Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the greatest baroque composers. He was born in Weimar in 1685 and in the age of 23 he was known as the best organist in the world. In his life he composed lots of great works.

He also lived on a small scale, working and worrying all the time. His large family called for attention – with his two wives he had 20 children and some of them were very talented. Later, his sons Johann Christian and Carl Philip Emanuel became very popular, but they didn’t reach their father’s greatness.

Bach’s contemporaries and sons didn’t compose the same art of music as he did. They inclined more to classicism, because baroque music seemed too conservative, flat-footed and old-fashioned to them. But they were wrong. 75 years after Bach’s death, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy rediscovered his music and when he introduced it in Berlin, the new generation of listeners was stunned by it and the renascence of the whole composer’s heritage began. His work became a part of the utmost German art.