Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived from 31 March 1685 to 28 July 1750, was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period known for his prolific output across a wide range of instruments and forms, including the orchestral Brandenburg Concertos, solo works such as the Cello Suites and the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier, organ works such as the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and choral works such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, alongside a mastery of counterpoint heard in The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue. Born in Eisenach, the youngest child of the city musician Johann Ambrosius Bach, he was orphaned at age ten and lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph before continuing his musical education in Luneburg; in 1703 he returned to Thuringia to work as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Muhlhausen, and he also spent extended periods at the courts of Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Kothen, where he focused on chamber music. By 1723 he had been hired as Thomaskantor, the church music director of Leipzig, responsible for music in four Lutheran city churches and for the St Thomas School, where he composed annual cycles of church cantatas and music for Leipzig University's student ensemble; his sovereign Augustus III of Poland granted him the title of court composer of the Elector of Saxony in 1736. Bach died in 1750 following complications from eye surgery, and four of his twenty children, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, became composers in their own right; though he was primarily known as an organist for decades after his death, Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion precipitated a Bach Revival, and he is now acclaimed as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.