On Good Friday, 1724, in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, the congregation heard something for which no sermon could have prepared them. The key was G minor. Bass instruments droned on the tonic while violins wove sixteenth notes around the triad, and on the third beat of the first bar came a twinge of harmonic pain — one oboe sounding an E-flat against another oboe's held D. Oboes are piercing by nature; to place them a half step apart triggers an aggressive acoustic roughness, as when car horns lean on adjacent pitches. Then the chorus entered — Herr! Herr! Herr! — chords contracting inward, voices dissolving into the swirl of the violins, a single syllable of Herrscher elongated into a thirty-three-note melisma. It went on for nine or ten minutes, an irresistible sombre rhythm, a dance of death that all must join. The opening chorus of the St. John Passion was, by any measure of the time or ours, an act of sonic terrorism perpetrated by a church employee. You need not have seen the words Passio secundum Johannem at the head of the score to feel the scene at Golgotha: an emaciated body raised on the Cross, nails being driven in, blood trickling down, a murmuring crowd below. The man who wrote it was thirty-nine years old, had been in his post less than a year, and had already acquired a reputation among Leipzig's good burghers for being difficult, for using "curious variations" and "strange tones." He was the city's third choice for the job. He would remain for twenty-seven years, would die there, and would be largely forgotten for the better part of a century. We have no eyewitness account of that première. If the people of Leipzig understood that they were in the presence of the most stupendous talent in musical history, they gave no sign.
The almost outlandish thing about "Herr, unser Herrscher" — the chorus that opens the St. John Passion — is that it does not simply take the point of view of the mourners and the mockers. It also adopts the perspective of the man on the Cross, gazing up and down. Aspects of the music that seem catastrophic acquire a triumphant tinge. The rhythm conveys mysterious vitality. The sixteenth notes in the violins unspool almost continuously, suggesting the transmission of the Lord's name through all lands. Light and dark are one. The conductor John Eliot Gardiner has called it a "portrayal of Christ in majesty like some colossal Byzantine mosaic . . . looking down on the maelstrom of distressed unregenerate humanity." Bach removed it from the score when he revived the St. John the following year — a hint, perhaps, that his listeners went away unhappy, or that outside interference dictated the cut. Either way, the most extraordinary piece of music that had yet been composed for a German church was shelved by its own creator, a man navigating the distance between the divine and the bureaucratic with a dagger in one pocket and a prayer book in the other.
By the Numbers
The Bach Apparatus
1,128+Catalogued compositions (BWV numbers)
~200Sacred cantatas surviving
20Children fathered (10 survived to adulthood)
27Years as Cantor at Leipzig's Thomaskirche
~700 thalerAnnual salary at Leipzig, supplemented by funeral fees
79Years between death (1750) and Mendelssohn's revival (1829)
~30Copies of The Art of the Fugue sold by 1756
The Baker's Cittern
To understand Johann Sebastian Bach, you must first understand that he was not a man but a dynasty, or the final, catastrophic flowering of one. About 1735, Bach himself drafted a genealogy — Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie ("Origin of the Musical Bach Family") — tracing his ancestry back to his great-great-grandfather Veit Bach, a Lutheran baker or miller who late in the sixteenth century was driven from Hungary to Wechmar in Thuringia by religious persecution and died in 1619. Veit used to take his cittern to the mill and play it while the mill was grinding. Johann Sebastian remarked, with characteristic dryness, "A pretty noise they must have made together! However, he learnt to keep time, and this apparently was the beginning of music in our family." There is a deflationary humor in this — the greatest musician in human history attributing his lineage to a baker trying to keep rhythm with a grinding wheel — but also something revealing. The Bachs did not compose for aristocratic courts in Italy or attend to princes in Vienna. They were Thuringian tradespeople who happened to deal in counterpoint. By the late seventeenth century, the name "Bach" was virtually synonymous with "musician" across central Germany, so that in Erfurt, any town musician was colloquially called a "Bach" regardless of surname. Johann Christoph, Johann Ludwig, Johann Michael — competent practical musicians, church organists, court players, none of them composers of the first rank. Until Johann Sebastian, his was the least distinguished branch of the family.
