Johann Sebastian Bach wrote over a thousand compositions. He wrote a new cantata nearly every week for years. He wrote the Mass in B Minor. He wrote the St. Matthew Passion. He wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier. He wrote fugues so mathematically intricate that computer scientists study them three centuries later, and so emotionally devastating that they make people cry in the same breath. He was a church organist. He thought of himself as a craftsman doing a job.

He Was Famous for Being an Organist, Not a Composer

During his lifetime, Bach was known primarily as the best organ player in Germany. His compositions were considered old-fashioned. His sons, who became famous composers in the new galant style, regarded their father's music as overly complex and intellectually demanding. When Bach died in 1750, his music was largely forgotten for nearly eighty years. Musicologists at the University of Leipzig, where Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as Thomaskantor, have documented that his works survived primarily through manuscript copies made by his students and family members. There was no systematic preservation effort. Scores were used as wrapping paper. Pages were lost. The fact that as much survived as it did is a minor miracle of musical history. Felix Mendelssohn revived the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, and the rediscovery of Bach began. By the end of the nineteenth century, he was recognized as one of the two or three greatest composers who had ever lived. The man the Baroque era forgot, the Romantic era deified.

The Music Is Architecture Made of Air

Bach wrote fugues the way other people breathe. A fugue takes a single musical idea and weaves it through multiple voices simultaneously, each voice independent but interlocking, creating a structure that is both rigorous and alive. The Art of Fugue, his final work, explores every possible permutation of a single theme. He did not finish it. The manuscript stops mid-measure. There is no more devastating ending in the history of music. Researchers at the Royal Academy of Music in London have analyzed Bach's contrapuntal technique and concluded that he operated at a level of simultaneous musical thinking that has no parallel before or since. He could improvise a six-voice fugue in real time. He once visited Frederick the Great, who gave him a theme and asked him to improvise a fugue on it. Bach improvised a three-voice fugue on the spot, then went home and wrote a six-voice fugue on the same theme, along with ten canons and a trio sonata, and sent the whole package to the king. He titled it A Musical Offering. It was the Baroque equivalent of a mic drop. He had twenty children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. He went blind in his final years. He dictated his last chorale to a son-in-law from memory, a hymn about approaching God's throne. He died on July 28, 1750. He wrote music for God every week for decades. Whether God was listening is a theological question. That the rest of humanity is still listening is not.