Johann Sebastian Bach is now known as one of the greatest, most prolific and most ingenious composers of all time. He wrote a huge amount of music for organ, keyboard, the piano hadn't been invented yet, as well as solo works, orchestral works and vocal works. He was an undisputed master of writing in counterpoint. That's where there are lots of independent musical lines playing at the same time, working cleverly around each other to form a complex, and engaging musical texture. Something like this.
Beyond that, Bach explored virtually every major style, form, and musical genre of his time, except for opera. He developed all these styles, pushed them forwards, and blended them together in new ways. His compositions are particularly remarkable for the way that they combine the emotional with the intellectual. and we'll talk more about that later on.
By his death, he had completed well over 1,000 compositions. He wasn't just a prolific musician. He was also very randy.
He fathered 20 children, 7 with his first wife and 13 with his second. Only 10 survived until adulthood. But the Bachs were very much known as a musical family, and many of Johann Sebastian's children went on to be big-name composers themselves.
After Johann Sebastian's death, His music fell into obscurity, and it wasn't really fully revived until the 19th century, particularly by composers such as Mendelssohn and Brahms. Since then, Bach has been regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, western composer who ever lived. Perhaps I can share some of the reasons why in this video. I'll talk first about his life's work, and then a bit about the quality of his music afterwards, though to be honest, I can barely scratch the surface in a single video. Bach's accomplishments were truly gargantuan, and his musical qualities are so varied from work to work.
So first, let's talk about Bach's life and works. Bach was a working musician throughout his life, a church organist, a teacher, a director of local orchestras, church choirs, and so on. So most of the music that he wrote was produced specifically for the jobs that he held. When he was an organist, he composed a lot of organ music.
When he was a court music director, he wrote a lot of music for court and domestic entertainment. When he was director of music at four churches in Leipzig, he wrote a huge number of cantatas and other church pieces, and so on. We might remember that a composer was particularly bound by duty in those days.
They did not have the same freedoms that we enjoy today. In fact, at one point, Bach wanted to move from Weimar to Köthen to start a new job. Because Bach was such a great musician, the Duke of Weimar refused to let him leave, and put him in prison for an entire month.
So, let's quickly overview the different genres and styles that Bach worked in and revolutionised. It'll have to be quick, because he wrote such a huge amount of music. First, organ music. Bach worked as a church musician, and so much of his music is based around the German Lutheran service.
He wrote many chorale settings, over 200 in fact. and chorale preludes, which are based on Lutheran hymn tunes. He also wrote a great deal of organ toccatas, fantasias, preludes and fugues. A notable organ work is his Orgelbuchlein, or Little Organ Book, which consists of 45 short chorale preludes. This book also gives guidance in how to develop a chorale yourself, and how to improve your organ pedal technique.
Bach often used the organ pedals to create an extra, independent line in the music. The book is therefore an instructive tool, and not just a book of music. For keyboard, he wrote a number of suites, showing the influence of different national styles. Six English suites, six French suites, and six partitas.
However, these suites also have many German and Italian characteristics. His best-known keyboard works are probably his two volumes of the well-tempered clavier. Each book contains 24 preludes and fugues, one for every possible key, major and minor, arranged in ascending order from C up to B. I've made a video on fugues and preludes before, if you want to learn more about them. These books are also somewhat educational.
They demonstrate the possibility of playing music in every single key on the keyboard, which was unusual at the time. And they also use many different styles of writing, and different levels of complexity. He also wrote the Goldberg Variations. You might recognize its main theme.
There are 30 variations on this theme. Every third variation is a canon. The first is a canon of the unison, the next is a canon of the second, and it goes on and on until he writes a canon of the ninth. So it's showing the potential for counterpoint, and Bach's genius with counterpoint. The other variations take all sorts of forms, including fugue, French overture, slow aria, bravura, and so on.
It's like an expert summary of the different kinds of music of his time. Meanwhile, The Art of Fugue systematically demonstrates all kinds of fugal writing. Eighteen canons and fugues in the strictest style.
all based on one subject and its transformations. The book is very much structured in order of increasing complexity. The Last Fugue, which Bach didn't finish before he died, has four subjects, including one which spells out Bach's own name, B-A-C-H. So, by structuring his music from simplest to most complex, you can see how this is not only a masterpiece, but a kind of instructive textbook on fugue writing. Onto chamber music.
He wrote 15 sonatas for solo instruments with harpsichord. That's six for violin, six for flute, and three for viola da gamba, a kind of precursor to the cello. He also wrote some for unaccompanied instruments, six sonatas and partitas for violin, six cello suites, and a partita for flute. To make these solo pieces work well, he developed a style of writing where the melody also suggests harmony.
So... that it doesn't need to be accompanied by another instrument. For an example of this, you may recognise the beginning of his first cello suite.
