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| Johann Sebastian Bach 1685 - 1750 | |
In the year 2000, Germany celebrated the 250th day of death of Johann Sebastian Bach, who died on the 28th of July 1750 in the German city of Leipzig.
Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building, Johann Sebastian Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time, and is celebrated as the creator of the "Brandenburg Concertos", "The Well-Tempered Clavier", the "Mass in B Minor", and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music. Im Jahr 2000 feierte Deutschland zum 250. Mal den Todestag des Komponisten Johann Sebastian Bach, der am 28. Juli 1750 in Leipzig gestorben ist.
Compared to a lot of other major composers, Johann Sebastian Bach's life and career were confined to a very limited geographical space. Born in Eisenach in Thuringia, on the 21st of March 1685, he never went farther north than Hamburg or Lübeck, or farther south than Carlsbad. In a similarly confined way, his east-west range stretched from Dresden in the East to Kassel in the West. He lived as well in Lüneburg, Weimar and Leipzig where he gained the position as Director of Church Music and organist at the Thomas-church, in 1723. In this city he lived until his death. During his first three years in Leipzig, Bach produced a large number of new cantatas, sometimes at the rate of one a week to meet his future needs for the regular Sunday and feast-day services.
Bach was a great master of classic music, as of the baroque in particular. He taught many composers, organists and pianists. Four sons out of his 20 children of two marriages became excellent composers. As important as Bach's influence on theory and practice of the development of the art of music and its science was, the more important became his compositions which still influence the present.
