Johann Sebastian Bach: the summit of Baroque counterpoint

A name that changes everything

Some composers belong to their era. Others, despite having lived in a specific time and place, seem to belong to all of them. Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the latter — though it took the world nearly a century to fully discover him.

Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a small town in Thuringia, in what is now central Germany. He died in 1750 in Leipzig, where he had spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as Kantor — music director — of the Church of St. Thomas. Between those two dates unfolded a life that looked, from the outside, rather ordinary: a musical civil servant employed by churches and courts, married twice, father of twenty children — half of whom survived — known in his day more as an extraordinary organist than as a composer.

And yet within that ordinary life accumulated something the history of music had never seen before and has not seen since: the perfect synthesis of everything Western music had learned to do.

The context: Germany, the Baroque, and music in the service of God

To understand Bach, you need to understand the world he lived in. The Germany of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a patchwork of small states governed by princes, bishops, and free cities. Music was not an autonomous art — as it would later become in Romanticism — but a service. It was written for weddings, funerals, court celebrations, and above all for Lutheran worship.

The Protestant Reformation had given music a central role in the liturgy: the Lutheran chorale — those congregational melodies sung together by the whole community — was the heart of the Sunday service. Bach grew up within that tradition. Music was not entertainment; it was prayer, theology in sound, a way of drawing closer to God. That conviction runs through his entire output, even in pieces that seem entirely secular.

In Thuringia, the Bach family name was synonymous with musician. For several generations, the Bachs had held positions as organists, Kantors, and music directors in the region's churches and courts. Johann Sebastian grew up in that environment, learned the craft from childhood, and practiced it with a dedication that borders on the superhuman: during his Leipzig years he composed, on average, a complete cantata — for soloists, choir, and orchestra — every week, to be performed the following Sunday.

Counterpoint: the art of voices that think

If there is one technique that defines Bach, it is counterpoint. The word comes from the Latin punctus contra punctum: note against note. It is the art of making several independent melodies sound simultaneously so that, when combined, they produce a coherent and expressive harmony.

Bach did not invent counterpoint. Western music had been developing this technique for centuries, from the polyphony of Notre-Dame to Josquin des Prez. What Bach did was take it to a level of complexity and beauty that no one before him had achieved.

The most demanding form of counterpoint is the fugue. A fugue begins with a single voice stating a theme — called the subject. Then a second voice enters with the same theme, while the first continues with a complementary melody. Then a third voice, a fourth. The voices imitate, answer, and interweave with one another. The composer must simultaneously control all those lines, ensuring that each makes sense on its own and that together they produce harmony. It is like writing several conversations at once, each with its own internal logic, and having them, when stacked on top of each other, remain perfectly coherent.

Bach wrote fugues for organ, harpsichord, chamber ensembles, and choir. His collection The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge), left unfinished at his death, is the most systematic exploration ever made of the genre's possibilities: a single theme transformed, inverted, augmented, diminished, combined with other themes, placed in mirror image. It is, simultaneously, a technical treatise and a musical masterpiece.

The great works: a universe unto itself

Bach's output is so vast that summarizing it without doing it an injustice is nearly impossible. But there are territories that every music lover should know.

The cantatas are perhaps the heart of his work. Bach composed over two hundred for the Lutheran service, each structured around arias, recitatives, choruses, and chorales. They are small sacred operas — dramatic works that move from anguish to consolation, from darkness to light, in the space of twenty or thirty minutes. Cantata BWV 82, Ich habe genug (I Have Enough), for bass solo, is one of the most profound meditations on death and acceptance that Western music has ever produced.

The Passions carry that dramatic scale even further. The St. Matthew Passion (Matthäuspassion) is Bach's artistic ambition taken to the extreme: an oratorio for two choirs, two orchestras, two organs, and multiple soloists that tells the story of Christ's suffering and death. It is a work of nearly three hours that functions simultaneously as dramatic narrative, theological meditation, and the pinnacle of choral art.

The Cello Suites reveal another side of Bach: the composer who can take an instrument designed to accompany and turn it into something fully self-sufficient. Six suites for a solo instrument that normally carries no more than one voice: Bach writes melody, harmony, implied counterpoint, and formal structure using only four strings and a bow. These are works that any string player studies today and that, despite having been written around 1720, sound as though they could belong to any century.

