"I had to work hard" - thus said the established court musician, looking back on his early years. He certainly never had it easy, at least not in the conventional sense, for at the age of nine he was already orphaned and was soon earning his keep as a chorister at a boarding school in Lüneburg. And when he took on his first church post in the Thuringian town of Arnstadt, he was still so poor that he had to travel the entire distance to Lübeck "on Shank's pony" in order to hear the aging Buxtehude at the organ, and also perhaps with a view to becoming his successor at the Marienkirche (which came to nothing because of Buxtehude's daughter, who had to be taken on along with the job). But on another level, in spite of all outward limitations, he was perfectly equipped to lead a truly satisfying life and to produce an even more satisfying body of works.

Here he was aided by a robust constitution and a deeply engrained protestant faith that was very much a part of his daily life. Twenty children born of two marriages testify to the one, his remarkably profuse catalogue of sacred music to the other. This latter includes the wide-ranging field of organ music.

But he was also aided by a sense of his own worth that matched his capabilities and by his strong desire for advancement. It is true that he did not have the pan-European ambitions of Handel, born in the same year and in the same country as himself (though Bach's youngest son, Johann Christian, would later walk in Handel's path). But a man like Bach did not need to travel to Italy in order to assimilate the Italian style; for him it was enough to study the 12 concertos by the prolific Venetian composer Vivaldi, which had recently been published as Op. 3, half of which he transcribed for different instruments for his own purposes. He did not need to journey to Paris to get to know the magnificent court music of Versailles. It was sufficient to pay a flying visit to nearby Celle, where the music of Lully was played - and already the seeds were sown for the orchestral suites written later in Cöthen.

He was further aided by his astonishing powers of concentration. Imagine: his most complex musical tapestries were produced in a boarding school with a constant hullabaloo that must have mingled with the sounds of any sort of rehearsal. And in the cantor's living quarters there were always small children crying or demanding to be taken on to Papa's knee. And in the midst of it all, probably more abstracted than stoical, the musical Father-of-All!

One simply has to marvel at Bach the tactician. When he auditioned for his second organ position in the imperial free city of Mühlhausen, he so fascinated the selection committee that they were quite willing to overlook the fact that the terms stated by the young man were considerably higher than the salary of his predecessor - and that after years of service. Here his ability to produce imaginative and original improvisations on the protestant hymns stood him in good stead. For a minister who had to sing, and harder still, listen to the same gradual hymns (the chorales prescribed for the appropriate Sunday of the church year) year in, year out, a fountain of inspiration on the organ bench was a joy, a duffer who played the endlessly recurring melodies above the same harmonies and accompaniments every time was torture!

Bach was not out to get rich, but he adopted the unspoken standpoint "good money for good work." And when it came to his art, he would abase himself before no man. It is well known that Frederick II of Prussia liked to challenge his contemporaries intellectually, even literary figures such as Voltaire, or philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the famous composer. Wishing to put the father of his court harpsichordist, Carl Philipp Emanuel, to the test, he invited Bach - who had come to see his first grandchild - to play in his almost completed pleasure palace, Sanssouci. The "thema regium" proposed ad hoc by the king as a fugue subject was very complicated and may have been slipped to the monarch by professionals. Bach declared frankly that it was unsuitable for improvisation, but more than made up for this with another virtuosic feat. However, back in Leipzig he then developed the "royal theme" in various ways, even a six-part fugue, the culmination of Das musikalische Opfer, which he then sent to Frederick in Potsdam. A man like Bach does things properly.

Since his time as a singer at the Ritteracademie in Lüneburg he had cultivated the French language, in which he liked to clothe the dedication of his works; he also carried a sword which he occasionally chose to draw later in small Thuringian towns. He was irascible all his life. If his musical judgement was not accepted, he could even be rude. When the honest citizens of Arnstadt heard him play in church once more after he visited Buxtehude in Lübeck, they protested at his new way of accompanying the congregational singing. Sometimes he added free interludes between the verses, sometimes the cantus firmus (the chorale-like prescribed melody) appeared in the tenor or even the bass, sometimes he even changed the key. For such a service the congregation needed not a hymnbook, but a timetable. When he was taken to task and admonished, Bach was defiant. He immediately performed his duties "as prescribed" and put out feelers for a new post. At least he would not be married in Arnstadt; Mühlhausen beckoned already.