He was born on March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach — a string player employed by the town council and the ducal court — and Elisabeth Lämmerhirt. Eisenach was a town still traumatized by the Thirty Years' War and by outbreaks of plague. Life expectancy hovered around thirty. Quasi-pagan notions of devilry still prevailed. The education was doctrinaire and reactionary; one popular textbook declared, "History is nothing but the demonstration of Christian truth." German research has noted rampant ruffianism among Eisenach's youth and a troubling trend of what Gardiner calls "brutalization of the boys." By 1695, when Johann Sebastian was ten, both his parents were dead. He was sent to live with his eldest brother, also named Johann Christoph, an organist at Ohrdruf who had studied with the influential keyboard composer Johann Pachelbel — a man whose orderly, warm formalism filtered through the elder Christoph's teaching and into the orphan's fingers. The boy did well at school. He always did well at school. He also did well at being inconvenient. An obituary prepared decades later by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel speaks of his father's "unheard-of zeal in studying," a claim buttressed by the discovery, made in 2006, of the teenaged Bach's precociously precise copies of organ pieces by Reincken and Buxtehude, found in the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. Analysis of the find revealed that he possessed extraordinary musical and performance abilities at thirteen — the copies included two of the most difficult organ compositions of his day. The paper came from the possession of Georg Böhm, a noteworthy Lüneburg organist and composer, confirming a long-assumed but never proven link between the boy and a mentor who shaped his early style.
In 1700, his voice secured him a place in a select choir of poor boys at the Michaelskirche in Lüneburg. The voice broke soon after, but he stayed on, making himself "generally useful" — a phrase that recurs in Bach biography with the quiet persistence of a pedal point. He studied in the school library, which had a large and up-to-date collection of church music. He visited Hamburg to hear the renowned organist Johann Adam Reinken. He contrived to hear the French orchestra maintained by the duke of Celle. By the time he returned to Thuringia in the summer of 1702, he was already a reasonably proficient organist, and his experience had turned him decisively away from the secular string-playing tradition of his immediate ancestors. He would be, thenceforth, chiefly a composer and performer of keyboard and sacred music — a path that would lead him not toward celebrity but toward a peculiar species of provincial magnificence, contained within a geographical radius that could be traversed in a few hours' driving.
The Dagger and the Organ Loft
Gardiner may go too far in characterizing Bach as a "reformed teenage thug," but the evidence is not nothing. In the summer of 1705, during his years as organist at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt, Bach made some offensive remark about a bassoonist named Johann Heinrich Geyersbach — accounts suggest he called the man a Zippel Fagottist, something like "nanny-goat bassoonist" — and the encounter degenerated into a street fight in which Bach drew a dagger. He was twenty. The Arnstadt authorities reprimanded him, though the deeper complaints ran wider: he had harmonized the hymn tunes so freely that the congregation could not sing to his accompaniment; he had produced no cantatas; he was on bad terms with the local singers and instrumentalists, who did not meet his standards and were not under his control. That October, he obtained a month's leave and walked more than two hundred miles to Lübeck to hear the spectacular, flamboyant playing of Dietrich Buxtehude, the most significant exponent of the north German school of organ music. He did not return until the middle of January 1706. His employers complained about the extended absence. His replies were neither satisfactory nor accommodating. The fact that he was not dismissed outright suggests they knew what they had and were reluctant to lose him.
This pattern — genius provoking bureaucratic exasperation, bureaucratic exasperation failing to contain genius — would recur at every station of Bach's career. It is the ur-narrative of his professional life, more consistent than any compositional development. At Mühlhausen, where he arrived in 1707 and married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach on October 17, he lasted barely a year before resigning, citing employers who hindered his plans for "well-regulated church music" and an inadequate salary. At Weimar, where he served as court organist beginning in 1708 and later as concertmaster with the duty of composing a cantata every month, he was passed over for musical director when the incumbent died in December 1716 — the post went to the dead man's son, "rather a nonentity" — and Bach accepted an appointment as musical director to Prince Leopold of Köthen. Duke Wilhelm refused to accept his resignation. Bach pressed. The duke imprisoned him for a month, from November 6 to December 2, 1717. A few days after his release, Bach moved to Köthen. The only surviving account of the contest arranged between Bach and the famous French organist Louis Marchand at Dresden, around September 1717, records that Marchand avoided the encounter by leaving the city a few hours before it should have taken place. By implication, Bach won. The man was, to use a word his Leipzig employers would later deploy with exhausted precision, "incorrigible."
