German Composer, the Great Synthesizer of Baroque Music
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a German composer of a musical family who spent most of his life as a church music director and court musician, composing a vast body of cantatas, fugues, and organ works and raising the contrapuntal technique of polyphony to an unprecedented precision, honored by later ages as "the great synthesizer of Baroque music." In his lifetime his fame was in fact largely confined to organ performance and church music, and after his death his renown fell silent for nearly a century, until rediscovered and promoted in the 19th century by composers such as Mendelssohn, when the profound value of his work was widely recognized — and he came to be acknowledged as one of the most important composers in Western musical history.
The young Bach once walked nearly four hundred kilometers just to hear the then-famous organ master Buxtehude play in Lübeck, taking only four weeks’ leave but lingering for months in his absorption in learning, and nearly losing his church post for the long unauthorized absence — an episode that vividly shows his near-obsessive drive for music.
After Bach’s death his work was for a time seen as outdated Baroque style and gradually forgotten, until in 1829 Mendelssohn conducted a revival of his St. Matthew Passion — a performance that stunned the European music world of the time and set off a "Bach revival," and people came anew to recognize the profound artistic value in his work.
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