A Complete Introduction to J.S. Bach

This video looks at why Bach is widely considered as a genius - one of the greatest musical geniuses in history. It looks at his life works - the Orgelbuchlein, the Well Tempered Clavier, the Art of Fugue, the Goldberg Variations, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Cantatas, The St Matthew Passion and St John Passion, and the B minor Mass. It also talks about his counterpoint, style, and so on.

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Air - Johann Sebastian Bach

Das "Air" von Johann Sebastian Bach aus der 3. Suite für Orchester (D-Dur; BWV 1068), 2. Satz. Einfach zurücklehnen, ins Grüne schauen und genießen. The "Air" by Johann Sebastian Bach from the 3rd orchestral suite (D minor; BWV 1068), 2nd movement. Just lean back, look into the green and enjoy. Photo 2005 by Nebelwarner: Forest at the "Venner Moor" near the city of Senden (German state North Rhine-Westphalia).

What Happened to Bach’s Twenty Children?

By Emily E. Hogstadt, Interlude

Johann Sebastian Bach is, of course, one of the most beloved composers of all time. He’s also famous for having fathered twenty children. A few became famous composers in their own right…but many of them died tragically young, too. Today we’re taking a look at the lives of all twenty of them.

J.S. Bach © biography.com

Maria Barbara Bach was Bach’s first wife (and his second cousin). They were married on 17 October 1707, and they had seven kids.

Catharina Dorothea (1708-1774)

We don’t know a lot about Catharina Dorothea, but we do know she was a singer. In 1730, Bach wrote to a friend, “[My children] are born musicians, and I can already form an ensemble both vocal and instrumental within my family, particularly since my present wife sings a good, clear soprano, and my eldest daughter, too, joins in not badly.” Seems like high praise from Bach, a known perfectionist!

It makes sense that Catharina Dorothea would be a well-trained musician. For many years, all of her surviving siblings were brothers, and she no doubt absorbed the musical instruction offered to boys of the era…and especially to the Bach boys.

Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-1784)

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, drawing by P. Gulle, 1783
© Berlin State Library

Bach’s eldest son was the inspiration behind Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a collection of keyboard music. He studied law and mathematics but ultimately ended up a professional musician and teacher. Despite all of his training, Wilhelm Friedemann never became a wealthy musician, and he died in poverty. 

Twins Johann Christoph and Maria Sophia (1713-1713)

Johann Christoph died the same day that he was born, 23 February 1713. Tragically, his twin Maria only survived a little longer, until March 15.

Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-1788)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

A little less than a year after Maria Sophia died, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, later known as C.P.E. Bach, was born. He would prove to be an important link between the Baroque style of music that his father wrote and the next generation’s lighter, more classical approach, as typified by Haydn and Mozart. That said, he was never able to truly escape the giant shadow cast by his father. 

Johann Gottfried Bernhard (1715-1739)

If Johann Gottfried Bernhard Bach wrote any music, none of it has survived. He did, however, study and work as an organist. Unfortunately, it seems that he lived beyond his means (Johann Sebastian once referred to him as “misguided”), and he accumulated debts as a young man. He abandoned music to study law, but before he finished his law training, he died suddenly of a high fever at the age of 24.

Leopold Augustus (1718-1719)

Poor Leopold Augustus died when he was just ten months old, in September 1719.

Less than a year after Leopold Augustus’ death, Maria Barbara Bach died, too. According to an obituary cowritten by C.P.E. Bach, she passed away unexpectedly in July of 1720. To make matters worse, Bach was traveling for work at the time, so he had no warning.

Bach no doubt wanted his surviving children to have a mother figure. On 3 December 1721, they got one when he married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a singer from a musical family. Anna Magdalena was relatively young compared to Johann: she had just turned twenty, and he was thirty-six. In fact, Anna Magdalena was closer in age to her stepchildren than Bach!

It wasn’t long before she became a biological mom of her own. She and her husband ultimately had thirteen children together, on top of raising the surviving kids from Bach’s first marriage.

Christiana Sophia Henrietta (1723-1726)

She died just after her third birthday.

Gottfried Heinrich (1724-1763)

It appears that Gottfried Heinrich Bach had a mental disability of some kind, as he is described in historic records as “feeble-minded.” However, he played the keyboard very well. Later, instead of embarking on a career of his own, he moved in with his younger sister Elisabeth and her husband.

