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 Return to Piano Project 2009 Home Page >> J.S. Bach: An Overview and the Early Years Bach and the Organ Bach and the Keyboard Equal Temperament and the Fantastic Style The Legacy of J.S. Bach
 Reincken can be seen at the harpsichord in this painting, Domestic Music Scene by Johannes Voorhout. |
Piano Project
2009: J.S. Bach and the Keyboard —Monica Verona “The Baroque artist…longs to enter into the multiplicity of phenomena, into the flux of things in their perpetual becoming—his compositions are dynamic and open and tend to expand outside their boundaries; the forms that go to make them are associated in a single organic action and cannot be isolated from each other. The Baroque artist’s instinct for escape drives him to prefer ‘forms that take flight’ to those that are static and dense; his liking for pathos leads him to depict sufferings and feelings, life and death at their extremes.” - Germain Bazin, French art historian. From Baroque to Rococo, 1985. Overview Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) has been the subject of scores of books and essays for more than two centuries and is still known to musicians and music lovers as the master of the Baroque era who brought this style of music to its highest level of maturity. Known to us primarily as a composer and virtuoso organist, his exhaustive list of over 1,000 compositions continues to inspire composers and performers to this very day. The most notable of these works include over 500 choral works (including cantatas, oratorios, passions, masses, and motets); over 30 concertos and orchestral suites; 6 sonatas and partitas for solo violin; 6 suites for solo cello; over 200 works for organ (including preludes, toccatas, fantasies and fugues, concertos, partitas, and chorale preludes); and the celebrated keyboard works—the 48 preludes and fugues that comprise the Well Tempered Klavier, the Goldberg Variations, 18 partitas and suites, 30 inventions and sinfonias, 7 toccatas, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, the Four Duets, and the Italian Concerto. As the heir to compositional structures that had been developed by the most influential composers from Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands for over 100 years before his birth, Bach reinvigorated these forms from the highly improvisatory to the strictly contrapuntal, injecting them with a personal energy and powerful sonority that we identify so characteristically with the name “Bach.” Even though he was known as an old-fashioned composer during most of his life, preoccupied with “learned counterpoint” in comparison to the popular “galant style” of the mid-18th century, Bach’s music sits at the foundation of Western music, acknowledged for its intellectual depth, artistic beauty, and extraordinary command of the harmonic language. The Early Years Born in the German town of Eisenach in 1685, Johann Sebastian Bach was the youngest of eight children and he would later proudly outline the genealogy of his musical family heritage which had, in fact, produced musicians for several generations. During his early childhood, Bach was instructed to play the violin and harpsichord by his father who was the director of the town musicians in Eisenach while also enjoying the influence of his uncles who worked professionally as church organists, court chamber musicians, and composers. His brother Johann Christoph Bach, 14 years his senior, held the post of organist at the Michaeliskirche in Ohrdruf, and it was here that Johann Sebastian lived after the death of both parents in 1695. Despite being orphaned at such an early age, the family musical tradition continued and Johann Christoph proved to be a valuable teacher, instructing the young Sebastian on the keyboard. Without doubt this instruction included study of the organ, an introduction to the clavichord, and exposure to the music of Pachelbel, Froberger, Lully, Marchand, Marais, Frescobaldi, and Sweelinck. By studying, copying, and performing this music, Bach laid the foundation of his compositional career —it was the fertile ground that inspired his personal growth and ultimately the development of the high Baroque style. By 1700, at age 15, Bach was sent to Lüneburg to study at the Latin school while singing in the choir at St. Michael’s Church, which was known for its impressive musical tradition. Most likely, he played the school’s three-manual organ as well as its harpsichords, although no documentation of formal study with any particular teacher exists. The church’s vast library of over 1,000 music manuscripts and prints certainly contributed to Bach’s erudite musical knowledge, while his experience within the choir advanced his profound understanding of the German choir tradition of the 17th century. Bach was a prodigy and his choice of study at St. Michael’s was a step toward advancing his musical career. Situated near the northern seaport of Hamburg, Lüneburg had a diverse and cosmopolitan culture, which exposed Bach to a wider European palette. While studying music, theology, history, Latin, French, and Italian, Bach also would have come into contact with French and German noblemen sent to this selective school for career training in diplomacy, government, and the military. Here, he also became acquainted with the music and performances of the organist Georg Böhm, who wrote French-inspired keyboard music. His later and legendary meeting with the aged Johann Adam Reincken, whose many organ performances he heard in Hamburg while still a student at Lüneburg, remains significant to our understanding of Bach’s relation to the 17th-century keyboard practice of improvisation—a tradition that Reincken feared had died, but which he exclaimed “still lives on in you” after hearing Bach play extempore at the organ. Through his early acquaintance with Böhm and Reincken, Bach no doubt had access to larger and more refined organs than he had played thus far and by the end of his studies, he had gained a measure of renown as a virtuoso organist. |
 A portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach painted in 1748 by Elias Gottlob Hausmann  The Bach house in Eisenach, Germany  A statue of Bach erected in Eisenach in 1884 |
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