Johann Sebastian Bach

Born

21 March 1685, Eisenach, GermanyBy the Julian calendar then used there; 31 March by today's calendar

Died

28 July 1750, Leipzig, Germany

Life

Bach was born in Eisenach on 21 March 1685, the son of the court musician Johann Ambrosius Bach. From 1708 to 1717 he was organist to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and from 1717 to 1723 court Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, where he wrote mainly keyboard music.

In 1723 he became Cantor of St Thomas Church in Leipzig, and he stayed until his death on 28 July 1750. His catalogue of works has almost 1,100 entries, in every genre of his time except opera.

Why play Bach

Bach wrote a great deal of music for learners in his own family. The Clavier-Büchlein for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, begun in 1720, opens with the Applicatio and also holds the Little Prelude in D minor. The first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, dated 1722, is 24 preludes and fugues in every major and minor key, and it begins with the Prelude in C major. He called his Inventions an instruction for playing two voices cleanly and learning a singing style; Invention No. 1 is the first of them.

The 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach was his gift to his second wife, the singer Anna Magdalena, whom he married in 1721. Many of its shorter pieces were written by his contemporaries and sons rather than by Bach himself, so the minuets and polonaises from it are listed here as attributed to Bach. The most famous of them, the Minuet in G major, comes from a harpsichord suite by the Dresden organist Christian Petzold, and was long credited to Bach because it was copied into the notebook.

When Bach lived