employed the BACH motif in homage to the composer himself.

Some of the greatest composers since Bach have written works which explicitly pay homage to him. 20 in A minor (file info) — play in browser (beta) From the Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) Keyboard Concerto No.1 in D minor, BWV 1052, first movement (file info) — play in browser (beta) Keyboard Concerto No.1 in D minor, BWV 1052, second movement (file info) — play in browser (beta) Keyboard Concerto No.1 in D minor, BWV 1052, third movement (file info) — play in browser (beta) Partita, BWV 1013 (file info) — play in browser (beta) Problems playing the files? See media help.

Eponyms

The Bach Ice Shelf, on the Beethoven Peninsula of Alexander Island, in Antarctica. Bach crater on Mercury. The new Bach reader (New York : Norton, 1999) 2d ed. A significant repository of documentary evidence, including contemporary documents, some by Bach himself. This book includes an English translation of the biography of Bach by the early 19th-century German musicologist Forkel. Johann Sebastian Bach: the learned musician (New York : Norton, 2000) ISBN 039304825X (hbk.) ; A comprehensive and engaging account of Bach's life. Bach as organist: his instruments, music, and performance practices (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1986) ISBN 0-253-33181-1 (hbk.), (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-253-21386-X (pbk.). Bachs in der h-moll-Messe", in Musik und Kirche volume lxii, number 6 (1992), pages 321-327, ISSN 0027-4771 (in German). Johann Sebastian Bach, his work and influence on the music of Germany, 1685-1750 (London : Novello, 1884) translated by Clara Bell and J. An early, groundbreaking, three-volume study of Bach's life and music. Johann Sebastian Bach; his life, art, and work (New York : Da Capo Press, 1970) Notes and appendices by Charles Sanford Terry, ISBN 0306700107, contains a translation of "Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke : Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst : Mit Bachs bildness und kupfertafeln" (Leipzig : Hoffmeister und Kühnel, 1802). Bach written by a near-contemporary who was able to correspond with two of Bach's sons.

Scores

Piano Sheet Music of Compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach - Out of Copyright Editions IMSLP's ongoing project to sort and make freely available all of Bach's works from the Bach Gesellschaft Ausgabe. Free scores by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki) Free scores by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Werner Icking Music Archive Works by Johann Sebastian Bach at Project Gutenberg

Recordings

Piano Society: J.S. Bach - A biography and various free recordings in MP3 format. Classical MIDI Connection: Free MIDI files Kunst der Fuge: MIDI files Bach cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library Johann Sebastian Bach at MusicBrainz MP3 files of arrangements for electric bass by David J. Bach MP3 at Magnatune

Specific topics

Bach manuscripts - video lectures by Christoph Wolff on the Bach family's hidden manuscripts archive Faces of Bach - Site discussing the portraits of J.S.Bach. Bach Tuning An article on Bach's tuning script from his manuscript of The Well Tempered Clavier J.S. Bach's work in films

Performance groups

Bach Collegium - Fort Wayne Utlizing early instruments and techniques Washington Bach Consort The American Bach Society The Bach Choir of Bethlehem Oregon Bach Festival Bach Festival at Baldwin-Wallace College Oldest collegiate Bach Festival in the United States Bach Collegium Japan The Meistersingers from Tokyo on the conductor Masaaki Suzuki and his enchanting Japanese Bach Collegium in tour in Germany, by Wolfram Goertz at signandsight.com. Bach on the bus on the viola player Volker Hagedorn's tour at signandsight.com

Persondata
NAME	Bach, Johann Sebastian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German composer and organist
DATE OF BIRTH	March 21, 1685
PLACE OF BIRTH	Eisenach
DATE OF DEATH	July 28, 1750
PLACE OF DEATH	Leipzig