Bach settled in Leipzig. His home life was happy, and varied by the visits of all musicians of prominence who passed through the town. His hospitality and his courtesy were famous. Men journeyed to Leipzig just to hear him play upon the organ. One man wrote in the account of his life which he contributed to Mattheson’s Ehrenpforte: ‘I journeyed to Leipzig to hear the great Johann Sebastian Bach play. This great artist received me most courteously and so bewitched me by his uncommon skill that the troubles of the journey were forgotten as nothing.’ Quantz, the famous flute player, teacher of Frederick the Great, wrote: ‘The admirable Johann Sebastian Bach has at length in modern times brought the art of the organ to its greatest perfection.’ Occasionally he went to Dresden to hear the opera or to play for friends there. One chronicle has it that he would say to his favorite son: ‘Friedemann, shall we go to Dresden again and hear their beautiful little songs?’ In 1736 he was appointed court composer to August III, king of Poland and of Saxony. He retained an honorary position at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, though Prince Leopold, his former friend and patron, died not long after Bach came to Leipzig. His sons Friedemann and Emanuel grew to manhood and acquired positions. Emanuel was employed at the court of Frederick the Great at Potsdam. Pupils surrounded him, most of whom were not members of the St. Thomas school, but students at the university; and in spite of the fact that on many occasions he showed signs of quick and violent temper, he won not only respect but love from most of them. One of the most famous, Altnikol, married a daughter of the house. At last Frederick the Great, having heard much of his marvellous talent through Emanuel and his pupils, many of whom were playing in the royal band, summoned him to the court at Potsdam. Bach arrived at Potsdam on the 7th of May, 1747, accompanied by Friedemann, and was received with respect by the great king. The story is well known how Frederick, when he heard that Bach was in town, laid aside his flute, which he had taken up for his evening concert, and saying, ‘Gentlemen, old Bach is arrived,’ sent for him to come at once to the palace. Bach was made to try over the new Silbermann pianofortes, of which the king had several, and the next evening the king desired him to improvise a six-part fugue on a subject which he was allowed to choose for himself. In all this experience Bach very evidently fulfilled the expectations which had been roused in the king. Upon his return to Leipzig he composed his famous ‘Musical Offering,’ a collection of pieces in most complicated style, all based upon or related to a theme which the king had given him, and dedicated it to the king. This led to the much greater ‘Art of Fugue,’ the last great work from his pen. It is made up of fifteen fugues and four canons on one and the same theme, employing the most complicated and difficult counterpoint in the expression of a calm and noble emotion. A good part of it had been engraved on copper plates before Bach died, but not all.
Johann Sebastian Bach.
After the painting recently discovered by Dr. Fritz Vollbach.
During the last year of his life his sight failed. In the winter of 1749-50 he underwent two operations, both of which were unsuccessful, and he was left totally blind and shaken in health. On July 18, 1750, his sight was suddenly restored, but a few hours afterward he was stricken with apoplexy and he died on Tuesday, July 28, at a quarter to nine in the evening. With him at the time of his death were his wife and daughters, his youngest son Christian, his son-in-law Altnikol and one of his pupils. The funeral was on the following Friday from St. John’s church, where the preacher announced: ‘The very worthy and venerable Herr Johann Sebastian Bach, court composer to his kingly majesty of Poland and electoral and serene highness of Saxony, chapel master to his highness the prince of Anhalt-Cöthen, and cantor to the school at St. Thomas’s in town, having fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God, in St. Thomas’s churchyard his body has this day, according to Christian usage, been consigned to the earth.’ It was remarked in a sitting of the town council on August 8 that Herr Bach had been a great musician but not a schoolmaster.
