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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750) was a prolific German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, a control of harmonic and motivic organisation from the smallest to the largest scales, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France. He is regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. Revered for their intellectual depth and technical and artistic beauty, JS Bach's works include the Brandenburg concerti, the Goldberg Variations, the keyboard Suites(1)(2), das Wohltempierte Klavier, Partitas, the Mass in B Minor, the St Matthew Passion, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and more than 200 cantatas.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, a town of some 6,000 residents in the German-speaking electorate of Thuringia, to an extraordinarily musical family. For more than 200 years, the Bach family had produced dozens of worthy performers and composers during a period in which the church, local government and the aristocracy provided significant support for professional music making in the German-speaking world, particularly in Thuringia and Saxony. Bach's father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was a talented violinist and trumpeter in Eisenach, and held a post involving the organisation of secular music and participation in church music. His uncles were all professional musicians, ranging from church organists and court chamber musicians to composers. Contemporary documents indicate that, in some circles, the name Bach had come to be used as a synonym for "musician". Bach was proud of his family's musical achievements, and around 1735 drafted a geneaology, "Origin of the musical Bach family",tracing the history of generations of 53 musical Bachs, beginning with Veit (Vitus) Bach (d. 1619) "a white-bread baker in Hungary" who was forced to flee Hungary because he was a Lutheran and who "found the greatest pleasure in a little Cittern". His son Johannes (d. 1626) became a piper, his son Christoph (1613–61) was an instrumentalist, and his twin son was JS Bach's father.

Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father died the following year. The nine-year-old orphan moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at nearby Ohrdruf. There he copied, studied and performed music, and apparently received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord. He exposed him to the work of the great South German composers of the day—such as Pachelbel and Johann Jakob Froberger—and possibly to the music of North German composers, and of Frenchmen such as Lully, Louis Marchand, Marin Marais, and the Italian clavierist Girolamo Frescobaldi. The boy probably witnessed and assisted in the maintenance of the organ. Bach's obituary indicates that he copied music out of Johann Christoph's scores, but his brother had apparenty forbidden him to do so, possibly because scores were valuable and private commodities at the time. Bach's eyesight problems were a result of his secretly copying Johann Christoph's works by moonlight so as not to be discovered.

At the age of 14, Bach, along with his older school friend, Georg Erdmann, was awarded a choral scholarship to study at the prestigious St Michael’s School in Lüneburg, not far from the northern seaport of Hamburg, the largest city in Germany. This involved a long journey with his friend, probably undertaken partly on foot and partly by coach. His two years there appear to have been critical in exposing him to a wider palette of European culture than he would have experienced in Thuringia. In addition to singing in the a cappella choir, it is likely that he played the School’s three-manual organ and its harpsichords. He probably learned French and Italian, and received a thorough grounding in theology, Latin, history, geography and physics. He would have come into contact with sons of noblemen from northern Germany sent to the highly selective school to prepare for careers in diplomacy, government and the military. It is likely that he had significant contact with organists in Lüneburg, in particular Georg Böhm, and that he visited several of them in Hamburg, such as Reincken and Bruhns. Through these musicians, he probably gained access to the largest and finest instruments he had thus far played. It is likely that during this stage, he became acquainted with the music of the North German tradition, especially the work of Dieterich Buxtehude, and with music manuscripts and treatises on music theory that were in the possession of these musicians.

Bach’s musical style arose from his extraordinary fluency in contrapuntal invention and motivic control, his flair for improvisation at the keyboard, his exposure to South German, North German, Italian and French music, and his apparent devotion to the Lutheran liturgy. His access to musicians, scores and instruments as a child and a young man, combined with his emerging talent for writing tightly woven music of powerful sonority, appear to have set him on course to develop an eclectic, energetic musical style in which foreign influences were injected into an intensified version of the pre-existing German musical language. Throughout his teens and 20s, his output showed increasing skill in the large-scale organisation of musical ideas, and the enhancement of the Buxtehudian model of improvisatory preludes and counterpoint of limited complexity. The period 1713–14, when a large repertoire of Italian music became available to the Weimar court orchestra, was a turning point. From this time onwards, he appears to have absorbed into his style the Italians’ dramatic openings, clear melodic contours, the sharp outlines of their bass lines, greater motoric and rhythmic conciseness, more unified motivic treatment, and more clearly articulated schemes for modulation.