The Goldberg Variations are Bach's most celebrated intellectual experiment for keyboard: an aria theme followed by thirty variations, each with its own character, its own tempo, its own emotional world. Variation 25, in the minor mode, is of such naked sorrow that it seems impossible it could belong to the same universe as Variation 1, which is pure energy.

And The Well-Tempered Clavier, which we touched on in the previous post: forty-eight preludes and fugues in all twenty-four keys, proving that with equal temperament the composer could travel anywhere in the harmonic universe.

Bach as organist: the sound that shook churches

Something must be said about Bach as a performer, because in his own time that was the source of his fame: he was the most extraordinary organist in Germany, perhaps in all of Europe.

The German Baroque organ was an instrument of impressive mechanical complexity: stacked manual keyboards, a pedalboard played with the feet, hundreds of pipes of different materials and lengths, stops that the organist activated to blend different tonal colors. Playing the organ with Bach's mastery required a physical and mental coordination that surpasses what most musicians can imagine.

It is recounted — with some historical basis — that Bach walked more than four hundred kilometers to hear the organist Dieterich Buxtehude in Lübeck, and that instead of staying the planned month he stayed four. A master recognizes a master. What Bach learned from Buxtehude — the fantasy, the improvisation, the dramatic sense — he transformed into something entirely his own.

His toccatas and fugues for organ are among the most recognizable pages in the entire history of music. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is the piece most people associate with Bach's name — though it is, in many respects, one of the most atypical works in his output.

The rediscovery: Mendelssohn and the return of Bach

Bach died in 1750. His work did not disappear, but it was pushed aside: his sons, who were also composers, adapted to the new galant and Classical style the world was beginning to prefer. Johann Sebastian was regarded as a master of the past — admirable but old-fashioned.

It was Felix Mendelssohn who, in 1829, conducted the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion since Bach's death. Mendelssohn was twenty years old. The concert in Berlin was a cultural event: the audience discovered that it had been ignoring, for nearly a century, a work of a depth that no living composer could match.

The Bachian revival of the nineteenth century permanently changed the way the West understands its musical canon. Bach became the reference point, the touchstone, the composer against whom all others are measured. Brahms studied him obsessively. Schumann analyzed him. In the twentieth century, musicians as different as Glenn Gould, Pablo Casals, and Keith Jarrett devoted their careers, in part, to exploring his work.

The synthesis no one else achieved

There is something worth noting about Bach's position in history: he arrived at exactly the right moment. The Baroque had spent 150 years developing an enormous range of forms, techniques, and musical languages: Renaissance counterpoint, Italian opera, the concerto grosso, the French suite, the German prelude, the cantata, the oratorio. Bach knew them all — had studied, copied, and absorbed them. And he synthesized them into a language of his own that is none of them, yet contains all of them.

It is as though someone had learned every language of a region and then written in a new language that encompassed them all. Bach's music sounds like Bach, not like anyone else. And at the same time it is the most complete summary that exists of what Western music had learned to do by 1750.

When the Baroque era ends with his death, it does not end as an exhaustion — as if the style had reached its limit — but as a point of fullness. The Classicism that follows, with Haydn and Mozart, starts from a different place, with different questions. But it always knows that behind it stands something it cannot ignore: that musician from Thuringia who resolved all the problems his predecessors had left open, and in doing so left open new ones that we have not yet finished exploring.

How is it possible that music written three hundred years ago for a Lutheran church in Leipzig can still stop you in your tracks and ask you to be still and listen? The answer may lie in another question: what happens when a musical language reaches its most perfect form? Does it close — or does it open? The music of Handel that awaits us next will offer, paradoxically, another answer to the same question: that of an art that sought not intimate perfection but shared grandeur, not the interior cathedral but the packed auditorium.

Nature gave man the natural scale; music gave him equal temperament.

Listening suggestions

• Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 — Bach: the best entry point to his world; two minutes that contain everything essential
• Aria from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 — Glenn Gould's 1981 recording: listen to the final version he recorded shortly before his death and compare it with his youthful 1955 version
• Cantata BWV 82, «Ich habe genug» — for bass and string orchestra: one of the most intimate and profound works in the entire history of music
• St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244 — the opening chorus «Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen»: you do not need to understand German to understand what is happening