(6 of 10)
Although scores of books have been written about Bach and his family, the underlying personality of the man is known only in the most shadowy way. It is, in fact, almost as much an esthetic miracle that this foursquare German burgher could produce the greatest music in history as it is that a glover's son from Stratford could write plays that are the glory of the English language. Bach was born in 1685 at Eisenach, a town on the edge of the Thuringian Forest that is still dominated by the Wartburg, the medieval castle where Luther translated the New Testament into German in 1522. Bach's ancestors had provided the region with town bandsmen, organists and composers for generations; eventually the word Bach, which means "brook" in German, became a synonym for "musician." Sebastian studied with his violinist father until he was orphaned at the age of nine, then continued with an older brother who was an organist. After solid secondary schooling—the classics and catechism—and some experience as a choirboy, he set out at 18 on a career as a journeyman musician.
The next decade formed the patterns that were to run throughout his life. In various Thuringian posts, he repeatedly got into squabbles with his civic and clerical bosses, which his temper and stubbornness did nothing to smooth over. He won little or no attention for his compositions, and even had to shrug off complaints that his organ playing confused congregations with "surprising variations and irrelevant ornaments." He was plagued by incompetent musicians; one of them once attacked him with a stick after Bach called him "a nanny-goat bassoonist." But Bach persisted in his study of the best European composers, particularly such Italians as Vivaldi and Corelli, whom he valued for their clarity and economy of line. In 1707, he married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach, the first of his two wives, and in 1708 fathered the first of his 20 children (of whom ten died in childhood).
At 23, Bach joined the court of Weimar's Duke Wilhelm Ernst as violinist and organist. There he flourished for nine years as an organ virtuoso and composed his first great works for the instrument: Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, Passacaglia in C Minor. As his fame began to spread through Germany, towns and churches invited him to test new organs—always an occasion for wining, dining and bravura performing. France's leading organist, Jean Louis Marchand, once ducked out of Dresden rather than answer a challenge to a musical duel with Bach. When Bach played, reported one witness, "his feet flew over the pedals as though they had wings, and powerful sounds roared like thunder through the church." Bach described his own technique with so much humility that it may actually have been irony: "You only have to hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself."