Questions to ask Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach's working life, one town at a time

In his lifetime Bach was famous mainly as an organist and keyboard player. His music fell out of fashion after his death until Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, which started a revival.

What survives, and how to use it

Bach left few personal letters, no diary and no memoir. The main documents are his job applications and complaints to employers, a handful of family letters, court and council records, inscriptions in his scores and his Bible, and the obituary (Nekrolog) written in 1750 and published in 1754 by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola. Most are collected in English in The New Bach Reader (1998). Because the record is thin, beware of invented stories: the touching “Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1925) is a novel, not a source.

To practise your questions, you can talk with an AI recreation of Bach on Yuga by voice or text, built from the documents and the historical record. It is not Bach and it can be wrong, so cite the documents in your project.

Childhood and school: Eisenach, Ohrdruf, Lüneburg

What the documents say: his mother died in 1694 and his father, a town musician, in 1695. The Nekrolog tells how his brother forbade him a book of keyboard music, and the boy copied it secretly by moonlight over six months, only to have the copy taken away. That story comes from the family, decades later. At 15 he went to Lüneburg on a choral scholarship.

1. What was it like to grow up in a family where nearly every man was a musician named Bach?
2. What do you remember of your parents in Eisenach?
3. Is the story of copying music by moonlight true?
4. Why did you go so far north as Lüneburg to study?
5. Which organists did you go to hear as a teenager?

Arnstadt, Lübeck and Mühlhausen

What the documents say: Arnstadt's church consistory records show complaints about him: a street fight with a student bassoonist in 1705, too few performances with the student choir, bewildering harmonies in the hymns, and, in 1706, a “stranger maiden” making music in the organ loft. In late 1705 he took four weeks' leave to hear the organist Dieterich Buxtehude in Lübeck, about 400 kilometres away, and the Nekrolog says he went on foot. He came back after about four months. His resignation letter from Mühlhausen in June 1708 says he could not achieve well regulated church music to the glory of God there.

1. Did you really walk to Lübeck, and what did you hear there?
2. Why did four weeks' leave turn into four months?
3. What happened in your fight with the bassoonist Geyersbach?
4. What was wrong with the way you played hymns, according to the Arnstadt elders?
5. Why did you leave Mühlhausen after only a year?

Weimar and Cöthen

What the documents say: at Weimar he wrote much of his organ music. When he accepted a better post at Cöthen in 1717, Duke Wilhelm Ernst refused to let him go, and the court secretary recorded that Bach was held in custody from 6 November to 2 December 1717 for too stubbornly demanding his dismissal. At Cöthen, a Calvinist court with little church music, he wrote instrumental works, and in 1721 dedicated six concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg. His first wife died suddenly in 1720 while he was away travelling with the prince; he married the singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke in 1721.

1. Why did the Duke of Weimar put you in jail?
2. What did you compose in your weeks in custody?
3. Why did you write so much instrumental music at Cöthen?
4. Did the Margrave of Brandenburg ever have your concertos played?
5. How did you learn that Maria Barbara had died?

Leipzig, 1723 to 1750

What the documents say: Leipzig's council chose Bach only after Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner were unavailable, and one councillor's remark that they had to settle for a mediocre candidate survives in the minutes. In his first years he wrote a new cantata for nearly every Sunday and feast day. His memorandum to the council of 23 August 1730 complained that there were too few competent singers and players and set out the minimum numbers needed. Two months later he wrote to his school friend Georg Erdmann that his income was low, the authorities quarrelsome, and he was thinking of leaving. In 1747 he visited Frederick the Great at Potsdam and improvised a fugue on a theme the king gave him, later published as the Musical Offering. In 1737 the critic Johann Adolph Scheibe attacked his style in print as overly complicated and unnatural. In 1750 two eye operations by the travelling English surgeon John Taylor failed, and he died that July.

1. How did you write a cantata almost every week?
2. What was wrong with the singers and players you were given?
3. Why did you tell Georg Erdmann you might leave Leipzig?
4. What happened when you played for Frederick the Great?
5. How did you teach your sons music, and which one played best?
6. How did you feel when Scheibe attacked your style in 1737?
7. Who were the Goldberg Variations written for?
8. Why do you write J. J. at the start of a score and S. D. G. at the end?
9. What was it like to lose your sight in your last year?

A note on the Passions: the St John Passion (1724) and St Matthew Passion set Gospel texts that blame “the Jews” for Jesus' death, language with a long history of fuelling prejudice. Many performances today print a note on this, and a careful interview can ask him about the texts while making clear that this view is not accepted now.

Answers from Bach's own writings

Bach left no quotable conversation, so these answers come from documents in his hand. Keep them in the third person or close paraphrase.

Q: What is music for? In the margin of his Bible commentary (the Calov Bible, owned from 1733), beside a passage in 1 Chronicles, he noted that where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present. And in his rules for thorough bass (1738), copied by pupils, he says the aim of all music should be the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.

Q: Why do you sign your scores the way you do? Many of his church scores begin with “J. J.” (Jesu juva, “Jesus, help”) and end with “S. D. G.” (Soli Deo gloria, “to God alone the glory”). Those letters are on the manuscripts themselves, so you can show them in a project.

Q: Why did you leave Mühlhausen? His letter of resignation, 25 June 1708, says he could not pursue well regulated church music to the glory of God there, and mentions the poor pay.

Q: Are you happy in Leipzig? To Georg Erdmann, 28 October 1730, he writes that the post is less profitable than he was told, that the authorities are odd and care little for music, and that he lives with almost constant vexation.

Questions he could not answer

He never knew that his St Matthew Passion would be revived by Mendelssohn in 1829, that his works would be numbered with BWV numbers (from 1950), or that the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 would travel into space on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977. The word “Baroque” for his era came later. And he did not know the modern piano; he tried early pianos built by Gottfried Silbermann, which is a better question to ask.

Where to read the documents

The New Bach Reader, edited by Hans T. David, Arthur Mendel and Christoph Wolff (1998), collects his letters, the Nekrolog and contemporary reports in English. Bach Digital, run by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig with partner libraries, shows scans of his manuscripts. Christoph Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000) is the standard biography, and John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013) is a conductor's view. See also famous classical composers.