Browse piano sheets by Johann Sebastian Bach on Zen Virtual Piano.
“I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far,” Bach once remarked, implying that everything in the craft of music is teachable and learnable. He is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time, and a line that modest from a composer of that standing makes his career read as a record of effort.
He kept many memories of his childhood in Eisenach all his life: the family home, which also had rooms for trainee musicians, the grammar school with its choir, St George’s Church and its organ, and the town hall, where brass musicians performed from the tower. Left an orphan, he moved to Ohrdruf to live with his brother Johann Christoph, fourteen years older and the organist at St Michael’s Church. An organ in St George’s, a school choir and brass from the town hall tower were all among the sounds he held onto, and the life of church posts that followed fits that early listening.
In 1703 he went to Arnstadt to examine the new organ at the New Church, now the Bach Church, and was later appointed its organist. By 1708 he had probably learned all that his German predecessors could teach him and reached a first synthesis of northern and southern German styles, having also studied some French organ and instrumental music on his own. Studying French organ and instrumental music on his own sits comfortably beside the hard-work remark he is quoted making. At one point his resignation was refused and he was imprisoned for a month for disobedience; released in December and unfavourably dismissed, he could start work in Köthen. A month in detention over a refused resignation hints at how little room he had to choose his own path at that moment.
As cantor of St Thomas’s in Leipzig he performed cantatas weekly at services on Sundays and feast days, about sixty for each ecclesiastical year. At that pace the advice to work hard stops sounding like modesty and starts reading as a timetable. He served as cantor for twenty-seven years, and the Leipzig Bach Archive, widely recognized as the world’s pre-eminent centre of Bach scholarship, now stands opposite the church where he served.
He is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Mass in B Minor, among numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music. In 1750 he underwent eye surgery by Sir John Taylor, after his health had deteriorated: he suffered from a serious eye condition as well as motor problems in his right arm and his writing hand. A note on attribution: the little Minuet in G major numbered BWV Anhang 114 was not written by a Bach at all; Anna Magdalena copied it, with a second minuet, from an extensive suite by Christian Petzold.
