Who Was Johann Sebastian Bach? A Brief Introduction
Johann Sebastian Bach was born March 21, 1685, in what is now Germany. He came from a family of musicians and was taught to play the organ by his eldest brother. Soon after this, in his teenage years, he began to focus on composing and performing keyboard and sacred music. Hundreds of his compositions, such as his church cantatas, were created for a religious context; he also composed an enormous amount of secular music, much of it purely instrumental.
The Baroque Era
Baroque refers to a style of architecture, music, and art that developed in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and can be broadly characterized as exuberant, ornate, and lavish. As with any artistic period, it has no official beginning or end (further complicated by the fact that the dates differ in the realms of music and visual arts), but the year of Bach’s death—1750— is often cited as a rough estimate for the end of the Baroque musical period.
Notable Works
The Brandenburg Concertos (1720)
The Brandenburg Concertos are a collection of six works that show Bach at his most colorful, covering nearly the entire gamut of what was possible in Baroque concertos and allowing for improvisation, as is often the case in Baroque music.
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Biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach
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18th century
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Contemporary biographical sources
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Johann Sebastian Bach
German composer (1685–1750)
"Bach" redirects here. For other uses, see Bach (disambiguation) and Johann Sebastian Bach (disambiguation).
Johann Sebastian Bach[n 1] (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms, including the orchestral Brandenburg Concertos; solo instrumental works such as the cello suites and sonatas and partitas for solo violin; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schübler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and choral works such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
The Bach family already had several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician, Johann Ambrosius, in Eisenach. After being orphaned at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, then continued his musical education in Lüneburg. In 1703 he returned to Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant
