Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1685-1750)
He was the youngest son of Johann Ambrosius Bach, a town
musician, from whom he probably learnt the violin and the
rudiments of musical theory. When he was ten he was
orphaned and went to live with his elder brother Johann
Christoph, organist at St. Michael's Church, Ohrdruf, who
gave him lessons in keyboard playing. From 1700 to 1702 he
attended St. Michael's School in Lüneburg, where he sang in
the church choir and probably came into contact with the
organist and composer Georg Böhm. He also visited Hamburg
to hear J.A. Reincken at the organ of St. Catherine's Church.
After competing unsuccessfully for an organist's post in
Sangerhausen in 1702, Bach spent the spring and summer of
1703 as 'lackey' and violinist at the court of Weimar and then
took up the post of organist at the Neukirche in Arnstadt. In
June 1707 he moved to St. Blasius, Mühlhausen, and four
months later married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach in nearby
Dornheim. Bach was appointed organist and chamber
musician to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar in 1708, and in the
next nine years he became known as a leading organist and
composed many of his finest works for the instrument.
During this time he fathered seven children, including
Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. When, in
1717, Bach was appointed Kapellmeister at Cöthen, he was at
first refused permission to leave Weimar and was allowed to
do so only after being held prisoner by the duke for almost a
month. Bach's new employer, Prince Leopold, was a talented
musician who loved and understood the art. Since the court
was Calvinist, Bach had no chapel duties and instead
concentrated on instrumental composition. From this period
date his violin concertos and the six Brandenburg Concertos,
as well as numerous sonalas, suites and keyboard works,
including several (e.g. the Inventions and Book I of the '48')
intended for instruction. In 1720 Maria Barbara died while
Bach was visiting Karlsbad with the prince; in December of
the following year Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcke,
daughter of a court trumpeter at Weissenfels. A week later
Prince Leopold also married, and his bride's lack of interest in the arts led to a decline in the support given to music at the
Cöthen court. In 1722 Bach entered his candidature for the
prestigious post of Director musices at Leipzig and Kantor of
the Thomasschule there. In April 1723, after the preferred
candidates, Telemann and Graupner, had withdrawn, he was
offered the post and accepted it. Bach remained as
Thomaskantor in Leipzig for the rest of his life, often in
conflict with the authorities, but a happy family man and a
proud and caring parent. His duties centred on the Sunday
and feastday services at the city's two main churches, and
during his early years in Leipzig he composed prodigious
quantities of church music, including four or five cantata
cycles, the Magnificat and the St. John and St. Matthew
Passions. He was by this time renowned as a virtuoso
organist and in constant demand as a teacher and an expert
in organ construction and design. His fame as a composer
gradually spread more widely when, from 1726 onwards, he
began to bring out published editions of some of his
keyboard and organ music. From about 1729 Bach's interest
in composing church music sharply declined, and most of his
sacred works after that date, including the b Minor Mass and
the Christmas Oratorio, consist mainly of 'parodies' or
arrangements of earlier music. At the same time he took over
the direction of the collegium musicum that Telemann had
founded in Leipzig in 1702 - a mainly amateur society which
gave regular public concerts. For these Bach arranged
harpsichord concertos and composed several large-scale
cantatas, or serenatas, to impress the Elector of Saxony, by
whom he was granted the courtesy title of Hofcompositeur in
1736. Among the 13 children born to Anna Magdalena at
Leipzig was Bach's youngest son, Johann Christian, in 1735.
In 1744 Bach's second son, Emanuel, was married, and three
years later Bach visited the couple and their son (his first
grandchild) at Potsdam, where Emanuel was employed as
harpsichordist by Frederick the Great. At Potsdam Bach
improvised on a theme given to him by the king, and this led
to the composition of the Musical Offering, a compendium of
fugue, canon, and sonata based on the royal theme.
Contrapuntal artifice predominates in the work of Bach's last
decade, during which his membership (from 1747) of Lorenz
Mizler's learned Society of Musical Sciences profoundly
affected his musical thinking. The Canonic Variations for
organ was one of the works Bach presented to the society,
and the unfinished Art of Fugue may also have been intended
for distribution among its members. Bach's eyesight began to
deteriorate during his last year and in March and April 1750
he was twice operated on by the itinerant English oculist
John Taylor. The operations and the treatment that followed
them may have hastened Bach's death. He took final
communion on 22 July and died six days later. On 31 July he
was buried at St. John's cemetery. His widow survived him
for ten years, dying in poverty in 1760. Bach's output
embraces practically every musical genre of his time except
for the dramatic ones of opera and oratorio (his three
'oratorios' being oratorios only in a special sense). He opened up new dimensions in virtually every department of creative work to which he turned, in format, musical quality and
technical demands. As was normal at the time, his creative
production was mostly bound up with the extemal factors of
his places of work and his employers, but the density and
complexity of his music are such that analysts and
commentators have uncovered in it layers of religious and
numerological significance rarely to be found in the music of
other composers. Many of his contemporaries, notably the
critic J.A. Scheibe, found his music too involved and lacking
in immediate melodic appeal, but his chorale harmonizations
and fugal works were soon adopted as models for new
generations of musicians. The course of Bach's musical
development was undeflected (though not entirely
uninfluenced) by the changes in musical style taking place
around him. Together with his great contemporary Handel
(whom chance prevented his ever meeting), Bach was the
last great representative of the Baroque era in an age which
was already rejecting the Baroque aesthetic in favour of a
new, "enlightened" one.