Name	Smalininkai
Nickname	Smolnis
Settlement type	City
Pushpin map	Lithuania
Pushpin label position
Pushpin map caption	Location of Smalininkai
Coordinates display	inline,title
Coordinates type	region:LT_type:city(600)
Subdivision type	Country
Subdivision name
Subdivision type1	Ethnographic region
Subdivision name1	Samogitia
Subdivision type2	County
Subdivision name2	Tauragė County
Subdivision type3	Municipality
Subdivision name3	Jurbarkas district municipality
Subdivision type4	Eldership
Subdivision name4	Smalininkai eldership
Subdivision type6	Capital of
Subdivision name6	Smalininkai eldership
Established date	15th century
Established title	First mentioned
Established date2	1945
Established title2	Granted city rights
Population total	621
Population as of	2007
Timezone	EET
Utc offset	+2
Timezone dst	EEST
Utc offset dst	+3

Smalininkai () is a small city in Lithuania. It is situated in the former samogitian part of Memelland on the right-hand shore of the Neman River, west from Jurbarkas. It was part of German East Prussia and was called Schmalleningken. Between 1923 - 1939 and since the World War II it is part of Lithuania.

Name

The name describes a place of tar and pitch burners ("smala": tar, pitch; -ingken: village).

History

Since 1422 (Treaty of Melno) Schmalleningken was a border-village at the Lithuanian-German customs frontier. 1792 it was appointed to a market town. 1845 the village became a parish and 1878 a church was built. 1902 a light railway was built from Pogegen to Schmalleningken. The village had in 1925 1,741 inhabitants and was incorporated into the Landkreis Tilsit-Ragnit in 1939.

Literature

Kurschat, Heinrich A.: Das Buch vom Memelland, Siebert Oldenburg 1968

Category:Cities in Lithuania Category:Cities in Tauragė County

banknote, 1997]] Claude-Achille Debussy () (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy is among the most important of all French composers, and a central figure in European music of the turn of the 20th century. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903.

His music is noted for its sensory component and for not often forming around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to 20th century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

Biography

Early life and studies

Claude Debussy was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862, the eldest of five children. His father, Manuel-Achille Debussy, owned a shop where he sold china and crockery, and his mother, Victorine Manoury Debussy, was a seamstress. The family moved to Paris in 1867, but in 1870 Debussy's pregnant mother sought refuge from the Franco-Prussian war with a paternal aunt of Claude's in Cannes. Debussy began piano lessons there at the age of seven years with an elderly Italian violinist named Cerutti; his lessons were paid for by his aunt. In 1871 he drew the attention of Marie Mauté de Fleurville, who claimed to have been a pupil of Frédéric Chopin. Debussy always believed her, although there is no independent evidence of her claim. His talents soon became evident, and in 1872, at age ten, Debussy entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he spent eleven years. During his time there he studied composition with Ernest Guiraud, music history/theory with Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, harmony with Émile Durand, piano with Antoine François Marmontel, organ with César Franck, and solfège with Albert Lavignac, as well as other significant figures of the era. He also became a lifelong friend of fellow student and noted pianist Isidor Philipp. After Debussy's death, many pianists sought out Philipp for advice on playing his music.

From the start, though clearly talented, Debussy was argumentative and experimental. He challenged the rigid teaching of the Academy, favoring instead dissonances and intervals that were frowned upon. Like Georges Bizet, he was a brilliant pianist and an outstanding sight reader, who could have had a professional career as such had he so wished. The pieces he played in public at this time included sonata movements by Beethoven, Schumann and Weber; and Chopin – the Ballade No. 2, a movement from the Piano Concerto No. 1, and the Allegro de concert, a relatively little-known piece but one requiring an advanced technique (it was originally intended to be the opening movement of a third piano concerto).

