Text a j.S. Bach in leipzig

In 1723 J.S. Bach was appointed Kantor at St. Thomas's church in Leipzig. Bach's duties as Kantor were a mixture of schoolmaster, director of music at several churches, and composer for civic occasions. As a teacher he had to instruct the scholars in music, and seems to have been inspiring to those with talent and intolerant to those without it. He and his pupils provided the music at four churches, two of which had elaborate Sunday services including a cantata on alternate Sundays. For grander occasions he could augment the scholars with town musicians. In the first years at Leipzig he wrote (or sometimes reworked) a cantata for every Sunday and major festivals, composing about 150 between 1723 and 1727. Mаnу of these are extraordinarily difficult to perform, especially the solo parts (one report records that the performances were usually bad and that Bach thrashed the boys afterwards). But Bach’s variety of forms, and more especially his delight in finding an exact musical equivalent to the imagery of the verse, marks him out from his contemporaries. If his cantatas are uneven in quality, a high proportion of them are masterpieces and even the duller works usually contain some music of great interest. The “St. John Passion” was composed before he left Coethen, and was one of the first of his works to be heard in Leipzig. He probably composed other works which have been lost, but his finest setting, the “St. Matthew Passion”, was too elaborate for the taste of the congregation and the city elders.

Bach's energy during this period was exceptional and he was keen to expand his activities by taking over music at the university church. Nevertheless, by 1730 he was disenchanted with conditions at St. Thomas's and wrote a stiff letter to the church authorities demanding improvements; they replied by threatening to reduce his salary. He began looking for a job elsewhere, but an outstanding rector was appointed at the school, and he understood Bach's needs. His appointment as director of the collegium musicum of the city in 1729 also helped persuade him to remain. He was now composing few cantatas, instead revising and composing keyboard music for a series of publications called “Clavier-Übung” (four volumes, 1731 - 42), which included partitas, the Italian Concerto, massive organ pieces, and the Goldberg Variations, obviously with a view to providing a comprehensive survey of keyboard style. He also arranged and composed harpsichord concertos, some for two or more harpsichords.

A change of headmaster at St. Thomas's School in 1734 led to trouble in Bach's life. In 1737 he resigned from collegium musicum, but he took up the post again in 1739. However, in 1736 Bach was made Royal Court Composer to the King of Saxony, which allowed him to visit Dresden quite frequently, he was also much in demand for organ recitals in other cities.

His family despite the deaths in infancy of 10 of the 13 children born to Anna Magdalena, was also doing credit, with Wilhelm Friedemann as organist at the Sophienkirche at Dresden and Carl Philipp Emanuel as court musician to Frederic the Great in Berlin. Thus the romantic view of his lack of appreciation in his own time is not entirely true.

In his last years Bach composed little for the daily round, but his delight in ordering and collecting earlier pieces grew ever stronger. In 1742 the second collection of the “Well-tempered Clavier” was completed, and earlier chorale preludes began to be revised and published. A visit to Berlin, where he was received with great enthusiasm by Frederic the Great, resulted in the “Musical Offering” (1747), a collection of canons and other scholarly pieces with a trio sonata as a concession to modern taste. Finally, a huge didactic collection “The Art of the Fugue”, left unfinished at his death, investigates comprehensively the whole concept of counterpoint in the 18th-century idiom.

Towards the end of his life he became blind, a condition which the treatment of John Tailor (Handel's oculist) did nothing to relieve. He was buried honourably near the South door of St. John's Church in Leipzig. Anna Magdalena was rather meanly treated by the church authorities and died in poverty in 1760.