History Music / JohannSebastianBach

* ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', BWV 846–893, two sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues, a prelude-and-fugue in every key in each set. The very first prelude, in C major, is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQW2YnCUrE something you might recognize]]. [[note]]A couple hundred years later, French composer Charles Gounod wrote a countermelody to it with the text "Ave Maria"; this became very famous as well and sometimes gets incorrectly attributed to Bach himself.[[/note]]

* ''Pieces From The Little Notebook'' is a book of piano (originally harpsichord) pieces, written for his second wife Anna Magdalena. They are some of the more popular works used to introduce piano students to [[AllLowercaseLetters classical (not Classical)]] music as a whole, due to their relative simplicity. (Like the Toccata and Fugue, the attribution of many of them to Bach is dubious.)

* DawnOfAnEra: 1685, the year J.S. Bach was born, is widely held to be the year when tonality in music (as we know it today) was found its footing, thanks to Archangelo Corelli. 1750, the year J.S. Bach died, is widely held to be the year when the Baroque period in music history ended and the Classical period began.

Noted in particular for his masterful use of contrapunctal technique, Bach's oeuvre consists of well over a thousand works. Some of the more well-known ones are:

* The six ''Brandenburg Concertos'', BWV 1046–1051, used widely in period dramas and various other works. The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMSwVf_69Hc#t=1m26s harpsichord solo from the fifth concerto]] could quite reasonably be considered the great-great-great-grandfather of metal. The second, with its high, treacherous trumpet part (played in Bach's day [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEJ-xcblCMo on a ''valveless'' instrument]], no less) is the first piece of Earth music aliens will hear should they manage to acquire and decipher one of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_golden_record Voyager golden records]].

* "Air on the G String," the colloquial title given to the 2nd movement of Bach's ''Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major'', BWV 1068.[[note]]The nickname comes from a [[CoveredUp particularly famous arrangement]][[invoked]] by August Wilhelmj, which transposes the melody down a ninth so that it can be played entirely on a violin's lowest string, which is tuned to G.[[/note]] Even if you don't follow classical music, and don't know Bach from Bono, it's a certainty you've heard it many times as background music in movies, TV shows, and commercials. A strong contender for "Most Sublimely Beautiful 5 Minutes of Music Ever Composed."

* The ''Mass in B minor,'' BWV 232, and the ''St. Matthew Passion'', BWV 244, two breathtaking works that are cornerstones of Western sacred choral music.

[[UsefulNotes/DichterAndDenker German composer and virtuoso organist]] (21 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) whose works represent the culmination of the Baroque era and whose death is generally considered to mark the point of transition into the Classical era. Bach, [[Music/WolfgangAmadeusMozart Mozart]], and [[Music/LudwigVanBeethoven Beethoven]] are seen as the three main contenders for "Most Sublime Music in Western History," and not without reason.

Bach was the most prominent member of an extended family of musicians. It was often said of he, his wife, and his children that he could form an orchestra with them all. Between his first and second wives, Bach fathered ''[[MassiveNumberedSiblings twenty children]]'' [[note]]sadly, only nine of them survived to adulthood[[/note]]. Four of his sons-- Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christoph Friedrich-- grew up to be notable composers in their own right. In Bach's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_family full family tree]] there were over fifty professional musicians, making it at least a family business if not an outright dynasty. (Then there's Music/PDQBach, who... [[{{Parody}} doesn't really count]].)

Though today he is considered [[SincerestFormOfFlattery one of the most influential composers]] in history, in his lifetime he was better known as an organist than a composer; particularly towards the end of his career, his work was deemed outdated by his contemporaries. He did maintain CultClassic status among professional composers who studied his work for technique, including such admirers as Music/WolfgangAmadeusMozart and Music/LudwigVanBeethoven. But among the musical public he was generally not seen as one of the great composers until his works were re-popularized by composer Music/FelixMendelssohn in the early 1800s, and has since been VindicatedByHistory.

* ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', BWV 846–893, two sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues, a prelude-and-fugue in every key in each set. The very first prelude, in C major, is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQW2YnCUrE something you might recognize]]. [[note]]A couple hundred years later, French composer Charles Gounod wrote a countermelody to it with the text "Ave Maria"; this become very famous as well and sometimes gets incorrectly attributed to Bach himself.[[/note]]

Bach was the most prominent member of an extended family of musicians. It was often said of he, his wife, and his children that he could form an orchestra with them all. Between his first and second wives, Bach fathered ''[[MassiveNumberedSiblings twenty children]]'' [[note]]sadly, only nine of them survived to adulthood[[/note]]. Four of his sons-- Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christoph Friedrich-- grew up to be notable composers in their own right. In Bach's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_family full family tree]] there were over fifty professional musicians, making it something of a family business. (Then there's Music/PDQBach, who... [[{{Parody}} doesn't really count]].)

