Not a brook, but an ocean
"Bach" means "brook" in German — but Beethoven, who kept a portrait of him on his wall, protested: "Not a brook, but an ocean should be his name." Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 into a Thuringian family that had produced professional musicians for seven generations. He never left Germany, never sought celebrity, and spent his life as a working church musician in provincial towns — yet out of that daily craft came what many regard as the foundation of Western music: The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Mass in B minor, the great Passions, and the most famous organ piece ever written, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
A craftsman's life, an immortal legacy
For his last 27 years Bach served as cantor of St Thomas's in Leipzig, responsible for the music of four churches — for long stretches that meant composing, rehearsing and performing a new cantata every single week, on top of teaching Latin to choirboys. Astonishingly, at his death in 1750 he was considered old-fashioned; for decades his manuscripts gathered dust while his own sons enjoyed greater fame. The turning point came in 1829, when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a revival of the St Matthew Passion in Berlin and set off a Bach renaissance that has never ended. Today his organ works remain the benchmark for the instrument, and his fugues are still the textbook from which every musician learns the art of counterpoint.
Bach and Prague
Bach never saw Prague — but Prague heard Bach remarkably early. Count Franz Anton Sporck, the great Bohemian patron of the arts, admired the composer and corresponded with him; Bach lent him the performance parts of the Sanctus from what would become the Mass in B minor, noting on his score that "the parts are in Bohemia with Count Sporck". Three centuries later, Prague is one of the best places in Europe to experience Bach's true element: the organ. His toccatas, preludes and fugues resound at concerts in the city's baroque churches — including instruments centuries old — in acoustics very much like those he composed for. Hearing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor under a vaulted Prague ceiling is as close to Bach's world as the modern listener can get.