60 Fun Facts About Johann Sebastian Bach

In which town was Johann Sebastian Bach born in 1685?

Eisenach. The half-timbered house opened there in 1907 as his birthplace, now the Bach museum, proved to be the wrong one, and the house where he was really born no longer stands.

To which musical period does Bach belong?

The late Baroque. The era is usually dated from about 1600 to 1750, the year he died, and he held to its dense counterpoint while his own sons turned to the lighter galant style.

What happened in Bach's childhood that sent him to live with his eldest brother in Ohrdruf?

Both his parents died, his mother in 1694 and his father early in 1695. He and his brother Jacob moved in with their eldest brother, an organist who gave him his first formal keyboard lessons.

In a story from his obituary, what did the young Bach secretly do by moonlight while living with his brother?

Copied music. The story goes that he spent six months of moonlit nights copying a book of keyboard pieces his brother had refused to lend him, only for the brother to find the copy and take it away.

How did the teenage Bach earn free schooling at St Michael's in Lüneburg?

Singing in its choir. The Matins choir was reserved for poor boys with good voices and paid for their schooling and keep; his voice broke soon afterwards, but he managed to stay on.

Which instrument did Bach presumably learn from his father?

The violin. His father was a string player who led the town musicians, though in chamber music the grown Bach chose to play the viola, to be 'in the middle of the harmony'.

Which Lübeck organist did the 20-year-old Bach reportedly walk more than 300 km to hear in 1705?

Dieterich Buxtehude. Bach had four weeks' leave from his church post and stayed away about four months, and on his return his employers demanded to know why.

Which skill of Bach's led the old organist Reincken to say, 'I thought this art was dead'?

Improvising on a church melody. In Hamburg in 1720 Bach spun out 'An Wasserflüssen Babylon' for about half an hour, and Reincken, who had written his own setting of it, is said to have added, 'but I see it still lives in you'.

Gott ist mein König, the only Bach cantata to survive in a print from his lifetime, was written for what occasion?

A town council's inauguration. Mühlhausen installed a new council every year, and in 1708 the councillors paid to print the music as well as the words, making it the first Bach composition ever published.

How was Maria Barbara, whom Bach married in 1707, related to him?

His second cousin, the daughter of his father's cousin. She died suddenly in 1720 while Bach was away at a spa with his employer, and he came home to find her already buried.

How many children did Bach father across his two marriages?

20. Seven were born to Maria Barbara and thirteen to Anna Magdalena, but only ten lived to adulthood; four of the sons became noted composers.

What was Anna Magdalena Wilcke's profession when Bach married her in 1721?

Soprano singer. She was on the court payroll in her own right, and she went on singing professionally after the wedding.

Which Italian composer's concertos did Bach transcribe for harpsichord and organ in Weimar?

Vivaldi. The duke's teenage nephew probably brought the newly printed concertos back from his studies in Holland, and Bach learned how they were built by rewriting them for keyboard.

Why does each book of The Well-Tempered Clavier have 24 preludes and fugues?

One per major and minor key. On many keyboards of the day, keys with many sharps or flats sounded sour, so a set that marches through all 24 showed off a tuning in which every key is playable.

What happened to Bach in Weimar in 1717 when he pushed too hard for his dismissal?

Jailed for almost a month. Passed over for the top music post, he had already accepted a job at another court, so the duke held him from 6 November to 2 December and then dismissed him in disgrace.

Which six works did Bach send in 1721 to a margrave who apparently never paid him for them?

The Brandenburg Concertos. Bach had played for the margrave in Berlin while buying a harpsichord, was invited to send some music, and took two years to deliver, largely by reworking older pieces.

Why is most of Bach's output from Köthen secular rather than sacred?

The prince was a Calvinist, so his court chapel used no elaborate music. He loved music all the same and kept a court orchestra, so Bach wrote for its players instead.

Which composer is Bach said to have travelled to Halle to meet in 1719, only to find him gone?

George Frideric Handel. He had been visiting his mother in his home town; a second try in 1729, when Bach was ill and sent his son with an invitation, also failed, and the two never met.

What post did Bach take up in Leipzig in 1723 and hold until his death?

Thomaskantor. He was his employers' third choice for the job, and ten days after his death a burgomaster, looking for a successor, said the school needed a cantor, not a music director.

Which two composers were the Leipzig council's first choices for the post Bach took up in 1723?

Telemann and Graupner. Telemann used the offer to win a raise in Hamburg and Graupner's employer in Darmstadt refused to let him go, so Leipzig turned to Bach.

Besides music, what subject was Bach assigned to teach at the Thomasschule?

He employed four 'prefects' for the job; he called the city council 'penny-pinching'.