Since the best musicians were not available, mediocre ones would have to be accepted.
The Happiest Years and the Cruelest Fact
The Köthen period — roughly 1717 to 1723 — was probably the happiest stretch of Bach's life, and the cruelest fact about it is that it ended because a woman married the wrong prince. Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen was genuinely musical, a Calvinist who had little need of sacred music but an avid taste for instrumental composition. Under his patronage Bach produced an astonishing torrent of secular works: the sonatas for violin and clavier and for viola da gamba and clavier, the works for unaccompanied violin and cello, the first book of Das Wohltemperierte Clavier (finished in 1722), the Inventions, some of the French Suites, and the six Brandenburg Concertos, finished by March 24, 1721. In the sixth concerto, it has been suggested, Bach bore in mind the technical limitations of the prince, who played the gamba. Bach himself played the viola by choice; he liked, as he put it, to be "in the middle of the harmony."
Then two catastrophes arrived in swift succession. Maria Barbara Bach died unexpectedly and was buried on July 7, 1720, while her husband was away accompanying the prince to a spa. Bach returned to find his wife already in the ground. We have no record of his grief — we never have records of his grief — but about November he visited Hamburg, and his wife's death may have unsettled him enough to inquire after a vacant post at the Jacobikirche. Nothing came of it. But he played at the Katharinenkirche in the presence of the aged Reinken, the same organist he had heard as a boy in Lüneburg. After hearing Bach improvise variations on a chorale tune, the old man said: "I thought this art was dead; but I see it still lives in you." The remark is almost unbearably moving in retrospect — a dying tradition recognizing its apotheosis in a grieving widower — though Reinken could not have known what it meant.
On December 3, 1721, Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, the twenty-year-old daughter of a trumpeter at Weissenfels. Eight days later, Prince Leopold also married. The princess — described by Bach, with devastating precision, as "an amusa" (opposed to the muses) — required so much of her husband's attention that Bach began to feel neglected. The music that had poured from Köthen's princely court slowed to a trickle. Bach began to think of his elder sons' education and to cast his eyes toward Leipzig, where the cantorate had fallen vacant with the death of Johann Kuhnau on June 5, 1722. He applied in December. The post had already been turned down by his friend Georg Philipp Telemann and offered to Christoph Graupner, the musical director at Darmstadt — two men who, in the estimation of their contemporaries, were greater composers than Bach. When Graupner withdrew on April 9, 1723, and Bach was finally offered the position, a member of the Leipzig town council observed, with the condescension of a man settling for his third choice, "Since the best musicians were not available, mediocre ones would have to be accepted." Bach was sworn in on May 13, 1723. He would never leave.
The Factory of the Sacred
What Bach attempted in Leipzig during his first three years beggars belief. As director of church music for the city, he had to supply performers for four churches. At the Peterskirche the choir merely led hymns; at the Neue Kirche, Nikolaikirche, and Thomaskirche, part singing was required. Bach himself conducted, and his own music was performed, only at the last two. His first official performance came on May 30, 1723 — Cantata No. 75, Die Elenden sollen essen — and from that Sunday forward he produced new cantatas at a pace that Gardiner plausibly compares to "the backstage activities on a TV or film set." During his first ecclesiastical year, he produced approximately sixty-two cantatas, of which about thirty-nine were new. On June 11, 1724, he began a fresh annual cycle and within the year wrote fifty-two of the so-called chorale cantatas. The St. John Passion arrived in the first half of 1724. The Sanctus of what would eventually become the Mass in B Minor was produced at Christmas.