During the summers of 1880, 1881, and 1882 Debussy accompanied the wealthy patroness of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Nadezhda von Meck, as she traveled with her family in Europe and Russia. The young composer's many musical activities during these vacations included playing four-hand pieces with von Meck at the piano, giving her children music lessons, and performing in private concerts with some of her musician friends. Despite von Meck's closeness with Tchaikovsky, the Russian master appears to have had little or no effect on Debussy. In September 1880 she sent Debussy's Danse bohémienne for Tchaikovsky's perusal. A month later Tchaikovsky wrote back to her, "It is a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity". Debussy did not publish the piece; the manuscript remained in the von Meck family, and it was sold to B. Schott's Sohne in Mainz, and published by them in 1932. A greater influence was Debussy's close friendship with Madame Vasnier, a singer he met when he began working as an accompanist to earn some money. She and her husband gave Debussy emotional and professional support. Monsieur Vasnier introduced him to the writings of influential French writers of the time, which gave rise to his first songs, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine, the son-in-law of his former teacher, Mme. Mauté de Fleurville. in Rome, 1885, at centre in the white jacket]] As the winner of the 1884 Prix de Rome with his composition L'enfant prodigue, Debussy received a scholarship to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which included a four-year residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, to further his studies (1885–1887). According to letters to Madame Vasnier, perhaps in part designed to gain her sympathy, he found the artistic atmosphere stifling, the company boorish, the food bad, and the monastic quarters "abominable". Neither did he delight in the pleasures of the "Eternal City", finding the Italian opera of Donizetti and Verdi not to his taste. Debussy was often depressed and unable to compose, but he was inspired by Franz Liszt, whose command of the keyboard he found admirable.

In June 1885, Debussy wrote of his desire to follow his own way, saying, "I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamoured of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas."

Debussy finally composed four pieces that were sent to the Academy: the symphonic ode Zuleima, based on a text by Heinrich Heine; the orchestral piece Printemps; the cantata La damoiselle élue (1887–1888), which was criticized by the Academy as "bizarre"; and the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra. The third piece was the first in which stylistic features of Debussy's later style emerged. The fourth piece was heavily based on César Franck's music and Debussy withdrew it. The Academy chided him for "courting the unusual" and hoped for something better from the gifted student. Even though Debussy's works showed the influence of Jules Massenet, Massenet concluded, "He is an enigma."

During his visits to Bayreuth in 1888-9, Debussy was exposed to Wagnerian opera, which had a lasting impact on his work. Richard Wagner had died in 1883 and the cult of Wagnerism was still in full swing. Debussy, like many young musicians of the time, responded positively to Wagner's sensuousness, mastery of form, and striking harmonies. Wagner's extroverted emotionalism was not to be Debussy's way , but the German composer's influence is evident in La damoiselle élue and the 1889 piece Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire. Other songs of the period, notably the settings of Verlaine —Ariettes oubliées, Trois mélodies, and Fêtes galantes— are all in a more capricious style. Around this time, Debussy met Erik Satie, who proved a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition and to naming his pieces. During this period, both musicians were bohemians enjoying the same cafe society and struggling to stay afloat financially.

In 1889, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Debussy heard Javanese gamelan music. Although direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been identified in any of Debussy's compositions, the equal-tempered pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward.

Private life

Debussy's private life was often turbulent. At the age of 18 he began an eight-year affair with Blanche Vasnier, wife of a wealthy Parisian lawyer. The relationship eventually faltered following his winning of the Prix de Rome and obligatory incarceration in the eponymous city.

On his permanent return to Paris and his parents' home on the av. de Berlin in 1889, he began a tempestuous nine-year relationship with Gabrielle ('Gaby') Dupont, a tailor's daughter from Lisieux, with whom he later cohabited on the Rue Gustave Doré. During this time he also had an affair with the singer Thérèse Roger, to whom he was briefly engaged.