In a comic Bach cantata, a father tries to break his daughter's addiction to which fashionable drink?

Coffee. In the Coffee Cantata the daughter gives it up to win a husband, then quietly tells her suitors she will only marry a man who lets her drink it; Bach's ensemble probably first played it in a Leipzig coffee house.

On what kind of hymn is each cantata of Bach's second Leipzig cycle based?

A Lutheran chorale. From June 1724 he wrote a new cantata almost every week, each built on the words and tune of one familiar chorale, until the run broke off early in 1725 and the cycle was never finished.

Bach's St Matthew Passion is scored for which large forces?

Two choirs and two orchestras. For the Good Friday performance of 1736 Bach reworked the score so that each choir also had its own continuo players.

Bach sent a Kyrie and Gloria to which Catholic court in 1733, hoping for the title of court composer?

Dresden. The title arrived only in 1736, after a second application, and it gave Bach a royal patron to cite in his long quarrels with his Leipzig employers.

A slow movement from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 is popularly known by which nickname?

Air on the G String. The name comes from an 1871 arrangement by the violinist August Wilhelmj, who shifted the tune down so that he could play it entirely on his instrument's lowest string.

Bach's Goldberg Variations were reportedly written to ease which complaint of a count?

Insomnia. Bach's first biographer tells how the sleepless count would call, 'Play me one of my variations, Goldberg', and how he paid Bach with a golden goblet holding a hundred gold coins.

Which ruler played Bach a theme in 1747 and challenged him to improvise a fugue on it?

Frederick the Great. Bach improvised a three-part fugue on the spot, then went home and worked the royal theme into a six-part one, canons and a trio sonata, printed that year as The Musical Offering.

On what new instrument did Bach play during his 1747 visit to Potsdam?

An early fortepiano. The king owned several by the organ builder Gottfried Silbermann; Bach had once faulted Silbermann's first pianos for a heavy touch and weak treble, and the improved ones won his approval.

In the famous Haussmann portrait of 1746, what is Bach holding in his hand?

A sheet of music. It shows a short puzzle canon for six voices: the portrait was his entry piece for a learned society of musicians, which asked each new member for a likeness and a piece of 'scientific' music.

What kind of operation did Bach undergo twice late in life?

Surgery on his eyes. The travelling English oculist John Taylor operated twice within weeks, and Bach's health never recovered; Taylor is said to have failed in the same way with another great composer.

About how long did Bach's grave in Leipzig lie unmarked?

About 150 years. He was buried in a churchyard in 1750 in an unmarked grave; only when the church was rebuilt in 1894 were bones dug up, judged to be his and given a proper tomb.

Wendy Carlos's 1968 hit album Switched-On Bach was performed on which instrument?

The Moog synthesizer. It could sound only one note at a time, so every line had to be recorded separately and layered on tape; the album's success introduced a wide public to electronic sound.

Which son co-wrote his father's obituary and probably saw The Art of Fugue into print in 1751?

Carl Philipp Emanuel. He later supplied the first biographer with family memories by letter, while his elder brother, heir to a large share of the music, was driven to sell part of it off.

Which is the one major genre of his time that Bach never wrote in?

Opera. Yet he often went to hear it, taking his eldest son along 'to hear the pretty tunes', as he joked.

Which composer wrote in 1782 that he went every Sunday to Baron van Swieten's in Vienna and was collecting Bach's fugues?

Mozart. Only old masters were played at those Sunday sessions, he told his father, and he was soon arranging Bach fugues for strings and writing denser counterpoint of his own.

Whose 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion launched the Bach Revival?

Felix Mendelssohn. He was 20 and had been given a copy of the score by his grandmother as a teenager; his Berlin performance, trimmed to suit the taste of the day, turned attention to Bach's other large works.

Which composer, who learned The Well-Tempered Clavier as a boy, called Bach the father of harmony?

Beethoven. A music magazine reported in 1783 that the boy's chief piece was The Well-Tempered Clavier, and in 1801 he asked a publisher to put him down as a subscriber to a planned Bach edition.

Which composer finished his own 24 Preludes, modelled on The Well-Tempered Clavier, during a winter on Majorca?

Chopin. He wintered there in 1838-39 with the novelist George Sand, fell ill when the weather broke and was ordered out of his villa, yet still sent the finished set off to his publisher.

Before Brahms took the place, which composer was the third of Peter Cornelius's original 'Three Bs' in 1854?

Berlioz. Cornelius ended an admiring article by cheering him alongside the two older masters; decades later the conductor Hans von Bülow swapped in Brahms, and that version stuck.

Which pianist's 1955 debut recording of the Goldberg Variations made it standard repertoire?

