Johann Sebastian Bach’s Grandson: The Last Composer of the Bach Dynasty

by Emily E. Hogstad  September 10th, 2026

It’s well known that Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 children. Several of his sons became accomplished composers in their own right.

But what about the next generation?

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (1759–1845) was the grandson of Johann Sebastian – and the last member of the family to pursue composition professionally.

Today we’re taking a look at his life, his career, and five of his most interesting works.

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach’s Background and Training

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach was born on 24 May 1759.

He was the son of composer Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (the fifth son of Johann Sebastian Bach) and his wife, singer Lucia Elisabeth Münchhausen. We wrote about their marriage here: https://interlude.hk/christoph-friedrich-bach-and-lucia-elisabeth-munchausen/.

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

Wilhelm was one of eight children, only half of whom survived infancy. He was the only boy to live to adulthood, and therefore the only one who pursued music professionally.

His music education began under his father. Later he went to Hamburg to study with an uncle, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, usually referred to as C.P.E. Bach.

In 1778, when he was nineteen, he and his father went to London to visit yet another uncle, Johann Christian Bach, whom Wilhelm studied with until Johann Christian died in 1782.

He may have been the only person ever to study with three of Johann Sebastian’s sons.

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach’s Career

After Johann Christian Bach’s death, Wilhelm returned to the Continent, embarking on a concert tour in the Netherlands and France.

In 1786, he was named the Kapellmeister in Minden, Germany, a small town a hundred miles south of Hamburg.

King Friedrich Wilhelm II

The following year, his life and career took a turn when King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia visited Minden.

The king was impressed by a work of Wilhelm’s that he heard during his trip, and hired Bach as Kapellmeister for his own court.

In 1788, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach became Kapellmeister in Berlin, a position he held for over twenty years. Part of his duties included teaching music to Prussian princes.

He married twice. In 1798, he married a woman named Charlotte Elerdt. She had two daughters, Caroline and Juliane, before dying young in 1801.

He remarried a woman named Wilhelmine the following year and had two more children: Auguste and Friederike.

Of the four children, only Caroline and Auguste survived past childhood.

Caroline lived until 1871, becoming the last surviving direct descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach’s Retirement

In 1811, at the age of fifty-two, Wilhelm retired from his Kapellmeister duties after the Prussian royal family granted him a pension. He continued living in Berlin, where he appeared as a pianist and composer.

He reappeared in music history in 1843, when he travelled to Leipzig, where a monument to Johann Sebastian Bach was being dedicated.

While there, he met a young Robert Schumann, who described him as “a very old, agile gentleman of 84 years old with snow-white hair and expressive features.”

He also corresponded with Felix Mendelssohn, who, with the help of his Bach-loving family, had done much advocacy for Johann Sebastian Bach’s music.

Wilhelm died a few years later, in 1845.

He was open-eyed about his legacy, acknowledging the discrepancy in talent between himself and his grandfather, and is remembered for his wry remark, “Heredity can tend to run out of ideas.”

Today we’re looking at five of Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach’s works.

Symphony No. 2 in G major  

This is a slender, spirited three-movement symphony.

The outer movements are sparkly and mischievous, with a serene, noble slow movement that prominently features horn calls reminiscent of genteel hunting horns.

Sestetto Concertante  

This is an elegant work for clarinet, two horns, violin, viola, and cello, written around 1800.

The varied, unconventional instrumentation would have helped it to carry in a large aristocratic space, and it is easy to imagine it as background music for a charming, gossipy, candlelit event.

Westphalens Freude  

“Westphalens Freude” (“Westphalens Joy” or “Triumph! Triumph Westphalia!”) was a cantata published in 1791, composed for orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists.

This is the work celebrating King Friedrich Wilhelm that so impressed the monarch that he invited Bach to work in Berlin.

Toccata  

Just like his famous grandfather, Wilhelm wrote works for solo organ.

Although this Toccata may not be as forcefully virtuosic as Johann Sebastian’s, it is pleasantly triumphant and explores a range of the instrument’s timbres.

