March 21, 1685 to July 28, 1750
from NPR:
quote:Gustav Mahler wrote that "in Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God," and Goethe said of Bach's music, "it was as if the eternal harmony was conversing within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God, just before the creation of the world."
quote:This is the portrait everybody knows, the portrait of the serious, solemn, even severe "old master" who played the organ and taught counterpoint to generations of children at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Looking at this portrait, it's not hard to imagine that Bach was great, but it is hard to imagine that he was ever young. Or slim. Or good-looking. But he was all those things. And more. He had 20 children, after all, and he didn't create them at the harpsichord. Many of the works we know and love, including most of his great instrumental works, Bach wrote in his twenties and thirties. We remember that he died at the age of 65, but somehow we forget that he wasn't born at 65. He always had quite a temper, was no stranger to scraps with his employers, and as a young man he once even managed to get himself into a sword fight.
From the Bach homepage:
quote:Bach was not only occupied with the style of the future but, as already mentioned, even more so with the stile antico, the strict counterpoint of composers like Palestrina. Bach's preoccupation with the stile antico is most obvious in his Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, but all other great "encyclopedic" compositions of his last period show a related preoccupation with strict counterpoint and the canon form.
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In the past, Bachs oeuvre was often seen as the the culmination point of a development of centuries, as the terminal point of the polyphonic period in the history of music. Modern Bach scholarship, however, also tends to stress the pre-classic, "progressive" elements in Bach's late works and even his preoccupation with the stile antico can be seen as an element that points to the future rather than to the past.
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It had something to do with the growing enthusiasm in this period about antiquity and even about things "gothic" as cultivated in the coming Romantic era.
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Bach was practically blind due to cataracts at the end of his life. Early in 1750, he was unsuccessfully treated for that by the British oculist Taylor and later that year he was hit by a stroke. He died on July 28, 1750. According to recent medical interpretations of Bach's symptoms in the last period of his life, he probably suffered and died from diabetes mellitus.
There's a scene in "Children of a Lesser God" where James Leeds, the new teacher at a school for the deaf, is listening to Bach's Double Concerto in D minor. He has been wooing a deaf teacher, Sarah Norman, who has already stunned him with her ability to dance by "feeling" the music.
She asks him to dance the music he is listening to. He can only reach toward the sky.
I like that scene. |