The heights of his middle-class prosperity were the years in Cöthen and Leipzig. In Cöthen one could even say he knew real affluence. The absolute dream conditions of this job would have kept him there until the end of his days - he earned as much as the master of ceremonies and lived in the palace itself - had his amiable prince not decided to marry. And an "amusa," as Bach put it, into the bargain. As soon as music began to take a back seat at Cöthen, Bach moved to Leipzig. The new position promised real power. He was director not only of the city's church music, but of its entire musical life. In order to have his hands free for this immense undertaking, our categorical realist hired assistants for tedious duties such as teaching Latin and Religion.

Bach was sometimes quick-tempered, but in the long term he was also a strategist. This had shown itself once before. The Duke of Weimar had unjustly passed over the self-confident musician in choosing the successor to the court Kapellmeister; Bach at once decided to leave and applied for the position at Cöthen. The angry duke then had him thrown into prison. Bach took this with perfect tranquillity, and calmly went on his Orgelbüchlein while he was behind bars. For he knew that Prince Leopold of Cöthen would take care of things at a higher level - between friends, as it were. And he was right.

In Leipzig, Bach had big plans: having moved in stages from the church in Thuringia to the courts of Weimar and Cöthen, he now saw his chance to embark on large-scale oratorios. To be able to do this, he needed first to amass an ample supply of church cantatas. And so in his early days at Leipzig he immediately set down on paper five complete yearly cycles. Unfortunately, there was a great deal of friction in Leipzig too. Two parties formed within the city council. One demanded that Bach pursue his trivial daily duties and be an exemplary master to his pupils at the Thomasschule, instead of pursuing his lofty ambitions as a composer. The other treasured the brilliant cantor and director of music and took pride in the sparkle he gave to the musical life of the city, especially as he also ran the Collegium musicum established by Telemann and attracted the young university students to take part. Bach safeguarded himself by composing Catholic Masses for August the Strong, in return for which he was named court composer - a good argument against the "schoolmaster" party.

And when the quarrelling increased, he withdrew behind his own four walls, and wrote works dedicated entirely to his Creator and his art. As a result the keystone of western counterpoint, Die Kunst der Fuge, does not even indicate a possible scoring!

As a performer Bach was first and foremost an organist. The "queen of instruments" perfectly met the requirements of his now habitual polyphony (usually in four parts). His performance on the organ bench was a direct physical experience, rather like a sensitive motorist today, whose entire body is aware of road and vehicle. To such an organist the pedals present not an added difficulty but a welcome support for the almost suspended torso with its four simultaneously moving extremities: it is the bass, after all, that provides the foundation.

Anyone who wishes to penetrate Bach's compositional apparatus must study his chorale settings. Here there is a clear distinction between the four voices. The soprano, as cantus firmus, is virtually divinely ordained and is therefore respected as the highest authority; it must be immediately recognisable. The bass is the most substantial thing man can set against this authority. A good bass makes good music! Like the outer voices, the middle voices are diametrically opposed. The tenor (usually extremely high in Bach's works, largely because of the rise in concert pitch over the years) has, as it were, artistic licence and indulges in the most wonderful escapades; the alto, on the other hand, has to make do with what remains of the harmony. One can say without exaggeration that in Bach the alto has a truly humble position!

Again, anyone who wishes to penetrate the wealth of Bach's musical imagination and at the same time observe the long-term influence he exerted on future generations of composers, should turn to the organ preludes, or better still the preludes of Das wohltemperierte Klavier. The latter inspired the preludes of Chopin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, the studies of Liszt and, as late as 1950, the Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich!

At the root of it all is singing, which had its beginnings in the family tradition. Not only was the Bach family an extensive one, but over the generations it had repeatedly produced musicians in the service of the courts, the church and the cities. When they met once a year in a town in Thuringia, they immediately struck up a chorale upon which they improvised in four parts. But to these were quickly added other melodies with rather different texts (even down to street ballads, the popular hits of those days); everyone enjoyed themselves, not just the singers - the Bach quodlibet ("whatever pleases") was the symbol of a concord between "serious" and "light" music that would be unimaginable today.