One cantata a week. The math alone is punishing: compose the score, prepare the parts for copyists (and frequently copy them himself), rehearse the performers — many of them schoolboys of indifferent talent — and conduct the première, all while teaching Latin grammar, disciplining unruly students, and preparing next week's cantata. Gardiner evokes Bach in his studio, copyists around him, cranking out music at a frenzied pace. The question this raises — how? — was answered by Bach himself with what must be one of the most innocently deceptive sentences in the history of art: "I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far." The remark implies that everything in the craft of music is teachable and learnable. The fact that no other composer of the period, with the arguable exception of Handel, even remotely approached Bach's achievement indicates that the application of "mechanical" procedures was controlled throughout by something else — what the eighteenth century called taste, an utterly individual compound of raw talent, imagination, psychological disposition, judgment, skill, and experience. It is unteachable and unlearnable.
The Baroque composer who submitted to the regimen had at his disposal a repertoire of melody types generated by an explicit "doctrine of figures" that created musical equivalents for the figures of speech in rhetoric: a rising scale to match words about resurrection, a descending chromatic line — depicting a howl of pain — to accompany sorrow. Pictorial symbolism, number symbolism, the stereotyped elaboration of themes into complete compositions — all of it was available, all of it was conventional, and all of it, in Bach's hands, became something no convention could have predicted. The arias and choruses of his cantatas seem to have been spun out automatically, until you listen to them and realize that the automation is an illusion sustained by a mind operating at velocities invisible to the ear.
I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.
The Vexations of Office
Leipzig did not appreciate the effort. The friction began almost immediately and never entirely ceased. Bach resented his nonmusical duties as cantor of the Thomasschule — he was expected to teach Latin, supervise boys, maintain discipline — and frequently absented himself without leave to play or examine organs elsewhere, to take his son Friedemann to hear the "pretty tunes" at the Dresden opera, or to fulfill duties at the honorary court posts he contrived to hold all his life. His employers, for their part, insisted on admitting unmusical boys to the school, refused to spend enough money to keep a decent orchestra together, and never forgot that he was their third choice. By 1730, the resulting ill feeling had become serious. Bach complained in a letter that his experience had been one of "almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution." He complained that his income was less than he had been led to expect, adding — with the black humor of a man whose salary was partly composed of funeral fees — that there were not enough funerals.
A temporary reprieve came with the arrival of Johann Matthias Gesner as the new rector of the Thomasschule — a man who admired Bach and had known him at Weimar — but Gesner stayed only until 1734, succeeded by Johann August Ernesti, a young man with fashionable ideas about education, one of which was that music was not one of the humanities but a time-wasting sideline. Trouble flared again in July 1736 over Bach's right to appoint prefects and became a public scandal. Bach was rescued, characteristically, not by accommodation but by escalation: in November 1736 he secured the title of Court Composer to the Elector of Saxony, and through his friends at court maneuvered an official inquiry that settled the dispute in 1738. The exact terms are unknown, but thereafter Bach did as he liked.
The judgment of another composer, Johann Adolf Scheibe, writing in 1737, may sum up the conventional wisdom in Leipzig: "This great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more agreeableness, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art." Turgid. Confused. An excess of art. These were the words used to describe the St. Matthew Passion.
The Annotated Bible
The book that perhaps reveals more of Bach than any other can be found at the Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. By chance, that institution came into possession of Bach's personal copy of Abraham Calov's three-volume edition of the Bible, containing Luther's translation alongside commentaries by Luther and Calov. Bach made notes in the margins. In 1733, he signed his name on the title page of each volume. The marginalia establish the fervor of his belief: no Sunday Christian could have made such acute observations. Bach singles out passages describing music as a vessel of divinity — in one note, he writes that music was "especially ordered by God's spirit through David," and in another, "With devotional music, God is always present in his grace."
The annotations also seem to reveal soul-searching. This passage is marked as important and partly underlined: "As far as your person is concerned, you must not get angry with anyone regardless of the injury he may have done to you. But, where your office requires it, there you must get angry." One can picture Bach struggling to determine whether his "almost continual vexation" stemmed from his person or his office — from vanity or duty. The distinction matters. It is the distinction between a man who fights because he is proud and a man who fights because the work demands it, and Bach spent his entire career unable to resolve which he was.