There are several more specific features of Bach's style. The notation of baroque melodic lines tended to assume that composers would write out only the basic framework, and that performers would embellish this framework by inserting ornamental notes and otherwise elaborating on it. Although this practice varied considerably between the schools of European music, Bach was regarded at the time as being on one extreme end of the spectrum, notating most or all of the details of his melodic lines—particularly in his fast movements—thus leaving little for performers to interpolate. (An example of this ornate, inclusive notation is provided by the excerpt from his Violin Sonata No. 1 in G, in the previous section.) This may have assisted his control over the dense contrapuntal textures that he favoured, which allow less leeway for the spontaneous variation of musical lines. Bach's contrapuntal textures tend to be more cumulative than those of Händel and most other composers of the day, who would typically allow a line to drop out after it had been joined by two or three others. Bach's harmony is marked by a tendency to employ brief tonicisations—subtle references to another key that last for only a few beats at the longest—particularly of the supertonic, to add colour to his textures.

At the same time, Bach, unlike later composers, left the instrumentation of major works including The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering open. It is likely that his detailed notation was less an absolute demand on the performer and more a response to a 17th-century culture in which the boundary, between what the performer could embellish and the composer's demands, was being negotiated.

Bach’s apparently devout, personal relationship with the Christian God in the Lutheran tradition and the high demand for religious music of his times inevitably placed sacred music at the centre of his repertory; more specifically, the Lutheran chorale (hymn tune), the principal musical aspect of the Lutheran service, was the basis of much of his output. He invested the chorale prelude, already a standard set of Lutheran forms, with a more cogent, tightly integrated architecture, in which the intervallic patterns and melodic contours of the tune were typically treated in a dense, contrapuntal lattice against relatively slow-moving, overarching statements of the tune.

Bach's deep knowledge of and interest in the liturgy led to his developing intricate relationships between music and linguistic text. This was evident from the smallest to the largest levels of his compositional technique. On the smallest level, many of his sacred works contain short motifs that, by recurrent association, can be regarded as pictorial symbolism and articulations of liturgical concepts. For example, the octave leap, usually in a bass line, represents the relationship between heaven and earth; the slow, repeated notes of the bass line in the opening movement of Cantata 106 (Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit) depict the laboured trudging of Jesus as he was forced to drag the cross from the city to the crucifixion site.

On the largest level, the large-scale structure of some of his sacred vocal works is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning: for example, the overall form of the St Matthew Passion illustrates the liturgical and dramatic flow of the Easter story on a number of levels simultaneously; the text, keys and variations of instrumental and vocal forces used in the movements of Cantata 11 (Lobet Gott in alle Landen) may form a structure that resembles the cross.

Beyond these specific musical features arising from Bach’s religious affiliation is the fact that he was able to produce music for an audience that was committed to serious, regular worship, for which a concentrated density and complexity was accepted. His natural inclination may have been to reinvigorate existing forms, rather than to discard them and pursue more dramatic musical innovations. Thus, Bach’s inventive genius was almost entirely directed towards working within the structures he inherited, according to most critics and historians.

Bach’s inner personal drive to display his musical achievements was evident in a number of ways. The most obvious was his successful striving to become the leading virtuoso and improviser of the day on the organ. Keyboard music occupied a central position in his output throughout his life, and he pioneered the elevation of the keyboard from continuo to solo instrument in his numerous harpsichord concertos and chamber movements with keyboard obbligato, in which he himself probably played the solo part. Many of his keyboard preludes are vehicles for a free improvisatory virtuosity in the German tradition, although their internal organisation became increasingly more cogent as he matured. Virtuosity is a key element in other forms, such as the fugal movement from Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, in which Bach himself may have been the first to play the rapid solo violin passages. Another example is in the organ fugue from BWV547, a late work from Leipzig, in which virtuosic passages are mapped onto Italian solo-tutti alternation within the fugal development.

Related to his cherished role as teacher was his drive to encompass whole genres by producing collections of movements that thoroughly explore the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in those genres. The most famous examples are the two books of the Well Tempered Clavier, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, in which a variety of contrapuntal and fugal techniques are displayed. The English and French Suites, and the Partitas, all keyboard works from the Cöthen period, systematically explore a range of metres and of sharp and flat keys. This urge to manifest structures is evident throughout his life: the Goldberg Variations (1746?), include a sequence of canons at increasing intervals (unison, seconds, thirds, etc.), and The Art of Fugue (1749) can be seen as a manifesto of fugal techniques.

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