By: Veronica Kogan

Many think of J.S. Bach as just some boring, stuffy composer who lived three hundred years ago and should stay there. Well, they are quite mistaken. Bach lived during the Baroque period, a time of artistic drama and grandeur. At the same time, Lutheranism, the first Christian faith to break from the Catholic Church, had a great impact on Bach’s music, and he devoted himself to expressing divine majesty through relatable human emotion. In this article, the first of a set, I will discuss Bach’s dark past. His life is also one of tragedy and rebellion towards authority, making him a rock star of his time. 

First, a little background. Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 to a fairly prominent family of musicians in a small town called Eisenach in Germany. Bach quickly became a musician of multiple talents—a competent violinist, a beautiful vocalist (until he hit puberty), and a virtuosic organist and harpsichordist (he’s from the pre-piano age).

Much of Bach’s life remains a mystery. However, diligent Bach researchers have made some shocking discoveries. Apparently, Bach was a teenage thug; in his school in Eisenach, boys bullied each other, brought rapiers to school, brought strange girls to school grounds, and were very likely to be part of gangs. Bach’s life only continued to get harder. At the age of nine, he lost a brother and a sister and both his parents to cholera. Now an orphan, he moved to Ohrdruf, Germany to live with his older brother. His new school was just as much a mess as the previous one. To top the cake with a rotten cherry, Bach’s new schoolmaster was known to be sadistic to the students and was eventually fired for his abusive behavior.

Bach got his first job at 18 years old in another German town called Arnstadt. There was one condition: he had to compose new music. Bach began by writing cantatas. Let’s pause—what on Earth is a cantata? Cantatas began as small Italian pieces written for solo voice and a few other instruments. Once they caught on in Germany, it became associated with religious ritual in the Lutheran Church. By the time Bach began composing them, they were massive works—Bach composed 200 cantatas, each lasting 25-30 minutes long. Back to his first composition–he immediately ran into trouble. The part he wrote for the bassoonist was a bassoonist’s worst nightmare. Every other note was in a different key signature, it was extremely fast, and the fingerings forced the player to contort their hands until they turned blue. The bassoonist, understandably, made a mess of it during rehearsal. Bach, deeply offended, called him what roughly translates as a “bassoonist breaking wind after eating a green onion.” The humiliated bassoonist vowed to take revenge. Later that day, as Bach was walking home through the town square after attending a christening, the bassoonist ran up to him, beating him with a stick and calling him “a dirty dog.” Bach drew his rapier, and the two scuffled until some bystanders pulled them apart. After the incident, Bach went to the Church council and requested protection against any further assault. Unfortunately for him, the council sided with the bassoonist and had quite a few complaints of their own; Bach’s strange harmonies upset the older members of the parish; he played either too long or not enough; and he kept bringing strange women into the organ loft to “play music to.” Bach’s complaint was silenced, but his trust in authority figures was never the same.

Now, cue the time lapse! During the early 1700s, Bach went to work for the court in Weimar. In 1717, a feud broke out between the Duke of Weimar and his nephew Ernst August. Playing for the duke’s nephew was forbidden for all musicians, punishable by flogging, or even death. The duke made an example of one unlucky horn player, who was flogged and then hanged. To add to Bach’s stress, the Capellmeister (musical director) died, and Bach was passed over for the post for the director’s no-talent son. With no reason left to stay, Bach accepted the help of the duke’s hated nephew to get the post of Capellmeister in Cothen and resigned from the duke’s court. Furious, the duke threw Bach into prison, making Bach one of the few major composers to have spent time in hard-core prison. Luckily, Bach was released after a month and was on his way to less deadly pastures.  

By the time Bach reached Cothen, he was married and had four children. Working for a prince who loved to travel to artist hubs, Bach often left home for extensive periods of time. Upon return from one such escapade, Bach found out that his wife had died and been buried in his absence, leaving his four children motherless. He remarried a few years later to Anna Magdalena. They had over a dozen children together, leaving Bach with 20 children in all. Only 10 of them survived past early childhood.

It’s safe to say that Bach had plenty to be depressed about. You’d think that his music would mirror his broken soul, but it does quite the opposite. The harder life got, the more uplifting and soothing his compositions became. Bach took refuge in his music, consoling himself and those who listened to his works. In my eyes, that only makes his music more beautiful.