Michael Marissen, a professor emeritus at Swarthmore College and the author of
Bach & God, identifies himself as an agnostic but adds that in the vicinity of Bach's music he will never be a "
comfortable agnostic." Previous scholarship tended toward an Enlightenment Bach — Glenn Gould's commentary on the
Goldberg Variations spoke of a "fundamental coordinating intelligence," and one German scholar went so far as to question the sincerity of Bach's religious convictions. But the historically informed performance movement, in trying to replicate the conditions in which Bach's works were first played, helped to restore awareness of his firm theological grounding. Recorded surveys of the two hundred or so sacred cantatas — including Gardiner's epic undertaking in 1999 and 2000, when he and his musical forces performed all of Bach's surviving sacred cantatas on their appropriate Sundays in churches across Europe — brought his spirituality to the forefront. Yes, Bach believed in God. What is harder to pin down is how he positioned himself among the theological trends of the time — between the orthodox Lutheran establishment and the Pietist movement, which urged a renewal of personal devotion and, critically, held that music had too prominent a role in church services.
The Synagogue and the Fugue
The question that many prefer to avoid: do Bach's Passions project anti-Semitism? Marissen confronts it directly, and his findings have met with a frosty reception at musicological conferences. Luther's ugliest legacy was the invective that, in his later years, he heaped on the Jewish people. His 1543 treatise "On the Jews and Their Lies" calls for the burning of synagogues and Jewish homes. Such sentiments were echoed by the more strident theologians of Bach's time, including the Hamburg pastor Erdmann Neumeister, whose church Bach had been under consideration to serve in 1720, and whose texts he set in five cantatas.
In the St. John Passion, the Jews appear in a series of bustling, bristling choruses — sixteenth notes in the strings, oboes chirping above, upward-slithering chromatic lines, bouts of counterpoint creating a disputatious atmosphere. All this fits the stereotype of "Jewish uproar" — of a noisy, obstinate people. At the same time, the choruses are lively, propulsive, exciting to sing and hear. When the Jews tell Pilate, "We have a law, and by the law he ought to die," the music is oddly infectious, full of jaunty syncopations. The incongruous merriment conveys how crowds can take pleasure in hounding individuals. The choicest irony is that Bach uses his own celebrated art of fugue as a symbol of malicious scheming. In the St. Matthew Passion, the crowd's cry of "Laß ihn kreuzigen!" ("Let him be crucified!") is articulated as a driving, demonic fugue.
The weakest protest holds that any noxious views are mitigated, or even annulled, by the greatness of the music. Marissen is properly aghast: "The aesthetic magnificence of Bach's musical settings surely makes these great cantatas more, not less, problematic. The notion that beauty trumps all really is too good to be true." And yet the story of the music's reception complicates things irreversibly. In 1824, Bella Salomon — an observant Jew living in Berlin, the grandmother of Felix Mendelssohn — gave her grandson a copy of the St. Matthew Passion. Mendelssohn, who had converted to Christianity but remained conscious of his Jewish origins, resolved to lead a performance. His revival of the work in Berlin on March 11, 1829 — before a capacity audience that included the King of Prussia, the poet Heinrich Heine, the philosopher Hegel, and the violinist Paganini, with up to a thousand people turned away at the door — inaugurated the modern cult of Bach. The scholar Ruth HaCohen speculates that Bach's "ecumenical, inclusive dialogue" opened a space in which Jewish listeners could find refuge. All this is reassuring, but one cannot take too much comfort. Even if the Passions lack active malice toward Jews, they treat them more as metaphors than as human beings.
The Synthesis Machine
Bach's most exalted sacred works — the two extant Passions, from the 1720s, and the Mass in B Minor, completed not long before his death in 1750 — are feats of synthesis of a kind that had no precedent and would have no true successor. They are rooted in archaic chants, hymns, and chorales. They honor the scholastic discipline of canon and fugue. They make expert use of the word-painting techniques of the Renaissance madrigal and Baroque opera. They absorb stock scenes: the lament, the pastoral, the lullaby, the rage aria, the tempest. They allude to courtly French dances, Italian love songs, the polonaise. Their furious development of brief motifs anticipates Beethoven, who worshipped Bach when he was young. Their most daring harmonic adventures — for example, the otherworldly modulations in the "Confiteor" of the Mass in B Minor — look ahead to Wagner, even to Schoenberg.
