Essential Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was an ordinary man who held ordinary jobs but wrote extraordinary music. He was born just a few miles from the castle in which the great reformer and hymn-writer Martin Luther translated the bible, and was subjected to a rigorous Lutheran education that would inform his diligent but very human life. Bach was no stranger to personal hardship or professional rejection. Only his final appointment, as Music Director of the Leipzig Churches and Cantor at St Thomas's School, was one of genuine prestige.
Read more…As a church musician, a court musician and multi-instrumentalist in charge of choirs and orchestras, Bach wrote music out of necessity. He probably didn't think much (if any) of it would outlive him, but there's reason to believe he stopped once or twice to take stock of a particular piece, knowing it was exceptional. He conceived his monumental Mass in B minor as a compendium of his greatest and most inspired sacred music and a testament of his faith. He filled the score for The Goldberg Variations with number games that were designed as much to delight the analyst as advance his own believe that numerology advanced his technique. He frequently wove his own initials, equivalent to the notes B flat, A, C B natural, into his works.
Bach's mastering of harmony and counterpoint has never been surpassed and influenced everyone from Beethoven to Britney. But no matter how technical it sounds, Bach's music never lacks emotional poetry. Nobody combined the mathematical, the spiritual and the exuberant like Bach did. And nobody has since.