Such are the outlines of Bach’s life. It was decidedly a happy one as lives go. There is much evidence to show that he was impulsive and that he worked at his music with great enthusiasm, but the tenor of his life was even, not erratic, methodical, and simple. It is strange to think of him as a schoolmaster, but such he was for a great part of his life. Though the duties of teaching must have been often irksome, they were relatively light, and in no way demanded so much time or effort as to deprive him of opportunity or enthusiasm to compose. His own report of the condition of the choirs and band at the school can leave no doubt that he never heard his choral works performed in a manner which we should deem at the present day appropriate to their greatness. Probably the two choirs at his service for singing the St. Matthew Passion numbered not more than twelve singers each, and the soloists were members of the choir; he never had a complete band, and the organs at St. Thomas church were bad. There was lax discipline and disorder, too. Still these were inadequacies and improprieties from which most composers of his day suffered. Even the Abendmusik at Lübeck, as fine church music as was likely to be heard in all Germany, was interrupted and marred by the noise of the choir boys racing and capering in the choir loft. Bach was not exceptionally unfortunate in this regard. In material affairs he was relatively well-off; his family life was exceptionally happy and complete, he won the love and admiration of many friends and pupils, and honor from princes.
Of his many children but three boys and a girl long survived him, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian, and Regina. Friedemann, the most gifted and the favorite son, became a drunkard, Emanuel and Christian became famous, one in Germany, the other in London. All three are to blame for the fact that their father’s widow, all but their mother, fell into abject poverty and dependence upon public charity. Regina lived to be an old woman, friendless and likewise poverty-stricken until not long before her death, Rochlitz, the publisher, undertook a publication by subscription of her father’s works. Among the subscribers Beethoven was the first.
Bach published only a very few works during his lifetime. The majority of his compositions passed in manuscript into the keeping of his sons. Emanuel later brought out many, but much of what fell to the keeping of Friedemann was carelessly lost or sold for a pittance here and there. There is no way of telling how much of the great man’s music has disappeared, but the amount which has been preserved is prodigious. As is so often the case among musicians, and, indeed, among most artists, his activity is more or less clearly divided into several periods. Thus the early years at Arnstadt and Mühlhausen are years of experiment and study. In the account of his life the ‘Necrology,’ which was published by Emanuel in a periodical owned by Mizler and called the Bibliothèque, we learn that during these years he frequently spent the whole night in study and practice. During the Weimar period, when he was both organist and player in the duke’s band, he came into contact with Italian music, and devoted himself with enthusiasm and evidently untiring energy to the mastery of those principles of clear and lucid form which were at that time exemplified at their best in the violin works of Corelli and Vivaldi. It was a period of great and brilliant works for the organ, probably the toccata and fugue in D minor, which, however, because of its very evident relationship in style and even in theme to works of Buxtehude, may have been conceived earlier; almost certainly the fugue in G minor, the prelude and fugue in A minor, the colossal toccata in F, and perhaps the one passacaglia. At this time, possibly largely as a matter of study and exercise, he transcribed concertos of Vivaldi for harpsichord, mastering thus the form, practically invented by the Italian, which he later used so brilliantly in the Italian Concerto for clavicembalo.
At Cöthen he was cut off from the organ and associated wholly with secular music, and in this period naturally fall the first part of the Well-tempered Clavichord, the French suites, the suites for violin alone and for 'cello, the Brandenburg concertos and the overtures for orchestra. Finally at Leipzig, where he was expected to furnish music for almost every Sunday of the year, he composed his great choral works, about three hundred cantatas, six motets at least, the Christmas and Easter oratorios, the Magnificats, the great mass in B minor, and shorter masses, and four settings of the Passion, of which that according to St. Matthew is perhaps the most sublime of his works and the perfect expression of his genius. Instrumental works also belong to this period, marked by maturity and calm, a broadening of form, an alienation from the lucid conciseness of the Italian and French styles. There are, for example, the prelude and fugue for organ in E-flat major, the English suites and the second part of the Well-tempered Clavichord for clavier, the overture à la manière française, the ‘Musical Offering,’ and the ‘Art of Fugue.’