Bach was the most prominent member of an extended family of musicians (it was often said of he, his wife, and his children that he could form an orchestra with them all). Though today he is considered one of the most influential composers in history, in his lifetime he was better known as an organist than a composer; particularly towards the end of his career, his work was deemed outdated by his contemporaries. He was generally not seen as one of the great composers until his works were re-popularized by composer Music/FelixMendelssohn in the early 1800s, and has since been VindicatedByHistory.

* MisattributedSong: In 1853 French composer Charles Gounod composed [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_(Bach/Gounod) a setting of "Ave Maria"]] that borrows Bach's C Major Prelude from ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'' for the accompaniment. This piece, extremely popular in its own right, is often misattributed to Bach himself, although he died 135 years before it existed. (It's most commonly credited "Bach/Gounod," although that hits the same problem.) To make matters worse, the edition of the Prelude that Gounod adapted has a spurious extra measure that was added by a well-meaning editor supposedly trying to "fix" Bach's faulty chord progression!

* ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', BWV 846–893, two sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues, a prelude-and-fugue in every key in each set. The very first prelude, in C major, is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQW2YnCUrE something you might recognize]].

** According to his son C.P.E. Bach and his biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach had a special love for the viola and strongly preferred playing the viola in chamber music. This is quite evident in his music as the viola parts in much of his music are almost equally as important as the violin parts, which was quite odd during the baroque period as the viola usually played backup harmonies to the violin or kept the beat with the bass part. Additionally, Bach lets the viola shine forth in a solo aspect, which was virtually unheard of during the baroque period. His sixth ''Brandenburg Concerto'' completely does away with the violin parts, instead using two violas as the soloists, two arias from two separate cantatas (''Ergieße dich reichlich, du göttliche Quelle'' from the BWV 5 cantata and ''Ich, dein betrübtes Kind'' from the BWV 199 cantata) have a solo viola accompany the vocalist, and finally, the BWV 18 cantata, ''Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt'' in its original score has the string section comprised [[UpToEleven ''solely'' of four ''separate'' viola parts]].

* GodIsLoveSongs: Being a devout Lutheran who was mostly employed by churches, he wrote a lot of religious pieces for church performance, among them the ''Johannes Passion'', ''Matthäus Passion'', the ''Mass in B Minor'' and, most spectacularly, over 300 sacred cantatas, of which about 200 survive. These include many of his most famous pieces, such as "Jesu Bleibet Meine Freude" ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"), which is a chorale from cantata BWV 147 ''Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben''. This trope is averted inasmuch as Bach's cantatas aren't ''disguised'' as secular works; they're completely up-front about their religious content -- sample titles (translated) include ''Christ lay in Death's bonds'', ''God's time is the best time of all'' and ''Praise the Lord, the mighty king of honour''.

* SignatureStyle: The fugue. Not everything he wrote was in fugue form, but he clearly loved them; his last, great, unfinished work is a collection of them, all originating with variations on the same basic theme, called ''The Art of Fugue''.

* ''Music/ToccataAndFugueInDMinor'', BWV 565[[note]]"BWV" stands for '''B'''ach-'''W'''erke-'''V'''erzeichnis, the standard catalogue of Bach's complete works.[[/note]], the opening of which has become a StandardSnippet for OminousPipeOrgan moments. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_FyFw Here]]'s the whole thing played on the most awesome pipe organ in Australia.[[note]]However, there has been some debate as to whether he wrote the piece at all; it has a number of stylistic anachronisms that suggest it may have been written after 1750. Another school of thought holds that it may have been originally written for violin (possibly by Bach but likely by another unknown composer), and then transcribed to organ by Bach.[[/note]]

* The ''Air on the G String,'' the colloquial title given to the 2nd movement of Bach's Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068. Even if you don't follow classical music, and don't know Bach from Bono, it's a certainty you've heard it many times as background music in movies, TV shows, and commercials. A strong contender for "Most Sublimely Beautiful 5 Minutes of Music Ever Composed."

