Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) spent most of his career as a church organist and cantor in Lutheran Germany, churning out cantatas at a pace that seems impossible in retrospect — roughly 300 survive, and he wrote one nearly every week for years. He was not famous in his own time as a composer; he was known as an organist. The music we revere was largely forgotten for nearly a century after his death.

Bach's architecture is what separates him. He built counterpoint the way an engineer builds a bridge — every voice load-bearing, every resolution purposeful. The Well-Tempered Clavier was a demonstration project for equal temperament tuning, but it became something else: 48 preludes and fugues that map the full emotional range of Western harmony. The Goldberg Variations do something similar — 30 variations on a bass line that never stops being recognizable even as it becomes unrecognizable.

The St. Matthew Passion and Mass in B Minor represent the summit: choral architecture on a scale that wouldn't be attempted again until Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Brahms's German Requiem. Brahms edited Bach's complete works. Beethoven learned from the Well-Tempered Clavier as a child. Pärt built an entire compositional system (tintinnabuli) as a response to Bach's polyphony.

StyleBaroque counterpoint at its apex. Dense fugal writing, da capo aria forms, elaborate ornamentation, basso continuo. Emotionally serious, architecturally rigorous, spiritually ambitious. Everything is functional; nothing is decorative.

Listen: Start with the Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould, 1981 recording). Then the Cello Suites — six of them, pick No. 1 in G major and let it loop.