He left Dupont for her friend Rosalie ('Lily') Texier, a fashion model whom he married in 1899. Although Texier was affectionate, practical, straightforward, and well liked by Debussy's friends and associates, he became increasingly irritated by her intellectual limitations and lack of musical sensitivity. In 1904, Debussy was introduced to Emma Bardac, wife of Parisian banker Sigismond Bardac, by her son Raoul, one of his students. In contrast to Texier, Bardac was a sophisticate, a brilliant conversationalist, and an accomplished singer. After despatching Lilly back to her father's home in Bichain on 15 July 1904, Debussy secretly took Bardac to Jersey for a holiday. On their return to France, Debussy wrote to Texier from Dieppe on 11 August, informing her their marriage was over, but still making no mention of Bardac. On 14 October, five days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Texier attempted suicide, shooting herself in the chest while standing in the Place de la Concorde; she survived, although the bullet remained lodged in her vertebrae until her death in 1932. The ensuing scandal was to alienate Debussy from many of his friends, whilst Bardac was disowned by her family.

In the spring of 1905, finding the hostility towards them intolerable, Debussy and Bardac (now pregnant) fled to England, via Jersey, settling at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne from 24 July to 30 August 1905, where Debussy was to correct proofs to his symphonic suite La mer, Their daughter (and the composer's only child), Claude-Emma, was born there on 30 October.

The application of the term "impressionist" to Debussy and the music he influenced is a matter of intense debate within academic circles. One side argues that the term is a misnomer, an inappropriate label which Debussy himself opposed. In a letter of 1908, he wrote "I am trying to do 'something different'--an effect of reality...what the imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term which is as poorly used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art." The opposing side argues that Debussy may have been reacting to unfavorable criticism at the time, and the negativity that critics associated with impressionism. It can be argued that he would have been pleased with application of the current definition of impressionism to his music.

List of works

List of compositions by Claude Debussy by category.

List of compositions by Claude Debussy by Lesure Numbers

Early works

, 1893]] Beginning in the 1890s, Debussy developed his own musical language largely independent of Wagner's style, colored in part from the dreamy, sometimes morbid romanticism of the Symbolist Movement. Debussy became a frequent participant at Stéphane Mallarmé's Symbolist gatherings, where Wagnerism dominated the discussion. In contrast to the enormous works of Wagner and other late-romantic composers, however, around this time Debussy chose to write in smaller, more accessible forms. The Deux Arabesques is an example of one of Debussy's earliest works, already developing his musical language. Suite bergamasque (1890) recalls rococo decorousness with a modern cynicism and puzzlement. This suite contains one of Debussy's most popular pieces, Clair de Lune. Debussy's String Quartet in G minor (1893) paved the way for his later, more daring harmonic exploration. In this work he utilized the Phrygian mode as well as less standard scales, such as the whole-tone, which creates a sense of floating, ethereal harmony. Debussy was beginning to employ a single, continuous theme and break away from the traditional A-B-A form, with its restatements and amplifications, which had been a mainstay of classical music since Haydn.

Influenced by Mallarmé, Debussy wrote one of his most famous works, the revolutionary Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, truly original in form and execution. In contrast to the large orchestras so favoured by late-romanticism, Debussy wrote this piece for a smaller ensemble, emphasizing instrumental colour and timbre. Despite Mallarmé himself, and colleague and friend Paul Dukas having been impressed by the piece, it was controversial at its premiere. Prélude subsequently placed Debussy into the spotlight as one of the leading composers of the era.

Middle works

The three Nocturnes (1899), include characteristic studies in veiled harmony and texture as demonstrated in Nuages; exuberance in Fêtes; and whole-tones in Sirènes. Contrasting sharply with Wagnerian opera, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande premiered in 1902, after ten years of work. It would be his only complete opera. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the opera proved to be an immediate success and immensely influential to younger French composers, including Maurice Ravel. These works brought a fluidity of rhythm and colour quite new to Western music.

La mer (1903–1905) essays a more symphonic form, with a finale that works themes from the first movement, although the middle movement, Jeux de vagues, proceeds much less directly and with more variety of colour. Again, the reviews were sharply divided. Some critics thought the treatment to be less subtle and less mysterious than his previous works and even a step backward. Pierre Lalo complained "I neither hear, nor see, nor feel the sea". Others extolled its "power and charm", its "extraordinary verve and brilliant fantasy", and its strong colors and definite lines.