Das Dreyblatt  

This is an unusual (to put it mildly) work written for one keyboard, three players, and six hands.

The centre player is to be a large man, and the ones on the sides are to be petite women.

In an era when playing piano duets was one of the few socially acceptable times for unmarried men and women to be physically close, this piece takes the sexual subtext of the genre and makes it quite explicit!

Conclusion

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach may not have matched his grandfather’s towering genius – as he himself cheerfully admitted.

But his long life gave him a unique vantage point on musical history, bridging the world of Johann Sebastian Bach and the early Romantic era of Schumann and Mendelssohn.

If you’d like to explore more of the Bach family tree, we’ve written more about it here: https://interlude.hk/the-bach-family-eight-fascinating-relatives-of-johann-sebastian/.

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 by Emily E. Hogstad  May 20th, 2026

Today, we remember Johann Sebastian Bach as one of the most prolific composers in music history. However, a significant portion of his output – about half – has not survived.

Johann Sebastian Bach

These lost works span categories including sacred and secular cantatas, Passion settings, and instrumental compositions.

Their disappearance can be attributed to various historical factors, including neglect after Bach’s death, the scattering of manuscripts among heirs, wartime losses, and more.

Today, we’re looking at the stories behind these lost Bach masterpieces – and how they might have been lost to time.

What Happened to Bach’s Manuscripts After He Died?

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts were divided among his family members, especially his widow Anna Magdalena and his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Wilhelm Friedemann sold his father’s scores piecemeal during various periods of financial struggle.

After his death in 1784, the remaining manuscripts were auctioned off to various collectors – including one of his students, Sara Itzig Levy, best-known today for being Felix Mendelssohn‘s great-aunt.

Carl Philipp Emanuel inherited another chunk of his father’s estate: the manuscripts of Bach’s Passions and other major works. He died in 1788, and his collection was passed to his granddaughter.

After she died in 1805, many of the manuscripts were sold off. A large portion was eventually purchased by a musical society and archive founded in Berlin known as the Sing-Akademie.

The Sing-Akademie’s Role In Preserving Bach Manuscripts

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

In 1800, German composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter became the leader of the Sing-Akademie. His star student, Felix Mendelssohn, became fascinated with the Bach works that were in the musical society collection, as well as the ones that his great-aunt had saved for her own private collection.

Over the generations, wartime upheavals took a toll on Bach’s works.

During World War II, the Berlin Sing-Akademie archives were moved for safekeeping and then seized by the Soviet army.

For decades, it was believed the archives had been lost, but in 1999, they were found in Ukraine intact. The rediscovery of the old Sing-Akademie archives yielded some previously lost Bach works and documents.

Other Bach Rediscoveries

Bach manuscript

This isn’t the only place where undiscovered Bach manuscripts have been found, either.

In 1992, Peter Wollny, the present-day director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, came across two unsigned and undated music manuscripts at the Royal Library of Belgium.

Years later, Wollny discovered that the handwriting in the manuscripts belonged to a student of Bach’s named Salomon Günther John, and that John may have copied them out.

The works – two Ciaconas for organ, likely dating from Bach’s teenage years – were authenticated and were performed for the first time in centuries in November 2025.

The discovery suggests that more lost Bach works might be uncovered someday.   

What Were the Lost Works?

The lost Bach works fall into a few baskets:

• Sacred cantatas
• Secular cantatas
• Passions
• Instrumental works

Why Are So Many of Bach’s Sacred Cantatas Lost?

Throughout his career, Bach’s job description often included writing sacred cantatas for performance on Sunday services and feast days.

While Bach worked in Leipzig between 1723 and 1750, his responsibilities included composing cantatas.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach claimed that he composed five full annual cycles of church cantatas.

Each annual cycle would consist of around 60 cantatas. Five full cycles’ worth would suggest the existence of 300. However, we only know of around 200, meaning around a hundred are presumably missing.

Another contributing factor to the confusion was the fact that Bach frequently (and understandably) reused or adapted parts of older cantatas as part of his newer versions.

