Orphaned at ten, Bach became the organist posterity forgot first
Johann Sebastian Bach flooded the late Baroque with Brandenburg Concertos, Cello Suites, Well-Tempered Clavier, Passions, and hundreds of cantatas. Decades after 1750 he was remembered mainly as an organist. Only nineteenth-century biographies and complete printing restored the composer we now catalog by BWV numbers.
Born in Eisenach on 31 March 1685 (Old Style 21 March) into a clan already stocked with composers, he was the youngest child of city musician Johann Ambrosius Bach. Orphaned at ten, he spent five years with eldest brother Johann Christoph, then studied in Lüneburg. From 1703 he worked Thuringian church posts in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and soon held court and civic jobs that culminated in Leipzig's Thomaskantor duties. He died 28 July 1750 after filling Protestant liturgy and princely chambers with equal rigor.
German styles deepened through his counterpoint, harmonic architecture, and borrowed Italian and French rhythms and forms. Sacred and secular cantatas number in the hundreds; Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, motets, and chorale settings of Lutheran hymnody fill the vocal shelf beside keyboard monuments, organ works, solo violin sonatas and partitas, and the cello suites. Adaptation, not rejection, of tradition was the method that made the late Baroque feel inexhaustible.
Eighteenth-century memory skewed toward the organ virtuoso. Nineteenth-century life writing and the printing of all known works, later organized in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis and ongoing critical editions, built the modern scholarly industry. The Eisenach orphan's afterlife is a reminder that canons are curated—sometimes slowly—out of local church jobs and family workshops. Local jobs, family craft, and later cataloguers together built the Bach the world now casually assumes was always inevitable.
Source: Johann Sebastian Bach