* ''Music/SchweigtStillePlaudertNicht'', BWV 211, also known as the "[[MustHaveCaffeine Coffee Cantata]]", a {{satire}} of the {{moral|Guardians}} debate over coffee consumption.

* ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', two sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues, a prelude-and-fugue in every key in each set. The very first prelude, in C major, is [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQW2YnCUrE something you might recognize]].
* The ''Mass in B minor'' and the ''St. Matthew Passion'', two breathtaking works that are cornerstones of Western sacred choral music.
* The six ''Brandenburg Concertos'', used widely in period dramas and various other works. The [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMSwVf_69Hc#t=1m26s harpsichord solo from the fifth concerto]] could quite reasonably be considered the great-great-great-grandfather of metal. The second, with its high, treacherous trumpet part (played in Bach's day [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEJ-xcblCMo on a ''valveless'' instrument]], no less) is the first piece of Earth music aliens will hear should they manage to acquire and decipher one of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_golden_record Voyager golden records]].

* The ''Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello'' are some of the most widely known cello pieces ever. The [[https://youtu.be/mGQLXRTl3Z0?t=9 prelude to the first suite]] is the best known from them. Pretty good considering there isn't even an original copy.

In addition, Bach's church gig at Leipzig's ''Thomaskirche '' required him to perform a sacred cantata on every Sunday and feast day of the Lutheran calendar. He composed at least three complete yearly cycles of cantatas -- over 300 works (1/3 of which, alas, are lost). The variety of form and style, mastery of polyphonic vocal writing, and breadth of instrumental tone color found in these works were unrivaled by his contemporaries.

Despite Bach's virtuosity and deep spirituality, he was also refreshingly human. He was once rebuked for stretching a brief leave of absence into several ''months'' without apology or explanation. He often battled his employers over the duties and responsibilities of his position. He once wrote [[Music/SchweigtStillePlaudertNicht a cantata about a man's concern over his daughter's consumption of coffee]] ([[MustHaveCaffeine he was for it]], by the way). Then there is the wonderful story of Bach drawing his sword in an altercation with an instrumentalist that he had insulted, calling him a "nanny-goat bassoonist."

* BaroqueMusic: One of the most famous composers of this era. Many people claim the genre died out with him, too.

* MustHaveCaffeine: ''Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht'', BWV 211, A.K.A. the "Coffee Cantata" is the UrExample, where the entire plot is driven by coffee.

Despite Bach's virtuosity and deep spirituality, he was also refreshingly human. He was once rebuked for stretching a brief leave of absence into several ''months'' without apology or explanation. He often battled his employers over the duties and responsibilities of his position. He once wrote a cantata about a man's concern over his daughter's consumption of coffee ([[MustHaveCaffeine he was for it]], by the way). Then there is the wonderful story of Bach drawing his sword in an altercation with an instrumentalist that he had insulted, calling him a "nanny-goat bassoonist."

* ''Music/ToccataAndFugueInDMinor'', BWV 565, the opening of which has become a StandardSnippet for OminousPipeOrgan moments. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_FyFw Here]]'s the whole thing played on the most awesome pipe organ in Australia.[[note]]However, there has been some debate as to whether he wrote the piece at all; it has a number of stylistic anachronisms that suggest it may have been written after 1750. Another school of thought holds that it may have been originally written for violin (possibly by Bach but likely by another unknown composer), and then transcribed to organ by Bach.[[/note]]

* ''Pieces From The Little Notebook'' is a book of piano (originally harpsichord) pieces, written for his second wife Anna Magdalena. They are some of the more popular works used to introduce piano students to classical (not Classical) music as a whole, due to their relative simplicity. (Like the Toccata and Fugue, the attribution of many of them to Bach is dubious.)

Despite Bach's virtuosity and deep spirituality he was also refreshingly human. He was once rebuked for stretching a brief leave of absence into several ''months'' without apology or explanation. He often battled his employers over the duties and responsibilities of his position. He once wrote a cantata about a man's concern over his daughter's consumption of coffee ([[MustHaveCaffeine he was for it]], by the way). Then there is the wonderful story of Bach drawing his sword in an altercation with an instrumentalist that he had insulted, calling him a "nanny-goat bassoonist."

* BaroqueMusic: One of the most famous composers of this era. Many people claim the genre died out with him too.