During this period Debussy wrote much for the piano. The set of pieces entitled Pour le piano (1901) utilises rich harmonies and textures which would later prove important in jazz music. His first volume of Images pour piano (1904–1905) combine harmonic innovation with poetic suggestion: Reflets dans l'eau is a musical description of rippling water; Hommage à Rameau, the second piece, is slow and yearningly nostalgic. It takes as its inspiration a melody from Jean-Philippe Rameau's Castor et Pollux.

The evocative Estampes for piano (1903) give impressions of exotic locations. Debussy came into contact with Javanese gamelan music during the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Pagodes is the directly inspired result, aiming for an evocation of the pentatonic structures employed by the Javanese music. Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1908) for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma, whom he nicknamed Chouchou. The suite recalls classicism—the opening piece Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum refers to Muzio Clementi's collection of instructional piano compositions Gradus ad Parnassum, as well as a new wave of American ragtime music. In the popular final piece of the suite, Golliwogg's Cakewalk, Debussy also pokes fun at Richard Wagner by mimicking the opening bars of Wagner's prelude to Tristan und Isolde.

The first book of Préludes (1910), twelve in total, proved to be his most successful work for piano. The Preludes are frequently compared to those of Chopin. Debussy's preludes are replete with rich, unusual and daring harmonies. They include the popular La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) and La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Engulfed Cathedral). Debussy wanted people to respond intuitively to these pieces and so he placed the titles at the end of each one in the hope that listeners would not make stereotype images as they listened.

Larger scaled works included his orchestral piece Iberia (1907), began as a work for two pianos, a triptych medley of Spanish allusions and fleeting impressions and also the music for Gabriele d'Annunzio's mystery play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911). A lush and dramatic work, written in only two months, it is remarkable in sustaining a late antique modal atmosphere that otherwise was touched only in relatively short piano pieces.

During this period, as Debussy gained more popularity, he was engaged as a conductor throughout Europe, most often performing Pelléas, La Mer, and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. He was also an occasional music critic to supplement his conducting fees and piano lessons. Debussy avoided analytical dissection and attempts to force images from music, "Let us at all costs preserve this magic peculiar to music, since of all the arts it is most susceptible to magic." He could be caustic and witty, sometimes sloppy and ill-informed. Debussy was for the most part enthusiastic about Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, worshipful of Chopin, Bach and Mozart, and found both Liszt and Beethoven geniuses who sometimes lacked "taste". He also admired the works of Charles-Valentin Alkan. Schubert and Mendelssohn fared much worse, the latter being described as a "facile and elegant notary".

Late works

Debussy's harmonies and chord progressions frequently exploit dissonances without any formal resolution. Unlike in his earlier work, he no longer hides discords in lush harmonies. The forms are far more irregular and fragmented. These chords that seemingly had no resolution were described by Debussy himself as "floating chords", and were used to set tone and mood in many of his works. The whole tone scale dominates much of Debussy's late music.

His two last volumes of works for the piano, the Études (1915) interprets similar varieties of style and texture purely as pianistic exercises and includes pieces that develop irregular form to an extreme as well as others influenced by the young Igor Stravinsky (a presence too in the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, 1915). The rarefaction of these works is a feature of the last set of songs, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), and of the Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915), though the sonata and its companions also recapture the inquisitive Verlainian classicism.

With the sonatas of 1915–1917, there is a sudden shift in the style. These works recall Debussy's earlier music, in part, but also look forward, with leaner, simpler structures. Despite the thinner textures of the Violin Sonata (1917) there remains an undeniable richness in the chords themselves. This shift parallels the movement commonly known as neo-classicism which became popular after Debussy's death. Debussy planned a set of six sonatas, but this plan was cut short by his death in 1918 so that he only completed three (cello, flute-viola-harp and violin sonatas).

The last orchestral work by Debussy, the ballet Jeux (1912) written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, contains some of his strangest harmonies and textures in a form that moves freely over its own field of motivic connection. At first Jeux was overshadowed by Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, composed in the same year as Jeux and premiered only two weeks later by the same ballet company. Decades later, composers such as Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué pointed out parallels to Anton Webern's serialism in this work. Other late stage works, including the ballets Khamma (1912) and La boîte à joujoux (1913) were left with the orchestration incomplete, and were later completed by Charles Koechlin and André Caplet, who also helped Debussy with the orchestration of Gigues (from Images pour orchestre) and Le martyre de St. Sébastien.

