Hello! My webpage is on Johann Sebastian Bach. By reading my information you will find out about Bach's life, his family, and most important of all his music. I hope you find it interesting and informative.
The great German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, was one of the most popular musical figures of the Western world. In his life he mainly was known as an accomplished organist rather than a composer. Bach's music is regarded as the high point in the baroque era. Baroque means highly decorated and was used to describe art between 1620-1750.
Europe was shaken up by the new ideas and discoveries of the renaissance and Bach added to this. Bach was required to compose various types of music; organ and choral music for church, chamber music for court use, and harpsichord works for teaching. Bach composed "Brandenburg" concertos(1721) for orchestra, the "Art of Fugue", "The Well Tempered Clavier" (1722-44) for keyboard, the St. John"(1723) and "St. Matthew" (1729) passions, nearly 200 cantatas, the "Mass in B Minor" (completed in 1738) six cello suites, the six violin sonatas and partites, the four lute suites, and the accompanied sonatas for flute, violin, viola, and viola gamba, and chamber concertos for the harpsichord, violin, and oboe.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21,1685 in Eisenach, Germany to Johann Ambrosias and Elizabeth Lammer. He was luckily born into a musical family, but Bach's mother died when he was only nine years old. That same year his father remarried and died, because his stepmother was so poor (but still wanted to keep him) he was sent to live with his older brother Johann Christoph. He walked all the way in 1695. His brother loved him despite the difference of age. Johann Sebastian was becoming harder and harder to keep for Johann Christoph had started his own family, but luckily once more, he had a bright future up ahead.
At the age of fourteen, in 1700, he began studying the keyboarding and composition from his brother and on his own. He used other composers as models and was selected to go to a choir for poor boys at the school Michaelskirche, Luneburg.
Through from 1703 to 1707 he was an organist at Arnstadt and began composing some of his early works. Bach wasn't very good at obtaining his duties and that made difficulties with his employers.
In 1707, age 21 he married his first cousin Maria Barbara and became organist at Mulhausen. The congregation didn't like his music because it harmonized innovatively and by the end of the year he moved back to Weimar. He then became court organist for nine years.
He composed weekly and his duties expanded, he wanted to be music director but was not granted the position. So he looked for a job else where and found it. But in the time he was looking Bach' s wife died in 1721, and he remarried to Anna Magdalena Wilchen. Bach received the position in 1717, and when he asked to be released he said it in a way so hostile that the court imprisoned him for a whole month. When he was released Bach went to Kothen to be music director until 1723. In all he fathered twenty children and was at age fifty when his last child was born.
Later that year he became music director
of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, he worked here until his death, and wrote
many of his great works there. In the year of 1750 Bach had two unsuccessful
operations on his eyes leaving him nearly blind and at the age 65, died
on July 28.