Christian Gottlieb (1725-1728)

He, like his older sister Christiana, died just after his third birthday.

Elisabeth Juliana Friederica (1726-1781)

We don’t know a tremendous amount about Elisabeth, but we know that she married one of her father’s pupils, an organist named Johann Christoph Altnikol. They named their firstborn Johann Sebastian, but he died in infancy. After her husband died, Elisabeth received money to survive from her half-brother, C.P.E. Bach, who helped to support both her and her disabled brother Gottfried.

Ernestus Andreas (1727-1727)

He only lived for two days.

Regina Johanna (1728-1733)

She died a few months before her fifth birthday.

Christiana Benedicta (1730-1730)

She lived for three days.

Christiana Dorothea (1731-1732)

She died at the age of seventeen months.

Johann Christoph Friedrich (1732-1795)

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

Johann Christoph Friedrich was born during a stretch of tragedy for the family, as Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena lost child after child. Today he’s known as the Bückeburg Bach, after the town in which he worked. He wrote all kinds of music, from symphonies to sonatas. In 1755 he married a singer, and they had a son named Wilhelm who became a professional composer in his own right

Johann August Abraham (1733-1733)

He only survived for a day.

Johann Christian (1735-1782)

Portrait of Johann Christian Bach in 1776 by Thomas Gainsborough

His dad was fifty years old when Johann Christian Bach was born! He studied with his father for a while, then (perhaps hoping to gain a more modern musical perspective), he studied with his older half-brother C.P.E. Bach, who, given the age difference, probably felt more like an uncle than a brother.

Johann Christian Bach enjoyed a successful career. He lived for many years in Italy and England, and even became Princess Charlotte’s music instructor. (He also converted to Catholicism, which his father, a famously devout Lutheran, probably wouldn’t have been too happy about!) He married a singer and died childless and in poverty. Luckily, Queen Charlotte arranged for a pension for his wife. 

Johanna Carolina (1737-1781)

We know very little about the life of Johanna Carolina. We know that she never married, and that she was only twelve when her father died, and twenty-two when her mother died.

And last but not least…

Regina Susanna (1742-1809)

Five years younger than her next-oldest sibling, Regina Susanna was the only Bach child to live into the nineteenth century. By her old age, she was destitute, and in the early 1800s, the editor of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung printed a notice explaining her circumstances and asking for donations to support her. One of the readers believed to have answered the call? A prickly Vienna-based composer named Ludwig van Beethoven.

Tragically, after Bach’s death in 1750, the surviving sons quarreled, and C.P.E. Bach ended up, as best we know, being the only sibling who ever provided any financial assistance to Anna Magdalena in her widowhood. She, like her youngest daughter, died deep in poverty in 1760 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

The Bach family is the most famous extended family in music history. Understanding the joys and sorrows of its members as reflected in its many births and deaths lends depth to our understanding of all the music they left for future generations.

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Transcript

Follow along using the transcript.

The Contradictions of Bach – An Interview with Alexander Polzin

by Maureen Buja, Interlude

German artist Alexander Polzin (b. 1973) first encountered Bach in his final work: The Art of the Fugue. The introduction to the ultimate Bach composition set Polzin up for a life confronting Bach and an evolution in his approach to art.

Alexander Polzin

His usual approach was to conceive of a theme that would convey the image he wanted to portray. With Bach however, he made many attempts to translate what he was hearing in the music into visual arts and failed over and over again.

He successfully did portraits of Schumann and Beethoven, and even of Orpheus, but Bach continued to elude him. Finally, he made up his mind that Bach is the God of Music and therefore couldn’t be pictured.

This, however, as a resolution, didn’t last long. But we digress.

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and East Germans were now free to travel for the first time since 1961. The 17-year-old Polzin promptly started moving, with his first stop in French Polynesia. While travelling, his book companion was Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which looked at mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence through the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer J.S. Bach.

Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (photo by Douglas Hofstadter)

In the South Pacific, Polzin was struck by the incredible variety of natural forms, both on land and in the sea. This same infinite variety is how he has come to conceive of Bach, and he fears (and somewhat hopes) that this will be his destiny: to be ever intertwined with the immortal composer.

