Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (March 21, 1685 – July 28, 1750) was a German composer and organist of the late Baroque period. He was born in Eisenach, in the Duchy of Saxe-Eisenach, into a large family of professional musicians; his father Johann Ambrosius Bach was a town piper and his older brother Johann Christoph Bach gave him keyboard lessons after their parents died when Bach was a child.

Bach held a sequence of posts as organist and court musician, including service at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, the ducal court at Weimar, and the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. From 1723 until his death he was Thomaskantor in Leipzig, with responsibility for music at the city's principal Lutheran churches.

His output covers nearly every genre of his era except opera and includes the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the St Matthew Passion, the Mass in B Minor, the Goldberg Variations, and more than two hundred surviving church cantatas. Much of this music was little performed for decades after his death; renewed interest grew through the 19th century, particularly after Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in 1829.

Bach married twice and fathered twenty children, of whom several, including Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, became prominent composers in their own right. He died in Leipzig at age 65.

The name Johann is the German form of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning God is gracious. It came into German through the Latin Iohannes and was one of the most common male names in German-speaking Europe for centuries.