Johann Sebastian Bach

Eisenach, Ohrdruf, Lüneburg, Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, Köthen, Leipzig — these were the main places where Bach lived. Born into a family that had supplied central Germany with musicians for generations, orphaned shortly before his tenth birthday and brought up by an elder brother, he learned violin, keyboard and the church repertoire. The Köthen years, at a court whose liturgy made few demands, produced the Brandenburg Concertos; in 1723 he became Thomaskantor in Leipzig and took charge of the music of the city's principal churches, writing cantatas by the annual cycle, the St John and St Matthew Passions, the Christmas Oratorio and eventually the Mass in B minor. Alongside all of it were works including the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, the unfinished Art of Fugue. He died in Leipzig in 1750, known to his contemporaries chiefly as an organist. He marked his manuscripts with abbreviated invocations, Soli Deo Gloria and Jesu juva among them, and set a dedicatory couplet at the head of the Orgelbuechlein, his collection of short chorale preludes. He remained a Lutheran all his life and read widely in theology, his library holding Luther's collected writings beside later divines of several confessions, and he told his pupils that music existed to honour God and to restore the spirit. The surviving versions of his orchestral suites belong to his Leipzig years.