* GodIsLoveSongs: Being a devout Lutheran who was mostly employed by churches, he wrote a lot of religious pieces for church performance, among them the ''Johannes Passion'', ''Matthäus Passion'', the ''Mass in B Minor'' and, most spectacularly, over 300 sacred cantatas, of which about 200 survive. These include many of his most famous pieces, such as "Jesu Bleibet Meine Freude" ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"), which is a chorale from cantata BWV 147 ''Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben''.[[note]]"BWV" stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, the standard catalogue of Bach's complete works.[[/note]] This trope is averted inasmuch as Bach's cantatas aren't ''disguised'' as secular works; they're completely up-front about their religious content -- sample titles (translated) include ''Christ lay in Death's bonds'', ''God's time is the best time of all'' and ''Praise the Lord, the mighty king of honour''.

* MundaneMadeAwesome and MustHaveCaffeine:
** ''Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht'', AKA "The Coffee Cantata", where the entire plot is driven by coffee.
** ''The Art of Fugue'' is literally this trope, taking a simple subject and crafting fourteen fugues and four canons from it, in increasing complexity, to show the contrapuntal possibilities that could arise from a single theme.
* NonIndicativeName: Unlike every other prelude in the collection of preludes and fugues known as ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', the Prelude in E flat major BWV 852 from Book 1 is actually a fugue.

* SignatureStyle: The fugue. Not everything he wrote was in fugue form but he clearly loved them; his last, great, unfinished work is a collection of them, all originating with variations on the same basic theme, called ''The Art of Fugue''.

* ''Music/{{PDQ Bach}}'' owns his artist's name to Bach. [[LiteraryAgentHypothesis The story goes]] that P.D.Q. was the 21st and least well-regarded of Bach's 20 children, disowned by the Bach family because his music was too stupid.
* ''Disney/{{Fantasia}}'' starts off with "Toccata And Fugue In D. Minor", which, true to the music's fashion is a series of abstract images.

[[redirect:Creator/JohannSebastianBach]]

[[quoteright:250:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/JohannSebastianBach.jpg]]
[[DichterAndDenker German composer and virtuoso organist]] (1685-1750), whose works represent the culmination of the Baroque era and whose death is generally considered to mark the point of transition into the Classical era. Bach, [[WolfgangAmadeusMozart Mozart]] and [[LudwigVanBeethoven Beethoven]] are seen as the three main contenders for "Most Sublime Music in Western History," and not without reason.

Bach was the most prominent member of an extended family of musicians. Though today he is considered one of the most influential composers in history, in his lifetime he was better known as an organist than a composer; particularly towards the end of his career, his work was deemed outdated by his contemporaries. He was generally not seen as one of the great composers until his works were re-popularized by composer FelixMendelssohn in the early 1800s, and has since been VindicatedByHistory.

Noted in particular for his masterful use of contrapunctal technique, Bach's oeuvre consists of well over a thousand works. Some of the more well-known ones are:
* ''Music/ToccataAndFugueInDMinor'', BWV 565, the opening of which has become a StandardSnippet for OminousPipeOrgan moments. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_FyFw Here]]'s the whole thing played on the most awesome pipe organ in Australia.[[hottip:Note:However, there has been some debate as to whether he wrote the piece at all; it contains a number of stylistic anachronisms which suggest it may have been written after 1750. Another school of thought holds that it may have been originally written for violin (possibly by Bach but likely by another unknown composer), and then transcribed to organ by Bach.]]
* ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', two sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues, a prelude-and-fugue in every key in each set. The very first prelude, in C major, is [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQW2YnCUrE something you might recognize]].
* The ''Mass in b minor'' and the ''St. Matthew Passion,'' two breathtaking works that are cornerstones of Western sacred choral music.
* The six ''Brandenburg Concertos'', used widely in period dramas and various other works. The [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMSwVf_69Hc#t=1m26s harpsichord solo from the fifth concerto]] could quite reasonably be considered the great-great-great-grandfather of metal. The second, with its high, treacherous trumpet part (played in Bach's day on a ''valveless'' instrument, no less) is the first piece of Earth music aliens will hear should they manage to acquire and decipher one of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_golden_record Voyager golden records]].
* The ''Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello'' are some of the most widely known cello pieces ever. The [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_QR_FTt3E prelude to the first suite]] is the best known from them. Pretty good considering there isn't even an original copy.
* ''Pieces From The Little Notebook'' is a book of piano (originally harpsichord) pieces, written for his second wife Anna Magdalena. They are some of the more popular works used to introduce piano students to classical (not Classical) music as a whole, due to their relative simplicity.

