It was in Cöthen that Bach compiled the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier (“tempered” meaning tuned), a collection of preludes and fugues for keyboard, in each of the 24 major and minor keys – this gives a hint of his lifelong love of completeness, precision and mathematical symbolism. The six Cello Suites and the Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are nominally sets of dances, though they were probably never intended to be actually danced to likewise the Orchestral Suites, and the French Suites for keyboard. In the six Brandenburg Concertos, he put groups of instruments rather than single players in the spotlight, in the fashionable Italian concerto grosso style. These included Dietrich Buxtehude, of whom Bach thought so highly that he took time off from his Arnstadt post to travel more than 260 miles to Lübeck – on foot, it is claimed – to hear him play in doing so he stretched four weeks’ leave to four months, which led to one of the disputes with employers that would be a recurring feature of his career.īach spent five years in Cöthen in the household of Prince Leopold, a Calvinist who had no use for elaborate devotional works, and it was here that his instrumental music blossomed.
Life for the previous generation of composers had been much the same.
His career began aged 18 in Weimar, and progressed as he moved between towns working as a court musician or, more often, an organist, a job that typically included composing choral cantatas and other music for church services – the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, one of his best-known organ works, dates from his early days as an organist in Arnstadt. His mother died when he was nine, and his father less than a year later, leaving the orphaned Bach to be brought up by his oldest brother. Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a small town in Thuringia in what is now Germany, into a dynasty of musicians (several of his children, notably Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, became renowned composers themselves).
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