Music lovers are continually surprised by the fact that Bach was first engaged not as an organist, but as a violinist. This was in the prince's Kapelle at Weimar, where we later meet him once more as court organist. One of the many benefits of his childhood training stems from the fact that his father, then a civic musician in Eisenach, had to play all the instruments that were in vogue, and naturally taught the most important of these to his children also. The most beautiful products of this instrumental universality are the Brandenburg Concertos, the richest concerti grossi, in terms of timbre and nuance, ever written.

Bach has often been accused (and singers do this secretly even today) of treating the human voice as though it were an instrument and writing against its nature. In fact, Bach so perfected the contrapuntal equality of every voice that, for instance, the tenor part in the aria "Frohe Hirten, eilet" from the Weihnachtsoratorium could be exchanged without any difficulty with the obligato flute part with which it competes or, to stay with the image, "runs the race." For a long time in his own country, and even today elsewhere in Europe - the further south and west one travels, the more persistently so - Bach was accused of writing outmoded, bombastic, "Gothic" music. Debussy called him the "dear God of music," but at the same time wished that he had had a publisher who would have curbed him and his ceaseless composing, because he found the fugues lacking in soul and content. He had a famous forerunner, who was in a sense a countryman of his since he was a disciple of the French Romantic: Franz Liszt. He called Bach's fugues, in short, "skeletons, nothing but skeletons."

Any portrait of Bach would be incomplete without an examination of the metaphysical aspects. This man was sensual and religious, in love with life and yet familiar with death (he had to bury a young wife and 13 children who had not even reached their tenth year). He was equipped as no other to write the most thrilling and yet comforting passion music. Yet Bach was neither a hypocrite nor a narrow-minded fanatic. In Arnstadt it was discovered that he went to the tavern during the long sermons (these could last up to an hour; the church nap dates from this time); Bach was generous enough not to bring up the quality of some of the sermons, but promised to do better in future. As a confirmed Lutheran he was also theologically well informed (some churchmen cited him as the "fifth evangelist," which is hardly an exaggeration considering the extensive influence of his musical message), yet he had no hesitation in moving to the protestant court at Cöthen (where he wrote little or no church music) nor in writing Latin Masses for the court of Dresden, converted to Catholicism for purely political reasons. To the first of these proofs of his rather shifting but relaxed religiosity we owe the abundance of his orchestral works and concertos, to the second a marvel such as the B Minor Mass. Probably the most inalienable property of his faith was the protestant chorale. It accompanied him throughout his life - in his cantatas and oratorios, at his auditions, and in the wonderfully rich chorale preludes and partitas. Even on his deathbed he held fast to it, making of it a bridge to the far shore. Now blind as a result of two bungled eye operations, the cantor dictated to his son-in-law his visiting card for his God: "Now as I approach Thy throne." And into this he subtly worked his own monogram...

The cantor of the Thomaskirche survived a great deal. That he is still "among us" today is due in the first place to two of the four sons who became composers and teachers of music. The younger of the two from the first marriage, Carl Philipp Emanuel, moved via Rheinsberg to the Prussian court and later, as successor to his godfather Telemann, to Hamburg; he had a strong influence on Haydn and Mozart. The latter was influenced still more by the younger of the two from the second marriage, Johann Christian, the enfant terrible of the family: he lived abroad in Milan, Paris and London, became a Catholic and wrote operas. The father, however, was quickly forgotten, as interest in polyphony dwindled - until the young Mendelssohn unearthed the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, a century after its first performance in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. The Bach Renaissance was about to begin. The Bach Society, the Complete Bach Edition, regular performances by the choir of the Thomaskirche of motets, cantatas and oratorios, soon even concert tours and - thanks to cantor Karl Straube - broadcasts of the cantatas on the radio every Sunday.
And if further proof is needed of the vitality of Bach's music, music that is bound to two worlds - past and present - and mediates between the two, than perhaps it lies in the fact that under the cantors Ramin, Tietze, Thomas and Mauersberger "his" choir (founded, incidentally, in 1212) was to survive the two German dictatorships of the twentieth century. Finally the men's voices sing in unison "Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wäre" (And if the world were filled by the devil) in the truly valiant Reformation cantata of Sebastian the Great!

Christoph Rueger