Bach & the Art of Counterpoint

2.1 The Bach Dynasty

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was born in Eisenach, Thuringia, into the most remarkable musical dynasty in European history. The Bach family produced at least 53 professional musicians across six generations. J. S. Bach's father, grandfather, uncles, and brothers were all employed musicians; his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach became famous composers in their own right (and, famously, more celebrated than their father during their lifetimes).

Orphaned at ten, Bach was raised by his eldest brother Johann Christoph in Ohrdruf. He received his earliest musical training there, reportedly copying out manuscripts by moonlight when his brother refused access to a prized collection of keyboard pieces. He attended the Michaelisschule in Lüneburg on a scholarship, where he could hear the finest organists in northern Germany and study the French court style.

Bach held a series of court and church positions: organist at Arnstadt (1703), Mühlhausen (1707), and Weimar (1708), where he composed the great majority of his organ works; then Kapellmeister at the Anhalt-Cöthen court (1717–1723), where he produced the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier Part I, and the solo violin and cello works.

His final and longest appointment — from 1723 until his death in 1750 — was as Thomaskantor (Cantor of St Thomas's) at Leipzig, the most prestigious church music post in Lutheran Germany. Here he composed an astounding 295 surviving church cantatas (probably writing over 300), three great Passions, the Mass in B minor, and the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. He was also responsible for teaching Latin to the schoolboys of the Thomasschule, a duty he largely delegated.

2.2 The Well-Tempered Clavier

In 1722 Bach completed the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Das Wohltemperierte Clavier) — 24 paired preludes and fugues, one in each major and minor key. The second book followed in 1742. Together they constitute the most important collection in keyboard literature: 48 pieces that are simultaneously a practical demonstration of equal temperament (or well-temperament, a related tuning system that makes all 24 keys usable), a pedagogical anthology, and an inexhaustible treasury of musical invention.

Before equal temperament, keyboards were tuned so that some keys sounded beautiful and others harshly out of tune. Bach's collection proved that with a well-tempered tuning, one instrument could serve all keys. The prelude in C major from Book I, with its arpeggiated chords of crystalline simplicity, became one of the most recognisable pieces in all music (later the subject of Gounod's Ave Maria). The fugue that follows it — four voices in strict counterpoint — demonstrates the full power of Bach's harmonic imagination.

Beethoven grew up playing the Well-Tempered Clavier. Chopin taught from it exclusively. Schumann called it “the musician's Bible.” It remains the most studied work in the history of keyboard music.

Anatomy of a Fugue

2.3 The Art of Fugue & Contrapuntal Mastery

Bach's final work, The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge), left unfinished at his death in 1750, is the supreme monument of contrapuntal art. It consists of fourteen fugues (contrapuncti) and four canons, all based on a single theme in D minor. Bach explores every contrapuntal device known: inversion (the theme upside down), retrograde (backwards), augmentation (in longer note values), diminution (shorter), double and triple counterpoint, mirror fugues, and finally an unfinished quadruple fugue that incorporates B–A–C–H (in German musical notation, B♭–A–C–B) as a second subject — Bach's own name written in music.

Whether The Art of Fugue was intended for performance or purely as a theoretical treatise remains debated. Bach left no indication of which instruments should play it. What is undeniable is that its systematic exploration of contrapuntal possibility has no equal in music — and that its emotional world, for all its intellectual rigour, is one of profound beauty and, in the final unfinished fugue, haunting incompleteness.

The fugue — a form in which a single theme (the subject) is systematically combined with itself in multiple voices through imitation, inversion, stretto, and harmonic development — was brought by Bach to a peak from which it could not be surpassed. No subsequent composer has added substantially to the fugal technique he mastered.

2.4 Key Works

2.5 The Bach Revival: Mendelssohn's Gift

Bach died in 1750 largely unknown outside a small circle of specialists. His sons — particularly Carl Philipp Emanuel, whose lighter, emotionally volatile “Empfindsamer Stil” (sensitive style) was enormously fashionable — were far better known than their father. For almost eighty years, J. S. Bach's music was filed away in libraries and forgotten.

On 11 March 1829, the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first complete performance of the St Matthew Passion since Bach's own time, at the Singakademie in Berlin. The effect was electrifying. Within weeks, all of educated Germany was talking about Bach; within years, a Bach revival was underway that would eventually produce the complete Bach-Gesellschaft edition of his works (1851–1900), comprising 46 volumes.

The revival reshaped how Western musicians understood their own tradition. Brahms, who owned many Bach manuscripts, studied him obsessively. Beethoven had grown up playing the Well-Tempered Clavier. But it was the 1829 performance that elevated Bach from a historical curiosity to the canonical figure he remains today — often described as the greatest composer who ever lived.

2.6 Bach as Lutheran Cantor

To understand Bach is to understand Lutheran Germany. He was not primarily a concert composer; he was an employee of the church. His contract as Thomaskantor required him to produce a new cantata every week for the liturgical year — roughly 58 cantatas per year, cycling through three complete cycles. He was also expected to oversee music at four Leipzig churches, teach Latin, and train the choirboys.

The Lutheran cantata — typically a 20–30 minute work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, alternating recitative, aria, chorale, and choral movements — was Bach's central medium. He treated each Sunday's scriptural text with equal seriousness and invention, producing cantatas of extraordinary variety: tragic laments, joyful celebrations, profound meditations on death and resurrection.

Bach frequently inscribed the letters S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria — “Glory to God alone”) at the end of his manuscripts. Whether this was genuine piety or professional convention, his sacred music convinces the listener that it was written by someone for whom music and faith were inseparable.

Documentary: Johann Sebastian Bach