Johann Sebastian Bach died on this day, July 28th, 1750, at 8.15 in the evening, just over a week after suffering a stroke. He was 65. The composer who was to change the course of public music for the next 200 years, and indeed, now more than ever, remains supreme, died as quietly as he had lived. Bach had many confrontations with church and civic authorities, and often rowed with the administration of St Thomas's School and its church in Leipzig where he lived and worked from 1723 until his death. This master artist-innovator who epitomised the idea of a complete musician, was first and last a church organist.
There were no world tours, no riches. He did have two unhappy stints at the Weimar Court, and a satisfying if brief time at the court of the music-loving Prince Leopold in Cothen. A father of 20, once widowed, who would survive 11 of his children, he was a hardworking, devout Lutheran. Aside from a fever in 1729 which prevented him from meeting his contemporary Handel, by then already an international superstar thanks to his operatic activities, Bach enjoyed robust health until his final year. When illness struck however it was cruel and alarming enough to send his employers, never overly sensitive to Capellmeister Bach's needs, scurrying off for a successor.
Eye operations
Auditions were taking place even when Bach was still well enough to play organ and harpsichord. Two disastrous eye operations in the Spring of 1750 not only failed to save his sight, they undermined his entire system. Probably completely blind he nevertheless accepted a new student in early May. Some 10 days before his death Bach's sight seemed to return. But the "miracle" only lasted a few hours and the fatal stroke followed.
He was laid to rest on July 31st in an unmarked grave in the Johanniskirche where his body would remain for 200 years. However for more than a century after his death groups of St Thomas choral scholars made a ritual of honouring their great cantor each July 28th. It was they who established the tradition that his grace was located "about six paces" from the southern church door. His widow, who died 10 years later, was left in poverty, with three of Bach's daughters, including one by his first wife. Even sadder is the fact that in 1800, the editor of a Leipzig music magazine saw the need to ask readers to help Bach's youngest, sole surviving child, the only one to have lived on into the 19th century.
During this year of Bachfest in which his majestic musical legacy has been celebrated all over the world, it is difficult to grasp how quickly he was forgotten. The revival began in 1829 when Mendelssohn conducted St Matthew Passion in Berlin. While we know relatively little of the life, we do know Bach was born into a seventh generation family of musicians. Orphaned at 10 and denied a university education, he impressed at the strict Latin schools he attended and was obviously destined for a life in music. Never an apprentice, he was a master who was always a working musician with a practical knowledge of how instruments are made. His improvisational genius owes as much to his curiosity as his natural gifts. Bach looked to the Italian and French style as closely as he did to his rich German tradition.
Glorious finale
Last Sunday St Flannan's Cathedral in Killaloe, Co Clare, was host to a magnificent performance of St John Passion by the Irish Chamber Orchestra and National Chamber Choir under an inspired Stephen Layton. It was a glorious finale to this year's AerFi Killaloe Music Festival. Rufus Muller was a sensitive, intelligent Evangelist expressing a sense of bewildered pain at the plight of Jesus. This same tone of emotion was shared by tenor Mark Tucker. Baritone Gary Magee's Pilate caught the exasperated curiosity of the role. As the evening light slowly drifted from the Twelve Apostles stained glass window behind the choir, the drama unfolded with a balance of beauty, grace and urgency all the while alert to the mood shifts of the work. The 15th century church proved a perfect stage for a superb interpretation.
Exciting project
Bach was well served by this, the fifth Killaloe Festival. Earlier in the week all six of the Brandenberg Concertos were performed, while Malcom Proud's harpsichord recital beginning with the English Suite no 5 and culminating in the Chromatic Fantastia and Fugue in D Minor was a virtuoso performance from a worldclass Irish musician. For encores he played the 9th and 5th Goldberg Variations. On Sunday Proud rejoins the John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Cantata tour in Ansbach, Germany, the next stage in an exciting project devoted to performing all of Bach's surviving Cantatas in this anniversary year.
So what of Bach, creator of spectacular organ music who also wrote some of the most beautiful pieces for solo violin and cello which have ever been written? As a young man he was romantic enough to have walked 250 miles to Lubeck to visit the Danish master organist Buxtehude. How is it that his music is as emotionally compelling as it is beautiful and exact? Bach the composer made heavy demands on the voices of his singers. Yet even in his quest for perfection which broke rules as much as made them, he deferred to tradition.
Tonight the Orchestra of St Cecilia, under Geoffrey Spratt, performs Bach at the National Concert Hall. Listen to Bach today; tune into Lyric FM, or play any recording of any piece be it sonata, aria or fugue and Bach's magic remains as fresh as it was when Mozart commented: "Now there is something one can learn from".