In addition, Bach's church gig at Leipzig's ''Thomaskirche '' required him to perform a sacred cantata on every Sunday and feast day of the Lutheran calendar. He composed at least three complete yearly cycles of cantatas -- over 300 works (1/3 of which, alas, are lost). The variety of form and style, mastery of polyphonic vocal writing, and breadth of instrumental tone color found in these works were unrivaled by his contemporaries.

Despite Bach's virtuosity and deep spirituality he was also refreshingly human. He was once rebuked for stretching a brief leave of absence into several ''months'' without apology or explanation. He often battled his employers over the duties and responsibilities of his position. He once wrote a cantata about a man's concern over his daughter's consumption of coffee ([[MustHaveCaffeine he was for it]], by the way). Then there is the wonderful story of Bach drawing his sword in an altercation with an instrumentalist that he had insulted, calling him a "nanny-goat bassoonist."

Interestingly, Bach shares not only a year of birth with George Frideric Handel, but also a possible cause of death: they were both unsuccessfully operated on by the same eye surgeon -- an "oculist" called the Chevalier John Taylor, often referred to as "the poster child for 18th century medical quackery."

!!Tropes present in Bach's life and work:
* DawnOfAnEra: 1685, the year J.S. Bach was born, is widely held to be the year when Tonality in music (as we know it today) was invented by Archangelo Corelli. 1750, the year J.S. Bach died, is widely held to be the year when the Baroque period in music history ended and the Classical period began.
* DeadArtistsAreBetter: Bach was better known as an organist than a composer during his lifetime. It was only when FelixMendelssohn rediscovered his compositions in the 1800s that Bach became known as "The Father of Classical Music."
* FamilyBusiness: Most of Bach's relatives (great-grandfather, grandfather, father, cousins, nephews, sons, grandsons, etc.) were musicians.
** No less than three of J.S. Bach's sons -- Johann Christian, Carl Philip Emanuel, and Wilhelm Friedemann -- became noted composers in their own right. (And, no, PDQBach was not among them.)
* HairTriggerTemper: He constantly bickered with his employers and musicians. One tantrum was so spectacular that ''it landed him in jail for almost a month.'' He also called one of his musicians a "nanny-goat bassoonist." Somewhat justified in that he took music a lot more seriously than most of his employers did, and was a lot better at it than any of his musicians.
* HappilyMarried: Two happy marriages that produced twenty children, although only ten of them would reach adulthood.
* KissingCousins: His first wife, Maria Barbara Bach, was his first cousin.
* MassiveNumberedSiblings: The aforementioned twenty children, many of whom went on to become successful composers and performers in their own right. Granted, he was married twice, and several died in infancy, but still.
* MasterOfYourDomain: FrederickTheGreat gave Bach a tricky chromatic theme and challenged him to [[ImpossibleTask improvise a fugue on it]]. Bach obliged. Frederick asked if Bach could [[MovingTheGoalposts improvise a three-part fugue]] using the same theme, knowing that Bach probably couldn't. Bach did. Frederick asked if he could [[WithThisHerring improvise a six-part fugue]] on the theme. Bach replied, in effect, "Leave it with me", and after tweaking the theme to make it easier to work with, [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome wrote exactly that]] and sent it to Frederick, along with a bunch of other pieces based on the same theme. The collection is known as the ''Musical Offering'' and it's regarded as one of Bach's greatest achievements. Bach's skill at improvising must have approached EnlightenmentSuperpowers.
* MinoredInAsskicking: The abovementioned bassoonist threatened Bach, who responded by ''pulling a knife on him''. They had to be physically separated, making Bach one of the few great composers you could probably count on in a street fight.
* MustHaveCaffeine: ''Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht'', AKA "The Coffee Cantata", which comments on the problem of coffee addiction, is the UrExample.
* OvershadowedByAwesome: A strange case. From Bach's death until his music's rediscovery, historians and musicians considered his sons' accomplishments more noteworthy than his; [[WolfgangAmadeusMozart Mozart]] said of C.P.E. Bach, "He is the father, we are the children." This was justified to some extent in that Bach's sons were more innovative and experimental than their father. Things changed when composers decided that they wanted some of that [[OlderIsBetter old-school contrapuntal wizardry]] that Bach had but his sons weren't interested in.
* PassionPlay: The ''St. Matthew Passion,'' of course, and also a lesser-known Passion from John's gospel.
* StrictlyFormula: Necessary. He had to compose a new cantata just about every week for three years.
* TropeCodifier: His fugues are pretty universally considered as this.

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