Glenn Gould. He was 22, and the record's popular success was unheard of for so austere a keyboard work; he went back to the same piece in 1981 for what proved one of his last albums.

Which cellist was the first to record all six of Bach's Cello Suites?

Pablo Casals. He found the music in a Barcelona shop at 13, worked at it for more than a decade before playing a suite in public, and was nearly 60 when he at last agreed to record them.

Whose orchestration of a Bach organ work opens Disney's Fantasia?

Leopold Stokowski. He appears in silhouette on the podium as the film begins, conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, and later shakes hands with Mickey Mouse.

The unfinished last fugue of The Art of Fugue breaks off soon after Bach brings in a theme that spells what?

His own name. In German note names B-A-C-H is B flat, A, C, B natural; a note in his son's hand says the composer died while writing this fugue.

What does the catalogue abbreviation 'BWV' stand for?

Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, the 'Bach works catalogue'. Wolfgang Schmieder published it in 1950 and numbered the works by type, not by date, so a BWV number says nothing about when a piece was written.

Which famous organ piece, long credited to Bach, have some scholars argued is by someone else?

The Toccata and Fugue in D minor. No copy in Bach's own hand survives, and its style is so unlike his other organ music that some suspect an arrangement of another composer's work; most experts still credit Bach.

Which famous piano piece from Anna Magdalena's notebook, long credited to Bach, is now attributed to Christian Petzold?

Minuet in G major. Bach long got the credit because the piece sits in his wife's notebook; in 1965 its tune became a pop hit as 'A Lover's Concerto'.

Which French composer wrote an 'Ave Maria', rivalling Schubert's in fame, over the first prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier?

Charles Gounod. He made up the melody at the keyboard over the prelude, and it first appeared in 1853 as a wordless 'Méditation'; the prayer text that made it famous was fitted to it only later.

Which Bach autograph score, a work completed in his last years, joined UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2015?

The Mass in B minor. Bach probably never heard it whole: he put it together at the end of his life, partly from music written decades earlier, and the score in his own hand is kept in Berlin.

The Episcopal Church's calendar honours Bach on 28 July, the anniversary of which event?

His death. He died in Leipzig on 28 July 1750, aged 65, and church calendars by long custom remember people on the day they died, once called a birthday into heaven.

Which Brazilian composer's Bachianas Brasileiras pay tribute to Bach in title and spirit?

Jazz players from Jacques Loussier to the Modern Jazz Quartet have also reworked him.

Who wrote the first Bach biography, published in 1802?

Johann Nikolaus Forkel. He gathered his facts by writing to Bach's two eldest sons, then pitched the book at German pride: Bach's works, he told readers, were 'a priceless national patrimony'.

What followed when Bach, 18, tested Arnstadt's new church organ in 1703?

A permanent post. Called in only to test and show off the instrument, he so impressed the town that within weeks he was its organist, with light duties that left him free to practise and compose.

Bones dug up in a Leipzig churchyard were judged to be Bach's partly by which method?

Rebuilding a face on the skull. An anatomist measured the depth of flesh on dead men's faces, and a sculptor used his figures to model a head over a cast of the skull; its likeness to the portraits convinced them, though doubts remain.

By the family's own account, why did Bach's ancestor Veit Bach leave Hungary for Germany in the 16th century?

To keep his Protestant faith. Bach's own family chronicle says the baker settled in a Thuringian village and took his cittern to the mill to play while it ground, which Bach called the beginning of music in the family.

The Bach-Gesellschaft was founded in Leipzig in 1850, a hundred years after Bach died, to do what?

Publish all his works. The first volume appeared in 1851, and when the last came out nearly fifty years later the society, its job done, dissolved itself.

Which founder of the Munich Bach Orchestra conducts the Bach concerto that opens the music on the Voyager Golden Records?

Karl Richter. A few years before the launch the biologist Lewis Thomas had proposed sending 'all of Bach' into space as humanity's introduction, admitting: 'We would be bragging, of course.'

Which French composer called Bach a 'benevolent God' to whom musicians should pray before working?

Claude Debussy. The prayer, he wrote, was to be 'preserved from mediocrity', and what he prized in Bach was the 'arabesque', a principle of ornament he called the basis of all art.

Who reportedly could not tell Bach's father from his twin brother?

Their wives. One of Bach's sons wrote the family story down, adding that the twins spoke, thought and played music alike, and that when one fell ill the other did too.

Bach's six-part Christmas Oratorio runs from Christmas Day to which feast?

Epiphany. Much of the music was recycled: Bach fitted new sacred words to festive cantatas he had written a year or so earlier to flatter his royal patrons.