The Well-Tempered Clavier, finished in its first book at Köthen in 1722 and compiled in a second book around 1742, systematically explores both the potentials of a newly established tuning procedure — which, for the first time in the history of keyboard music, made all keys equally usable — and the possibilities for musical organization afforded by "functional tonality," a system that would prevail for the next two hundred years. At the same time, it is a compendium of the most popular forms and styles of the era: dance types, arias, motets, concerti, presented within the unified aspect of a single compositional technique — the rigorously logical and venerable fugue. The collection is a curriculum and a cosmos simultaneously. Bach became an absolute master of his art by never ceasing to be a student of it. His lifelong habit of studying and copying scores — from a Renaissance mass by Palestrina to the up-to-date Italianate lyricism of Pergolesi, from Vivaldi's concertos to Reincken's organ fantasias — allowed him to roam the Europe of the mind while his body remained trapped in the constricted geography of central Germany. The towns and cities where he spent his career — Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, Köthen, Leipzig — can be seen in a few hours' driving. His imagination circumnavigated the continent without ever leaving Thuringia.
The Man Handel Would Not Meet
He yearned for recognition. This is the thing about Bach that is most human and most painful. He became a distinguished figure in his final years — his influence felt in many corners of German music, not least through the activity of his various composing sons. He received the title of Court Composer from the Elector of Saxony. In May 1747, he visited his son Carl Philipp Emanuel at Potsdam and astonished Frederick the Great with his improvisations; in July, those improvisations took shape as The Musical Offering. Still, he had nothing like the celebrity of his contemporary George Frideric Handel. According to Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach twice tried to arrange a meeting with Handel, but the latter contrived to make himself unavailable. The implication is that Handel felt threatened. The anecdote gives a poignant glimpse of Bach's personality: he craved entrance to the international élite, but the trappings of success were denied him. He made careful copies of the Passions in his last years, which suggests a hope for posterity's attention, but he could hardly have imagined the repertory culture that came into existence in the nineteenth century. More likely, he simply wanted to prevent his music from vanishing. Some of it did: at least one other Passion, after St. Mark, was lost.
In June 1747, Bach joined a Society of the Musical Sciences founded by his former pupil Lorenz Christoph Mizler, presenting the canonic variations on the chorale Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her — a work of breathtaking intellectual complexity offered, one suspects, less out of fraternal feeling than as a quiet demonstration of superiority. His last great project, The Art of the Fugue, remained unfinished. His constitution was undermined by two unsuccessful eye operations performed by John Taylor, the itinerant English quack who numbered Handel among his other failures. Bach died on July 28, 1750, in Leipzig, at sixty-five. His employers proceeded with relief to appoint a successor. Burgomaster Stieglitz remarked, "The school needs a cantor, not a musical director — though certainly he ought to understand music."
Anna Magdalena was left badly off. For reasons that remain unclear, her stepsons did nothing to help her. Her own sons were too young. She died on February 27, 1760, and was given a pauper's funeral. The Art of the Fugue was published in 1751. It attracted little attention and was reissued in 1752 with a laudatory preface. By 1756, only about thirty copies had been sold, and Emanuel Bach offered the printing plates for sale. As far as is known, they were sold for scrap.
The Eighty-Year Silence
For about fifty years after his death, Bach's music was neglected. This was natural enough: in the days of Haydn and
Mozart, no one could be expected to take much interest in a composer who had been considered old-fashioned even in his lifetime, especially since his music was not readily available and half of it — the church cantatas — was becoming useless as religious thought evolved. But musicians of the late eighteenth century were neither so ignorant of Bach's music nor so insensitive to its influence as later accounts suggest. Emanuel Bach's debt to his father was considerable. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all acknowledged his shadow.
