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Johann Sebastian Bach Biography
Tribute to Bach
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Johann Sebastian Bach ( 1685 - 1750 ) was born in Eisenach, Saxony, Germany, on March 21, 1685. He was born to a musical family. In fact, there were about ten generations of musical Bachs.
Johann Sebastian Bach played the violin, the organ, and the harpsichord (forerunner to our modern piano). He also wrote music for these instruments. He wrote many oratorios for churches; his most famous oratorio was "The St. Matthew Passion Music."
Bach, a composer of the Baroque era, was (in his day) admired primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building. However, Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music.
By 1695 both of Bach's parents were dead. Ten-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach was cared for by his eldest brother, Johann Christoph (1671–1721), organist at Ohrdruf. This brother had been a pupil of the influential keyboard composer Johann Pachelbel, who apparently gave Johann Sebastian his first keyboard lessons. Johann Sebastian Bach did well in school, and in 1700 his voice secured him a place in a select choir of poor boys at the school at Michaelskirche, Lüneburg.
Music Score of Johann Sebastian Bach
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In or around 1735, Bach paid tribute to his musical family by drafting a genealogy, Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie (“Origin of the Musical Bach Family”), in which he traced his ancestry back to his great-great-grandfather Veit Bach.
Bach married twice and had twenty children - 11 sons and nine daughters! Two of his sons, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach and Friedman Bach, became famous musicians.
In his later years, Bach went blind, caused, it was thought, by copying his music by moonlight. Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig, Germany, on July 28, 1750.
Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach
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