Leipzig: 1723-1750

Johann Sebastian Bach

II LIFE

Early Life
Arnstadt: 1703-1707
Mühlhausen: 1707-1708
Weimar: 1708-1717
Köthen: 1717-1723

Leipzig: 1723-1750

In Leipzig Bach stepped into one of the oldest and most prestigious music positions in Germany. He held the position of cantor for more than 25 years, until the end of his life. He was answerable to a stable, self-perpetuating town council, he had the opportunity to compose both sacred and secular music, and his sons could attend the university—an educational opportunity he himself had not been able to enjoy. As cantor and director of town music, Bach was responsible first and foremost for overseeing the music in the town’s five largest Lutheran churches, including Saint Thomas and Saint Nicholas, which offered the most elaborate programs. He also served as a teacher at the respected Saint Thomas School (founded in 1212), where he was required to teach Latin and give singing and instrumental lessons to the boys.

Although Bach was less than enthusiastic about his teaching duties, he approached his obligations as a church composer with great industry. During the first six years in Leipzig he appears to have assembled five annual cycles of cantatas. Each cycle contained approximately 60 works—one for each Sunday and festival day of the church year—as well as a passion for Good Friday. For most of this period Bach composed cantatas at a rate of better than one per week.

As time went on, however, Bach became disillusioned with the mediocre quality of the performers at his disposal, and he increasingly entered into disagreements with the town council over his rights as cantor. “The authorities are odd and very little interested in music, and I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution,” he wrote to a friend. Perhaps for this reason, Bach stopped composing church cantatas almost altogether in 1729 and took over the directorship of the collegium musicum, a group of university students that gathered weekly to present public concerts in Zimmermann’s Coffee House. For the collegium he composed or arranged a host of instrumental pieces: viola da gamba and flute sonatas, trio sonatas, orchestral suites, and concertos for one, two, three, and even four harpsichords, written for himself and his talented sons and students. The second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier may have been assembled for the purpose of collegium performances as well. It was for Zimmermann’s customers that Bach wrote the humorous Coffee Cantata, an early “singing commercial” that satirizes the coffee craze of the time.

Bach stepped down from the collegium directorship in 1737, and from that time until the end of his life he increasingly withdrew from his official duties and turned instead to private projects, such as the publication of the Goldberg Variations, Schübler Chorales, and other keyboard works; the study of Catholic church music in Latin; and the composition of large composite pieces such as the Art of Fugue and, in his final years, the B-Minor Mass. During his last decade, Bach also traveled frequently to Dresden and Berlin, where his sons worked as professional musicians.

In 1747 Bach enjoyed his most significant personal triumph when he visited the Berlin court of Frederick II (Frederick the Great), where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel served as harpsichordist. Bach tried out Frederick’s fine harpsichords and fortepianos (an early type of piano), displaying his incredible mastery of improvisation. Without preparation he improvised a fugue on a subject provided by the king, and on his return to Leipzig he used the royal theme for a set of polyphonic compositions dedicated to the monarch and published with the title Musical Offering.

Two years later Bach’s eyesight, which had been poor for many years, began to fail seriously. In June 1749 the town council auditioned a potential successor for his job, and by October, Bach was so disabled that his 14-year-old son Johann Christian had to sign pay receipts on his behalf. In the spring of 1750, Bach entrusted himself to the care of a visiting eye surgeon who boasted of having performed successful operations elsewhere. In Bach’s case the two subsequent operations proved to be failures, and the drugs that were administered broke his health, which had been robust up to this point. On July 18 he suddenly recovered his sight, but a few hours later he suffered a stroke, and on July 28, 1750, he died.

III WORKS

Cantatas
Motets
Oratorios and Passions
Magnificat and B-Minor Mass
Organ Works
Clavier Works
Works for Solo Instruments
Works for Instrumental Ensemble
Musical Offering, Canonic Variations, Art of Fugue
Method of Composing

IV THE REVIVAL OF BACH’S MUSIC