The second set of Préludes for piano (1913) features Debussy at his most avant-garde, where he utilizes dissonant harmonies to evoke specific moods and images. Debussy consciously gives titles to each prelude that amplify the preludes’ tonal ambiguity and dissonance. He utilizes scales such as the whole tone scale, musical modes, and the octatonic scale in his preludes that exaggerate this tonal ambiguity, making the key of each prelude almost indistinguishable at times. The second book of Preludes for piano represents Debussy’s strong interest in the indefinite and esoteric.

Although Pelléas was Debussy's only completed opera, he began several opera projects which remained unfinished, his fading concentration, increasing procrastination, and failing health perhaps the reasons. He had finished some partial musical sketches and some unpublished libretti for operas based on Poe's The Devil in the Belfry (Le diable dans le beffroi, 1902–?1912) and The Fall of the House of Usher (La chute de la maison Usher, 1908–1917) as well as considered projects for operas based on Shakespeare's As You Like It and Joseph Bedier's La Legende de Tristan.

Further plans, such as an American tour, more ballet scores, and revisions of Chopin and Bach works for re-publication, were all cut short by the outbreak of World War I and his poor health.

Mathematical structuring

Given that Debussy's music is apparently so concerned with mood and colour, one may be surprised to discover that, according to Howat, many of his greatest works appear to have been structured around mathematical models even while using an apparent classical structure such as sonata form. Howat suggests that some of Debussy's pieces can be divided into sections that reflect the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. Sometimes these divisions seem to follow the standard divisions of the overall structure. In other pieces they appear to mark out other significant features of the music. The 55 bar-long introduction to 'Dialogue du vent et la mer' in La mer, for example, breaks down into 5 sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars in length. The golden mean point of bar 34 in this structure is signalled by the introduction of the trombones, with the use of the main motif from all three movements used in the central section around that point. It can be inferred that from the Russians “Debussy acquired his taste for ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules.” Although it is not known what it is meant by this statement, one can observe in his music a careful use of orchestral, textural, and harmonic 'shading'.

Influence on later composers

Claude Debussy is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His harmonies, considered radical in his day, were influential to almost every major composer of the 20th century, especially the music of Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, Béla Bartók, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, Ned Rorem, and the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass as well as the influential Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. He also influenced many important figures in Jazz, most notably George Gershwin, Bill Evans, George Shearing, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Herbie Hancock and Jimmy Giuffre. Furthermore, he had a profound impact on contemporary soundtrack composers such as John Williams because Debussy's colorful and suggesting style translated easily into an emotional language for use in motion picture scores. In 1999, The Art of Noise released a concept album titled The Seduction of Claude Debussy. The group blended the music of Debussy with drum and bass, opera, hip hop, jazz, and narration, and described the album as "the soundtrack to a film that wasn't made about the life of Claude Debussy". In 2000, the band released Reduction, a limited-edition album composed mainly of outtakes from this album.

Leopold Stokowski, in an article, pointed out the identification of composers including Debussy with the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, providing an inspiration for non-contrapuntal music.

Media

Eponyms

Claude Debussy's name has, posthumously, been given to a number of discoveries. These include:

Debussy Heights, a heights at Ravel Peak which was discovered in 1960;

Debussy, an impact crater on Mercury which was discovered in 1969;

4492 Debussy, a main belt asteroid which was discovered in 1988.

Recordings

Debussy participated in a handful of recordings, made in 1904, with soprano Mary Garden. He also made some piano rolls for Welte Mignon in 1913.

References

Sources

Thompson, Oscar Debussy: Man and Artist, Tudor Publishing Company, 1940

Further reading

Lücke, Hendrik (2005): Mallarmé – Debussy. Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunstanschauung am Beispiel von „L'Après-midi d'un Faune“. (= Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 4). Dr. Kovac, ISBN 3-8300-1685-9.