He wrote orchestral music too, famously his six Brandenburg concertos. Generally, these adopted the Italian structure of three movements, fast, slow, fast, and Italian styles too. But it also has original surprises, like in the fifth concerto, where there's an incredible cadenza for harpsichord, an instrument which would normally only underpin the harmony.
And finally, there's his vocal music. His cantatas were written for church services, and are a sort of dramatic presentation of religious texts. The church calendar in Leipzig required 58 cantatas per year, as well as passion music for Good Friday, some magnificats, and other music too for special occasions.
Overall, Bach composed three or even four complete annual cycles of cantatas. That's over 200 cantatas. They show an ingenious mixture of genres and a great grasp of musical drama. Bach's passions, most famously the Matthew Passion and the John Passion, mix elements from opera, cantata, and oratorios.
They sort of blend all three to tell the story of Christ's crucifixion. Here are the first intense notes to Bach's St. John Passion. And finally, there's his great Mass in B minor.
We can think of this as Bach's personal compendium of his life's work. A great deal of the movements in this are actually rehashes of older works, some of his best stuff from earlier cantatas or other pieces, and they're brought back here and revamped or rewritten a bit. Because if you think about it, when Bach was alive, he wouldn't have known that most of his work would survive him. They were just random cantatas or orchestral works.
written for specific services or concerts in his life. But by creating a full, large-scale mass, too large for use in just another church service, it was as if he was making a statement. This is a collection of my best work. I want this work to be immortalised.
And so, we could comfortably argue that Bach believed the music in his B minor mass was some of his strongest. Now, let's talk about his musical qualities a little bit. I mentioned earlier that Bach was a master of all sorts of music, and it's important to understand how he blended or transcended different styles, both artistic and emotional, and intellectual too.
Bach was writing during the Baroque and Rococo era of art. It's a style based in movement, contrast, intricate detail, colour, opulence, grandeur. as well as surprise and drama, these are all words that could describe Bach's music too, and situate him within this period of art.
We can hear his long, long lines of melody, constantly moving, exploring, developing, searching. His opulent and decorative textures. His love of drama.
But his music wasn't just tagging along with stylistic trends. Above all, as with any great art, Bach's music values beauty and truth. But there's another side to Bach's music. For him, music was also an opportunity to show great feats of the intellect, which was an ideal of the Enlightenment period, a prosperous period of science and reason, spearheaded by Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. And while I don't have time to go into detail here, if you want to learn more about Bach's intellectual techniques, his fugues, canons, augmentations, diminutions, and counterpoint, and so on, You can see my video on fugues.
But perhaps all this is why Bach's music often appeals to the mathematically-minded. It stimulates the intellectual brain as well as the emotional. Though, as any mathematician knows, there is beauty in complexity too. In fact, sometimes there is beauty because of complexity, especially when all these complex pieces fit together so perfectly. To take just one example of potentially thousands of of Bach blending the emotional and the intellectual.
Listen to the qui tollis from his B minor mass, how emotionally expressive it is, while also being a perfect, uninterrupted canon of the fifth between the two voices. So Bach was a master of the Baroque style and of the intellect. I used to find Bach's music difficult to access. It didn't resonate with me in the same way that later music did.
But the more familiar I became with him and his style, and the more his world opened up to me, the more apparent it became that Bach was an undisputed master and has composed some of the most profound and beautiful works in music's history, let alone the most ingenious. But But where to start? I'm sure everybody has a different opinion on this, but I'll risk offering mine. For the emotional, perhaps start with Bach's St John Passion, which starts right in the thick of the drama and follows the story of Christ's Passion.
Follow it through with the text in hand if you can, so you can follow what's going on. And for the intellect, you can try one of his grand summaries of style, the Goldberg Variations. You can hear this performed on piano.
harpsichord, even the harp, there are 30 variations on the beautiful theme. And we can think of that as 10 sets of three. Each set of three variations contains a virtuoso piece, an emotional piece, and a rational piece. And as I said, every third piece is a canon. First a canon at the unison, and then at the second, and then so on, up and up.
And one of my favourite of all pieces has to be the B minor mass. Though the Kyrie may be challenging for newcomers, the rest of the piece takes you on a whirlwind of musical and emotional content. And I might add as an end note, I know several people who have complained that Bach's music sounds too old, too dusty and boring for them. This might be sacrilege, but you could try listening to the fantastic orchestral transcriptions of his music.
Edward Elgar and Arnold Schoenberg have done some amazing transcriptions. The notes are exactly the same, but they've modernised the instrumentation, transforming it. Or there are Stokowski's transcriptions, bombastic though some of them are.
Or there are even the Swingle singers, jazzifying his music. Some will cry that this is no longer Bach, but I prefer to think, how is it that the music can still sound so fresh, so modern, so musically strong after 250 years? We may change the instruments, but the notes are still the same.
The melodies, the harmonies, the lines of counterpoint and the musical thought. And those are the things that are really important in Bach. So... By all means, check out these transcriptions and enjoy how Bach stimulates your emotions and your intellect.
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