Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is, for many, the greatest composer who ever lived: the supreme master of the Baroque and the towering summit of the entire Western musical tradition. Born in Eisenach into a vast dynasty of German musicians, he spent his life as a working church and court musician, never travelling far from his native Thuringia and Saxony, and capped his career as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, responsible for the music of the city’s principal churches. There he produced, week after week, an output of staggering quantity and quality: hundreds of cantatas, the Passions, the Mass in B minor, the great organ works, the keyboard collections, the orchestral and chamber music. Bach’s genius lay in fusing profound emotional and spiritual depth with unparalleled contrapuntal mastery, music of dazzling intellectual rigour that is at the same time intensely human. Relatively neglected as a composer in the decades after his death (though revered by musicians), he was triumphantly restored to the wider public by the nineteenth-century Bach revival, and has stood at the centre of musical life ever since.