Born in 1685 in Eisenach

Johann Sebastian Bach stands as the figure who transformed counterpoint from a compositional technique into the supreme vehicle of musical expression. His works marry mathematical precision with profound spiritual depth, achieving what lesser composers might consider an impossible synthesis.

Bach was born into a dynasty of professional musicians in Thuringia. The Bach family had produced church organists, court musicians, and composers for generations, making music not a calling but a birthright. Orphaned at ten, he was raised by his eldest brother Johann Christoph, an organist. The young Bach reportedly copied his brother's manuscripts by moonlight, a forbidden act that reveals both his hunger for knowledge and the scarcity of musical resources in provincial Germany. At St. Michael's School in Luneburg, he absorbed the organ traditions of northern Germany alongside French and Italian styles, forging the cosmopolitan palette that would define his mature output.

His career traced a path through the institutions of Lutheran Germany. As a church organist in Arnstadt and Muhlhausen, then a court musician in Weimar, he refined his craft in organ composition. At the court of Kothen, freed from liturgical obligations, he produced his greatest secular instrumental works: the Brandenburg Concertos, the solo cello suites, and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1723 he accepted the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, directing music for four churches and composing cantatas on a weekly schedule that would have overwhelmed most musicians. Over two decades he produced more than 200 church cantatas, alongside the monumental St. Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor.

What sets Bach apart is his treatment of counterpoint as a living art rather than an academic exercise. In the Art of Fugue, a single theme generates an astonishing range of variations, demonstrating that structural rigor and creative freedom are not opposites but partners. The Well-Tempered Clavier, covering all 24 major and minor keys, became the Old Testament of keyboard literature. Meanwhile, works like the St. Matthew Passion deploy contrapuntal technique in service of dramatic storytelling, weaving solo voices, chorus, and orchestra into a unified expression of faith and sorrow.

During his lifetime, Bach was primarily known as an organist rather than a composer. His music fell into relative obscurity after his death, overshadowed by the galant style favored by the next generation. The turning point came in 1829, when the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a landmark revival of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. This performance ignited the Bach Revival, a reassessment that ultimately placed him at the center of the Western musical canon.

In his final years, failing eyesight led Bach to undergo surgery by the itinerant English oculist John Taylor. Complications from the procedure contributed to his death in 1750 at age 65. Four of his twenty children became composers in their own right, with Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian serving as crucial bridges to the Classical era that followed.