After Bach’s death, there were simply too many pieces – and too many heirs – for the cantatas to remain a unified collection, so they were ultimately split up.  

What Happened to Bach’s Secular Cantatas?

Bach also composed numerous secular cantatas, i.e., celebratory works for royal birthdays, weddings, city officials, and the like.

Because they were often written for a single specific occasion, their scores were less likely to be preserved. Sometimes those scores might have been gifted to dedicatees or patrons as gifts.

One example is Bach’s Birthday Cantata for Augustus II (BWV 1156) from 1727. The libretto survives today because it was presented in print to Augustus, but Bach’s music hasn’t survived.

It has been theorised that portions of Bach’s Mass in B minor, dating from 1749, were adapted from this cantata, as pieces of the Mass appear to fit Haupt’s text.

If that theory is true, it means that Bach may have reused secular music in his later sacred music, or vice versa, even decades after the fact.  

Why Are So Many of Bach’s Passions Lost?   

Only two authentic Bach Passions have survived in their entirety: the St. John Passion from 1724 and the St. Matthew Passion from 1727.

We also have the libretto of a third: the St. Mark Passion.

However, Bach’s obituary lists five Passions, suggesting there might be two we don’t know about.

A payment record exists from 1717, paying Bach (referred to as “Concert Meister Bachen” in the paperwork) for a Passion music performance. However, we don’t have any trace of this hypothetical work at all.

As for the fifth, if it ever existed, we have no concrete evidence about it.

There’s an outside possibility that while writing his obituary, Bach’s family incorrectly ascribed a Passion to him. A surviving manuscript of a St. Luke’s Passion copied by Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel exists, and for a while, historians believed that Bach had written it. However, it has since been attributed to another unknown composer.

If the obituary was correct, and there were indeed three other complete passions by Bach that we know nothing about, as gutting as the loss would be, it would also make a certain amount of sense. The Passions were massive works meant for performance during Holy Week, which only happened once a year, so these weren’t works that were intended to be preserved and performed long-term.

What Happened to Bach’s Lost Instrumental Works?

Scholars believe that we have far fewer instrumental works by Bach than we should, given that he had two appointments – one in Weimar from 1708 to 1717, and one in Köthen from 1717 to 1723 – where his primary responsibilities would have included writing instrumental music.

It is believed that his Harpsichord Concerto in D-minor (BWV 1052) was adapted from a lost violin concerto; transposing the keyboard part to violin suggests an original string version.   

In fact, reconstructions have been made for about ten instrumental concertos that Bach likely wrote but are now lost.

Bach’s obituary also mentions that he composed “many trios”, but not many survive.

There’s also an excerpt from a Sinfonia in D-major that ends abruptly and has no known accompanying sections; we simply don’t know where the rest went.  

Conclusion

Johann Sebastian Bach’s surviving output is vast, but, unbelievably, it represents only a fraction of what he actually composed during his lifetime.

The story of those lost pieces reminds us that there is much we still don’t know about Bach’s work – even though he is arguably the single most important figure in the history of classical music.

But there are still plenty of archives to comb through. So who knows? In the years to come, we may yet discover more of Johann Sebastian Bach’s lost works.

Johann Sebastian Bach

 Am 21. Mai ist das Kammerensemble der J. S. Bach-Stiftung zusammen mit der Sopranistin Julia Doyle und dem Bariton Matthias Helm zu Gast im Berliner Dom.

21. Mai 2026 um 20:00

Berliner Dom

Tickets über den Berliner Dom

#bachkantate #johannsebastianbach #berlinerdom #cantatas #bachstiftung

0:23 / 0:35

If You Like Bach, You Might Like Glenn Gould

 by Georg Predota

Johann Sebastian Bach, the towering figure of Baroque music, is renowned for his intricate counterpoint, emotional depth, and technical brilliance. His compositions have inspired countless musicians and listeners for centuries.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Among the interpreters of Bach’s keyboard music, few have left as indelible a mark as the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Known for his idiosyncratic and highly personal approach to Bach’s compositions, Gould’s performances offer a fresh lens through which to experience the composer’s genius.

