Bach Dies Obscure: A Century Later, Music's Foundation Revealed

Johann Sebastian Bach went blind in his final year, the result of two operations by an English traveling eye surgeon named John Taylor, who moved through Europe leaving a trail of blind patients behind him. Taylor had previously operated on Handel with similarly disastrous results. Bach died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750, ten days after the second surgery. He was 65. Born in Eisenach, Thuringia in 1685, Bach came from a family of musicians so prolific that in parts of Germany the word "Bach" was used as a synonym for "musician." He was orphaned at ten and raised by his eldest brother. He held a series of positions as organist and court musician before becoming Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723, responsible for music at the city's principal churches. He held the position for twenty-seven years, until his death. He composed roughly a thousand works: cantatas, concertos, fugues, masses, partitas, passions, suites. The Well-Tempered Clavier demonstrated that a keyboard could be tuned to play in all twenty-four major and minor keys. The Art of Fugue pushed counterpoint to its mathematical limits. The Brandenburg Concertos displayed a range of instrumental combinations that nobody else attempted. His wife, Anna Magdalena, found 385 thalers in cash and no will. He left twenty children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Several became prominent composers in their own right, including Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was better known than his father for much of the eighteenth century. Bach's reputation during his lifetime was primarily as a virtuoso organist and a solid craftsman, admired locally but largely unknown outside central Germany. Felix Mendelssohn revived the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, seventy-nine years after Bach's death. The performance launched a rediscovery that took another generation to complete. Today he is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in Western musical history, but his posthumous fame would have astonished everyone who knew him.