Music and Worship: Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time, was born into a family of musicians in 1685 – over 70 musicians surnamed Bach worked in Germany in the 1600s and 1700s. Two of his 20(!) children, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, became important composers themselves.

J. S. Bach was sometimes dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned in his later years – but it was not long after his death in 1750 that the full worth of his music came to be recognised. He was in fact a model musician: nothing that he wrote was second-rate or shoddy. Composing music did not come effortlessly to him, but through sheer dedication and hard work.

One of Bach’s best-known pieces is ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’. Although it is sometimes sung as an anthem, it was originally part of a longer work with German text, Cantata No. 147. In all, Bach wrote over 200 church cantatas for performance at Leipzig, where he was musical director.

Today we sometimes hear ‘Jesu, joy’ sung by a choir with organ accompaniment, but the original had an orchestra, with oboes and violins playing the opening melody. The piece has also been arranged as an organ voluntary.

More than 250 years after his death, Bach remains the finest and probably the favourite composer for the organ. His skill as a player was legendary, and he had a phenomenal gift for improvising music.

Bach was a most devout believer, and much of his greatest music was his response to the Christian message – and indeed it is a means by which our response to this message can still be heightened. We occasionally sing his arrangements of old German chorales – one is ‘All glory, laud and honour’, another ‘O sacred head, surrounded’ – and perhaps at such times we feel something of the conviction and the power of his music. ‘O sacred head’ comes from his dramatic setting of St Matthew’s account of the Passion (the St Matthew Passion).

The early eighteenth-century mind-set was very different from ours. So we may, for example, find Bach’s love of symbolism and numerology rather quaint. In some of his music he spelled out his own name B A C H in the notes B flat A C B natural (Germans refer to B flat as B and B natural as H). The number ‘14’ fascinated him (B = 2, A = 1, C = 3, H = 8; so BACH = 14). In one of his Easter organ pieces, every phrase starts with a rising interval to bring alive to us the power of the Resurrection.