Glenn Gould at the piano

Glenn Gould (1932–1982) was a singular voice in the interpretation of Bach, a pianist of extraordinary talent and polarising eccentricity. His approach to Bach was shaped by a combination of technical brilliance, intellectual rigour, and a willingness to challenge conventional performance practices. 

A Fusion of Precision and Passion

Bach’s music is both intellectually stimulating and deeply emotive, balancing mathematical precision with profound spirituality. For the performer, they demand technical precision and interpretive insight, offering the artist a vast canvas for expression.

Bach’s mastery of counterpoint creates a dense, almost hypnotic interplay of lines that challenges both listener and performers. Structural complexity, emotional depth, and interpretive flexibility made Bach’s music a perfect vehicle for a performer like Glenn Gould, whose unorthodox approach brought a completely new dimension to these works.

Unlike most pianists of his time, who adhered to Romantic traditions of lush, expressive playing, Gould favoured clarity, precision, and a detached yet highly expressive style. His performances often emphasised the architectural logic of Bach’s music while infusing it with a distinctly modern sensibility.

A Revolutionary Blend

Glenn Gould

Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations is perhaps the most iconic example of his approach. At the age of 22, Gould burst onto the international scene with his debut album for Columbia Records, which remains one of the most celebrated recordings of the work. In contrast to the stately, measured interpretations of earlier performers, Gould’s set is brisk, rhythmically incisive, and strikingly clear.

His tempos, particularly in the faster variations, are lightning-fast, showcasing his virtuosic control and ability to articulate each voice in Bach’s polyphony with crystalline precision. For instance, in Variation 7, a gigue-like movement, Gould’s buoyant rhythm and crisp articulation highlight the dance-like character, making the music feel alive and spontaneous.

Yet, Gould’s interpretation is not merely about speed or clarity. He brings a profound sense of individuality to the work, emphasising contrasts between variations and creating a narrative arc that feels both cohesive and unpredictable.

Eccentric Brilliance

Glenn Gould’s chair

Gould does engage in deliberate pacing and provides subtle dynamic shading that evokes a meditative intensity that resonates with Bach’s spiritual core. This ability to balance intellectual clarity with emotional expressiveness makes Gould’s Goldberg Variations a must-hear for Bach lovers, as it captures the composer’s multifaceted genius in a uniquely compelling way.

Gould’s interpretations are not without controversy, and this is part of what makes him so fascinating for Bach enthusiasts. His unconventional choices, such as extreme tempos, unconventional phrasing, and even his habit of humming along while playing, can be polarising.

Yet, these quirks often enhance the listener’s experience by offering a fresh perspective on familiar works by adding a layer of intimacy. While some find it distracting, others see it as a window into Gould’s immersion in the music and as a sign of his deep connection to Bach’s world. By bridging the intellectual and the emotional, Gould’s eccentricities can feel like an authentic expression of that duality.

Reimagining Bach

Glenn Gould

Gould’s engagement with Bach extended beyond his performances. As a writer, broadcaster, and thinker, he championed Bach’s music in ways that resonate with fans of the composer. In his essays and radio documentaries, he explored themes of solitude and creativity, drawing parallels to Bach’s introspective genius. His advocacy for Bach’s music as a timeless, universal language helped cement the composer’s place in the modern repertoire.

Gould’s choice to perform Bach on the modern piano reflects his belief in the music’s adaptability. By using the piano’s dynamic capabilities to bring out dramatic contrasts, Gould’s interpretation bridges historical and modern sensibilities.

Universal Genius

Gould’s interpretations are not just journeys into the composer’s world but also an encounter with a performer whose passion and originality mirror Bach’s own genius. His performances offer a gateway to experiencing the qualities of Bach’s music in a fresh and unforgettable way.

For Bach fans, Gould’s interpretations are not just performances. They are revelations that uncover the multifaceted beauty of Bach’s music. His unapologetic individuality makes his performances a natural extension of Bach’s own innovative spirit, and he invites listeners to rediscover the music through the lens of a singular artist.