His first Bach work was a painting, Bach at Pomare IV, created in 1994. He painted one image after another on top of the last, creating an abstract result from layered non-abstract images.

Bach at Pomare IV, 1994 (photograph by the artist)

Once he brought Bach to the world of dimensional sculpture, his freedom to explore knew few bounds. He creates to the music of Bach and his Bach sculptures bring out what he listens to.

With his training as a stonemason, Polzin’s approach to art is through a medium that is particularly difficult to manipulate. It’s large, it’s heavy, and has an individual character. Accordingly, his modelling material is equally difficult. Although most sculptors work in clay before their busts are cast, Polzin works in wood. Specifically oak, one of the hardest woods of Europe. Polzin sources his wood from the trees in the forest, working with the local forester to choose the tree. He said there’s a kind of hubris in this – taking a tree, which is already a work of art and maybe 100 to 150 years old, and then making a different work of art out of it.

Oak is very difficult to work with, starting with the hardness of it wood; in addition, the acid in its wood quickly blunts the woodworking tools. Polzin says he has a dialogue with the wood, seeking how to impose his vision on what is already a perfect sculpture of a tree. Accordingly, there may be many tree elements that come through his sculptures, as in Bach III below.

Bach I, done in blue glass, can glow in the light.

Bach I © Norbert Banik

Bach I, glowing © Norbert Banik

Bach II seems to be connected with the undersea world that Polzin saw in French Polynesia. Bach’s mind is open to the world, taking in everything and channelling it through his polished perception. A brain coral, perhaps?

Bach II © Norbert Banik

Bach III, completed in 2023, will be installed at the Royal Academy of Music in London. This is a larger image – if Bach I and II were appropriate for collectors, this Bach is for public display. The texture of the wood is more visible here – both on his cheek and in his hair. This will be displayed on a plexiglass plinth and is intended to be viewed from 360°, including from below. With plexiglass’ ability to capture light, there should also be a glowing effect with this bust.

Bach III (photo by Alexander Polzin)

Polzin doesn’t conceive of a unified Bach but a sectional Bach: The Bach of The Art of Fugue is different than the Passion Bach, or the Keyboard Bach. All these different Bach characters may be at the root of Polzin’s inability to focus on one theme for his Bach portraits.

For Polzin, sculpture has the possibility of illustrating contracting or opposing ideas. Whereas poetry cannot put both love and hate in a single word, sculpture can bring these together. When we spoke, Polzin had just received Bach IV from the foundry, and in it he was able to evoke a double Bach.

Bach IV, 2024 (photo by Alexander Polzin)

You can see Back’s profile at the right, but in the centre, you can see another Bach, looking in a different direction. Polzin said that this kind of double imagery, a kind of dimensional cubism, was only achievable in glass.

Another Bach from his hands was the cover for a recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, arranged for chamber ensemble. Polzin held an exhibition, Bach and Beauty, in New York in 2023 in conjunction with Laurence Dreyfus and Phantasm.

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, 2023 (photo by Alexander Polzin)

As an extension of his playing, Gorini sought a dialogue with the current artists who encounter Bach, including Polzin, pianist Alfred Brendel, stage director Peter Sellars, architect Frank Gehry, cellist Steven Isserlis, mathematician Betül Tanbay, and many others. Each interlocutor comes at Bach from a different perspective, and much like Polzin’s own work on his Bach problem, comes to different conclusions about their work and Bach.

In Paris, Polzin worked with Gorini on an Artists Talk entitled Art of the Fugue, which was an exhibition of Polzin’s work followed by a performance of The Art of Fugue by Gorini. The audience was split between those who had come to see Polzin’s work and those who came for the music. For Polzin, it was interesting observing the audience: those who came for an artist’s exhibition and who ended up in a piano recital started off irritated, annoyed, and impatient to leave. By the end, 90-some minutes later, they were still held, captured by the music.

And so Polzin is held by the contradictions of Bach – Bach the subtle master of counterpoint, Bach the artist of the fugue, Bach the confounder of expectations, Bach the magician.

Polzin’s Bach III will be installed in the foyer of the Royal Academy of Music on 13 June 2024. He is currently working on Bach V.