The revival gathered momentum after 1800. Johann Nikolaus Forkel published the first Bach biography in 1802, a volume subtitled For Patriotic Admirers of True Musical Art, and advised the publishers Hoffmeister and Kühnel on a collected edition that was ultimately cut short by the activities of Napoleon. But it was Mendelssohn's performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 that changed everything — the first performance outside Leipzig, the event that inaugurated what we now call the Bach Revival. The St. John Passion was published in 1830; the Mass in B Minor followed between 1832 and 1845. Robert Schumann encouraged the founding of the Bach-Gesellschaft in the centenary year 1850, with the purpose of publishing the complete works. By 1900, all the known works had been printed. The Neue Bach-Gesellschaft succeeded it and exists still, publishing the Bach-Jahrbuch annually since 1904. In retrospect, the Bach revival can be recognized as the first conspicuous example of the deliberate exhumation of old music — a phenomenon now so commonplace that it is difficult to grasp how radical it was. And the man at its center had died in provincial obscurity, his printing plates sold for the value of the metal.
The most recent chapter of recovery came on November 17, 2025, when two previously unknown organ works — the Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1178, and the Chaconne in G minor, BWV 1179 — were performed at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach is buried. Peter Wollny, the director of the Bach Archive, had first noticed the unsigned, undated manuscripts in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels in 1992, when he was a graduate student at Harvard. "I have to confess that I didn't even think these were works by Bach at the time," Wollny said. "The handwriting of the score just fascinated me, and I had this vague feeling that these bits of paper could be interesting some day. So I made photocopies and created a file that I dragged around with me for 30 years." The manuscripts were eventually identified as copies made around 1705 by Salomon Günther John, one of Bach's pupils at Arnstadt, through a painstaking analysis of handwriting samples spanning decades. Wollny declared himself "99.99% sure" of the attribution. Ton Koopman, the Dutch organist who performed them, noted that the pieces were "of a very high quality" and reflected the extraordinary abilities of a composer barely out of his teens. Three hundred and twenty years after they were written down, two more fragments of the incorrigible cantor's mind emerged from obscurity, as if the archive itself were a kind of resurrection.
Lost in Time
John Butt — one of the finest modern conductors of Bach, whose recordings with the Dunedin Consort have set benchmarks for the Passions and the
Mass in B Minor — argues in
Bach's Dialogue with Modernity that what makes this music permanently modern is its relationship to time. In the arias and choruses, time seems to stop, as we sink into a particular emotional or spiritual condition. Elsewhere, time hurtles ahead: unpredictable harmonic schemes generate suspense at every turn of the most familiar of stories. Butt maps multiple "time zones" in the Passions: the recitatives and dialogues plunge us into the midst of the New Testament narrative; the stern, stately chorales are like voices calling out from the era of Luther; and the arias and big choruses, in operatic style, show the lessons and moods of the Passion being absorbed into the Baroque present of Leipzig. The heterogeneity of elements engenders what Butt calls a novelistic richness, a virtual world rife with ambiguity: "It is as if he had entered into a 'Faustian pact,' by which he sought for his music an extraordinarily strong power in articulating and enhancing faith within the Lutheran religion, but in doing so gave to music an autonomous logic and referential power that goes well beyond the original purpose."
The St. John Passion aria "Ach, mein Sinn" — a reflection on Peter's denial — depicts a traumatized, flailing spirit. The tenor starts in synch with the ritornello, attempts to assume an independent melodic shape, fails, tries to rejoin the accompaniment. All the while, the instruments churn through their material, indifferent to the singer's plight. Butt calls it "a representation of a human who loses the way set out for him." This air of being lost in a world of ungraspable dimensions — lost in time, in harmonic space, in the gap between what we owe and what we feel — is the experience of the Passion as a whole, and perhaps the experience of Bach's life. He was a man whose genius was not merely unrecognized but actively resented, whose employers hired him reluctantly and reprimanded him constantly, whose greatest works were shelved or revised under duress, whose printing plates were melted down, whose second wife was buried in a pauper's grave. And yet the music itself — agitating the listener on one level while calming on another, refusing to blot out the ugliness of the world — endures in a state of what Frank Kermode called "eternal transition, perpetual crisis."
This music can be more beautiful than anyone's, but it refuses to console. It commiserates. "Herr, unser Herrscher" notwithstanding, Bach is no Byzantine deity gazing from the dome. He walks beside you in the night.
