Before the final decision was made, Bach made it his business to be on hand at Leipzig. When it became clear to Graupner that he was out of the running he heartily recommended Bach. The latter was requested, in order to prove his fitness for the post he sought, to conduct in the Church of St. Thomas on Good Friday, 1723, a work of his own composition, appropriate to the day. That work was the Passion according to St. John which, though it may have been written hurriedly, is a creation of such transcendent grandeur that only the later Passion according to St. Matthew can be said to excel it in lyric splendor and sublimity.

As soon as Graupner’s decision was known, Bach asked Prince Leopold for his official leave. The letter of dismissal was couched in most friendly and flattering terms. At Leipzig Bach executed a document binding himself to discharge all the duties of the Cantorship, undertaking to teach a variety of subjects and even to give private lessons in singing without extra pay. The only thing he balked at was taking charge of Latin classes. For this chore he agreed to provide a substitute at his own expense. Then he took leave of Prince Leopold, with whom he remained on terms of the closest friendship till the prince’s death five years later. On May 5, 1723 he received from the burgomaster of Leipzig the ceremonious notification of his unanimous appointment. On May 30 he conducted at the Church of St. Nicholas (which he served alternately with the Church of St. Thomas) the cantata The Hungry Shall Be Fed. Therewith he inaugurated his office.

Bach’s Greater Work

Bach settled in Leipzig at the age of thirty-eight. He remained there the rest of his life. True, he came and went, and he made journeys of one sort or another, but they were never far distant or protracted. In Leipzig he created his grandest, his most colossal, and also his profoundest and subtlest works. His duties were incredibly numerous and often heart-breakingly heavy. He was responsible, it has been said, “to all and to none.” Again and again he had the rector of the St. Thomas School, the city council, the church Consistory, and yet others about his ears. He had to look after the musical services in four churches, two of them the most important in the town. Under exasperating conditions he had to teach turbulent and ruffianly pupils. He had to combat official ill will and intrigue. For the performances he was obliged to conduct he had vocal and instrumental forces that strike us as laughably inadequate and were in numberless cases grossly unskilled. The demands on his physical and spiritual strength must have been appalling. Yet Bach appears to have had the resources and the resistance of a giant. We know that over and again his temper, his obstinate nature and inborn pugnacity were tried to the uttermost. But in the face of all irritations he was earning enough, his home life was comfortable, he met and entertained artists, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his sons could enjoy the educational advantages of Leipzig, and he gradually gathered about him a company of greatly gifted young students and devoted disciples.

In the course of years he shifted some of his most unsympathetic duties to other shoulders. How he could otherwise have written the gigantic amount of music he did is an unanswerable question. For consider: he came to Leipzig the composer of about thirty church cantatas. When he died in 1750 he had produced there 265 more. Of this staggering total (295) 202 have come down to us. As if this were not enough (these cantatas, incidentally, were week-to-week obligations), his years at Leipzig account for many secular cantatas, six motets, five masses (including the titanic one in B minor), the Passions according to St. John and St. Matthew (not to mention lost ones), the Christmas Oratorio, the resplendent Magnificat, the Easter and Ascension oratorios, besides clavier works like the Italian Concerto, the Goldberg Variations, the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and an incredible mass of other things.

The rector of St. Thomas’ School during Bach’s first years in Leipzig was Johann Heinrich Ernesti, with whom Bach’s relations were cordial enough, though the rector was a slipshod disciplinarian. Matters remained pleasant enough under Johann Gesner, but presently the latter left St. Thomas to assume a more profitable post at Göttingen. His successor, Johann August Ernesti, quickly proceeded to stroke Bach’s fur the wrong way by declaring that altogether too much attention was given to the study of music. “So you want to be a pot-house fiddler,” he used to say to youths he found practising the violin. It was only a question of time when the surly new rector and the combustible Bach would come into collision.

What has been called the “battle of the Prefects” was long drawn out and bitter. The details need not detain us. Trouble was intensified by the appointment to a responsible position of a person named Krause, whom Bach had angrily described as “ein liederlicher Hund” (“a dissolute dog”). Things went from bad to worse. Bach accused the rector of usurping his functions. He wrote long, circumstantial letters setting forth his case to “their Magnificences,” the Burgomaster, the civic council, and other outstanding authorities. “Their Magnificences” replied with legalistic hair-splittings and things grew so violent that Bach in one case undertook to drive Krause from the choir loft. The lengthy series of undignified squabbles was finally brought to an end by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, Saxony, “etc., etc., etc.” (to use Bach’s own designation). We are not certain that the composer obtained the satisfaction he demanded, but everyone seems to have tired of the interminable quarrel and was relieved to see it peter out.

Meanwhile, Bach had other worries and vexations. One of his sons, Gottfried Bernhard, proved as unstable as did Wilhelm Friedemann in a later day, but died before his financial misdeeds had ended in his open disgrace. Then the composer was made the target of attacks by a certain minor musician, one Scheibe, who criticized his works for what he called their “complexity and overelaboration.” Bach immortalized the fellow by satirizing him in the secular cantata, “Phoebus and Pan,” where Scheibe appears as the ignoramus Midas, adorned with a pair of ass’s ears!