Johann Sebastian Bach – Life Milestones

Manuscripts, scores, and landmark editions of Johann Sebastian Bach's masterpieces evoke the remarkable creative journey of one of history's greatest composers, from sacred music to the enduring works that shaped Western musical tradition.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) stands among the defining figures in the history of Western music. During his lifetime, he was admired primarily as a formidable organist, improviser, and teacher. The full scale of his achievement as a composer became widely recognized only in later generations, when his music began to exert a decisive influence on composers across radically different periods and traditions.

Bach brought the language of the Baroque to its highest point of structural refinement and expressive depth. His command of counterpoint was inseparable from a profound understanding of drama, faith, movement, and human feeling. From The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations to the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, his works remain central to musical study and performance almost three centuries after they were written.

1685

Born on March 31 — March 21 according to the calendar then used locally — in Eisenach, Germany, into an extensive family of professional musicians.

1694

His mother dies, leaving the nine-year-old Bach without one of the central figures of his early childhood.

1695

His father dies the following year. Bach moves to Ohrdruf, where he is raised and educated by his elder brother Johann Christoph Bach, an organist and former pupil of Johann Pachelbel.

1700

Joins the choir of St Michael’s School in Lüneburg. His years there expose him to a broader musical world, including northern German organ traditions, courtly styles, and the work of musicians beyond his family circle.

1703

Takes up his first established position as organist at the New Church in Arnstadt. His powerful playing attracts attention, though his independent temperament soon brings him into conflict with the local authorities.

1705

Walks roughly 400 kilometres to Lübeck to hear the celebrated organist Dieterich Buxtehude. Bach remains there considerably longer than his authorized leave, an indication of how seriously he regarded the opportunity to study Buxtehude’s music at close range.

1707

Marries his cousin Maria Barbara Bach and is appointed organist at St Blasius Church in Mühlhausen. The position gives him greater musical resources, particularly for sacred vocal works.

1708

Moves to Weimar as court organist and chamber musician. During this period, his reputation as an organist grows substantially, and he composes many of the works that establish his mastery of the instrument.

1717

Leaves Weimar to enter the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. Before being released, he is imprisoned for almost a month after insisting on his right to accept the new appointment.

1720

Maria Barbara dies suddenly while Bach is away on a journey with the Köthen court. He returns to discover that she has already been buried.

1721

Marries the singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke. She becomes an important presence in his household, performing his music and helping to copy manuscripts, while the family home develops into an active centre of musical work and education.

1723

Appointed Cantor of St Thomas in Leipzig, a demanding position he will hold for the rest of his life. His responsibilities include teaching, directing church music, training choristers, and supplying new works for the city’s principal churches.

1724

The St John Passion receives its first known performance in Leipzig. Its concentrated dramatic force reveals Bach’s ability to combine theological reflection with the immediacy of musical theatre.

1727

The St Matthew Passion is presented for the first time. Conceived on an unusually large scale, it becomes one of the most profound expressions of sacred drama in the Western tradition.

1731

The first part of the Clavier-Übung is published, beginning a major series of keyboard publications through which Bach presents different dimensions of his instrumental art.

1741

Publishes the Goldberg Variations, a vast cycle built from a single bass structure. The work combines intellectual rigor, stylistic variety, and extraordinary keyboard imagination.

1747

Visits Frederick II of Prussia at Potsdam. Asked to improvise on a theme supplied by the king, Bach later develops the material into The Musical Offering, one of his most concentrated demonstrations of contrapuntal invention.

1749

His eyesight deteriorates severely. During his final years, he brings the Mass in B minor into its mature, comprehensive form and continues work on The Art of Fugue, whose final contrapunctus remains incomplete.

1750

Dies in Leipzig on July 28, only months after two unsuccessful eye operations. His death is often taken as a symbolic end point of the Baroque era, though the musical world around him had already begun to move in new directions.

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• The famous story of the young Bach secretly copying a valuable manuscript by moonlight comes from the first major biography of the composer, written by Johann Nikolaus Forkel in 1802. It cannot be independently verified, but it has endured because it captures something credible about Bach’s early hunger for knowledge and his determination to gain access to music beyond his immediate surroundings.

• Bach fathered twenty children across his two marriages, a remarkable number even by the standards of the period. Only ten survived into adulthood, reflecting the high levels of infant and childhood mortality in the 18th century. Four of his sons became important composers in their own right, most notably Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian Bach, whose music belonged to a newer style than that of their father.

• After Bach’s death, public interest in much of his music declined as Classical taste favored greater transparency and a different approach to form. He was never entirely forgotten: keyboard players, theorists, and composers continued to study his work. The decisive public revival came in 1829, when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin. The performance became a landmark in the history of musical rediscovery and helped restore Bach to the centre of the international repertory.

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