Summary: <br> Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in 1746, by Elias Gottlob Haussmann<br> <br> <br> <br> On April 22, 1723 – 296 years ago today – the 38-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach was elected music director and cantor of St. Thomas church in Leipzig. Despite the fact that it was a prestigious position, Bach felt scant enthusiasm for the job and considered it a step down from his previous position. Bach’s reticence was shared by the Leipzig authorities’ reticence towards Bach, who was – in fact – their fourth choice for the job. Bach and Leipzig were “a marriage of convenience” and therein lies the story for this week’s Music History Monday.<br> <br> <br> <br> Sebastian Bach (as he was known to his friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances) was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Thuringia, in what today is central Germany. He was the eighth and last child (of five surviving children) born to Elisabeth and Johann Ambrosius Bach. <br> <br> <br> <br> To say that Sebastian Bach had a genetic predisposition towards music is like saying that giraffes are genetically predisposed to necking. For generations, music had been the Bach family trade. In 1735, the 50-year-old Sebastian Bach compiled a list of forty-two family members who had been professional musicians during the previous 150 years. It was a “short list”, as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians today lists 85 musical Bachs spanning the nearly 300 years from 1555 to 1846.<br> <br> <br> <br> Writing in a biography published in 1802, Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749-1818), described a typical Bach family gathering this way:<br> <br> <br> <br> “As it was impossible for them to all live in the same place, they liked to get together at least once a year, probably in Erfurt, Eisenach or Arnstadt. Their favorite occupation during these gathering was to engage in some form of musical activity. Naturally enough, as they were all choirmasters, organists or town musicians, connected in some way with the church, and also since custom demanded a religious framework, they would start with the singing of a chorale. This solemnity, however, would soon give way to more light-hearted music-making, which was often in strong contrast with what had gone before. They liked to sing folksongs of a light or sometimes ribald nature, singing two or more [folksongs] simultaneously and extemporizing upon them so that choral harmony resulted. These quodlibets, as they called them, not only made the performers laugh heartily, but anyone who happened to hear them was irresistibly affected by laughter too.”<br> <br> <br> <br> We’re glad to know that some members of the Bach family “laughed heartily”, because our impression of Sebastian Bach is one of grim seriousness, though in fact, we know little about Bach the man. The well-known Elias Gottlob Hausmann portrait of the 61-year-old Bach at the top of this post is one of the very few indisputable images of him that have come down to us. It shows us a man with sharp, calculating eyes, an outthrust chin, and a severe mouth with ever so slightly twisted lips. Is this what passed for a smile from Bach? Or perhaps it’s a sneer of disdain, a sign of resentment for having to sit still in an artist’s studio while there was important work to do? <br> <br> <br> <br> Whatever; it’s the face of a most intelligent man who knew his worth; a stubborn, unyielding, sometimes irascible guy who nevertheless loved his wives (two in number) and children (20 in number); a man who liked his tobacco, food, and drink (beer and brandy); someone who’d been around the block more than a few times and who did not suffer fools (or his employers) gladly. <br> <br> <br> <br> Bach’s provincial career was centered on the churches, courts, and municipalities of his native central Germany, a career that was an exercise in disappointment management. In Weimar, in 1717,
