At twenty he walked over four hundred kilometres to hear one organist play — and came back to work three months late.
Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685 into a family that had been supplying musicians for generations — in that part of Germany, "Bach" more or less meant "musician". Both his parents died before he was ten, and he was raised in Ohrdruf by a brother fourteen years his senior.
At twenty, working as an organist in Arnstadt, he asked the church for four weeks' leave, walked more than four hundred kilometres to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude play, and came back after about four months. The record of the hearing that followed survives, and it carries a second complaint: that he had put too many strange variations into the chorales and confused the congregation.
He held a handful of posts in his life, every one of them a job with a superior and an attendance record. In 1717 he pressed so hard to be released from Weimar that he was locked up for nearly four weeks. From 1723 he was cantor in Leipzig, where for the first years he delivered a new cantata almost every week — that is a workload, not inspiration.
He married twice and had twenty children, ten of whom reached adulthood. The keyboard notebooks he compiled for them survive, and early forms of several pieces in Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier are in them.
In his own lifetime he was known mainly as the man who played the organ extremely well. His music slipped out of fashion after his death, until Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829 and the world went back to look for him.
There is rarely a soloist-plus-accompaniment in Bach. Usually several lines run at once, none of them yielding to the others, and they still fit — you can pick any one of them and follow it the whole way.
He also rarely changes mood. A piece tends to end in the weather it began in; nothing suddenly clouds over halfway. What you are listening for is not what happens next, but how many sides one thing can be turned to.
One more habit that makes him easy to recognise: he will take a figure a second or two long and carry an entire piece on it. The Prelude in C major is the most extreme case of that.
