A Sketch of Bach and His Music

A calling is sometimes known by the name of its master: "Bach" is a German word meaning brook, and it is also the name of a line of musicians who excelled for two centuries.

In some of the German lands that knew these men, the word "Bach" came to mean music; but when we say "Bach" we mean Johann Sebastian Bach, the very pattern of genius and artistic brilliance!

Beethoven said of him: "This is not a brook, but a sea."

And after him Schumann repeated: "Music is indebted to Bach as Christianity is indebted to Christ." He filled the artist Mozart with gaiety, and Wagner's breast with appreciation and respect.

Bach died in body on the twenty-eighth of July, 1750, but to this day he is the master of music, presiding over its course. They called him the father of artistic harmony; we know him as the father of music, the creator of melodies from the merriest to the profoundest and the saddest. In his art he is a creator of undying greatness, many-hued in his strains; there is no limit to the variety of his music, and despite its distinctive stamp, everyone who understands him and hears him feels that spiritual bond which ties all men to him.

He performed his melodies in the temples and before kings and princes, and from his tenderest years until his death he worked in earnest and toiled to gain a little material sufficiency and some measure of fame. He passed his sixty-five years in and around Eisenach, the seat of his birth, in a countryside that had known Martin Luther and that later became the setting of the opera Wagner composed.

Bach lived a simple, devout life, and his art — which has become the wellspring of the music of our own day — was his means of livelihood and of winning bread for his large family: by two wives he fathered twenty children, ten of whom died in childhood. He joined a husband's faithfulness to a father's devotion and sacrifice.

He was flung into the struggle of life while still small, after the death of his parents. His brother took him in when he was ten years old, and took upon himself his musical education, while forbidding him to taste the works of the famous composers, knowing them to be above his level. But little Bach would steal past his brother and copy them out under the light of the moon, and he kept this up for six months. It is a story, and a witness to the artist's power of absorbing work, and to the curiosity and effort that became the foundation of his genius.

He went on copying the music of composers of every land and generation, drinking in these schools and fusing them in his own crucible, then drawing out of them a kind of art marvelous in its novelty and invention.

His vocal gift fitted him to serve the musical training of a religious school; then, when his voice weakened, he made up for it by playing the violin, and so distinguished himself in this playing that he gained a reputation which helped him earn his living for a time. When he reached the age of eighteen he took upon himself the training of the choir at the church of Arnstadt, and it was his habit to walk for days, on an empty stomach, to reach different churches where

he received instruction in the art at the hands of the great musicians of that day. Once he asked a cousin of his to take his place for a month while he traveled to Lübeck to listen to Dietrich Buxtehude; he stayed three months, and when he returned, questions arose around him — first about the reason for the long absence, then about the palpable change in his melodies. In this period he was asked to become organist at one of the churches; he consented, married his cousin, and passed a year in this state, after which he became musician to the Duke of Weimar. He then passed into the protection of Prince Leopold; but the Duke brought a suit against him and managed to have him imprisoned, and in this seclusion he gave himself over to composition. The Prince afterward treated him on a footing of mutual friendship, keeping him at his side wherever he traveled. During one of his journeys his wife fell ill and died; he was then the father of four children, the eldest a girl of twelve. A year and a half later he married a singer at the Prince's court, and she bore him thirteen children, of whom six remained alive. She used to help him copy out music, and he gathered the pieces he dedicated to her into a single book, into which he put verses that show the depth of the love he lavished upon her.

The Prince's marriage marked the end of Bach's days at the palace, for the new bride hated music and was jealous of her husband's devotion to this art. So the artist was compelled to depart for Leipzig, where he lived until he died, wrestling with poverty and want, and striving to secure some small measure of schooling for his children. But one bond joined them all, and love and concord reigned over the atmosphere of his home. He wrote in a private letter: "The children of my last marriage are small, but they are lovers of music."

Frederick the Great, ruler of Prussia, was kind to the artist and a help to him in his last days, moved to this by his passion for music and his esteem for art — which led Bach to dedicate some musical pieces to him. In the last year of his life the artist's eyesight weakened; an operation was performed which ended in the loss of his sight, and his sight came back to him the following summer — but he met his death a few days after that.

Bach thought he would not long be remembered — and indeed he was nearly forgotten, had not Mozart lifted the veil from the light of his art. Ludwig van Beethoven visited Vienna and astonished his hearers when he played a piece by an unknown musician whose name was "Bach." In the year 1850 a committee was formed to immortalize and set down this artist's works, but that did not prevent a large part of them from being lost.

No one among the musicians has recorded all of Bach's compositions; and from his art one may set out on any road one chooses, for it is vast and wide in its reaches, and his pieces live on through the ages — no decay can creep into them!