James Ross, "Pelléas et Mélisande: The 'Nouveau Prophete'?", Crisis and Transformation: French Opera, Politics and the Press (Oxford University D.Phil. Thesis, 1998), pp. 164–208.

R.S. Parks : The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven, 1989)

R.L. Smith, ed.: Debussy Studies (Cambridge, 1997)

R. Nichols : The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, 1998)

M. Baigent : The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail (G.B 1983)

External links

Claude Debussy Catalogue chronologique

Documentary film about Claude Debussy

Music scores

Public domain scores Debussy's Scores + Audio

www.kreusch-sheet-music.net Free Scores by Debussy

Category:1862 births Category:1918 deaths Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Alumni of the Conservatoire de Paris Category:Ballet composers Category:Burials at Passy Cemetery, Paris Category:Cancer deaths in France Category:Deaths from colorectal cancer Category:French composers Category:Opera composers Category:People from Saint-Germain-en-Laye Category:People of the Edwardian era Category:Prix de Rome for composition Category:Romantic composers Category:Rosicrucians

, 1835]] Frédéric François Chopin (; Polish: Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin; 22 February or 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer, virtuoso pianist, and music teacher of French–Polish parentage. He was one of the great masters of Romantic music. He is also known as "the poet of the piano".

Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, a village in the Duchy of Warsaw. A renowned child-prodigy pianist and composer, he grew up in Warsaw and completed his musical education there. Following the Russian suppression of the Polish November 1830 Uprising, he settled in Paris as part of the Polish Great Emigration. He supported himself as a composer and piano teacher, giving few public performances. From 1837 to 1847 he carried on a relationship with the French woman writer George Sand. For most of his life, Chopin suffered from poor health; he died in Paris in 1849 at the age of 39.

The vast majority of Chopin's works are exclusively for solo piano, the most notable exceptions being his two piano concertos. His compositions are technically demanding but emphasize nuance and expressive depth. Chopin invented the musical form known as the instrumental ballade and made major innovations to the piano sonata, mazurka, waltz, nocturne, polonaise, étude, impromptu and prélude.

Life

Childhood

at Żelazowa Wola]] Chopin's father was Nicolas Chopin, a Frenchman from Lorraine who had emigrated to Poland in 1787 at the age of sixteen and had served in Poland's National Guard during the Kościuszko Uprising (1794). In France he had been baptized Nicolas but later, living in Poland, he used the Polish form of his given name, Mikołaj. He subsequently tutored children of the aristocracy, including the Skarbeks, whose poorer relative, Justyna Krzyżanowska, he married. The wedding took place at the 16th-century parish church in Brochów on 2 June 1806. (Justyna's brother would become the father of American Union General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski.)

Frédéric Chopin was the couple's second child and only son. (The eldest child, Ludwika, was to become his first piano teacher, and several decades later was to repatriate his heart from Paris.) He was born at Żelazowa Wola, forty-six kilometres west of Warsaw, in what was the Duchy of Warsaw. The parish baptismal record, discovered in 1892, gives his birthday as 22 February 1810, but a date one week later, 1 March, was stated by the composer and his family as his birthday; he was "born 1 March 1810 at the village of Żelazowa Wola in the Province of Mazowsze." He was baptized on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1810, in the same Brochów church where his parents had married. The parish register cites his given names in the Latin form Fridericus Franciscus; which also hosted the newly founded Warsaw University. The family lived in a spacious second-floor apartment in an adjacent building. Chopin attended the Warsaw Lyceum from 1823 to 1826.

The Polish spirit, culture and language pervaded the Chopins' home, and as a result the son would never, even in Paris, perfectly master the French language. Louis Énault, a biographer, borrowed George Sand's phrase to describe Chopin as being "more Polish than Poland".

Others in Chopin's family were musically talented. Chopin's father played the flute and violin; his mother played the piano and gave lessons to boys in the elite boarding house that the Chopins maintained. As a result Frederic became conversant with music in its various forms at an early age. He received his earliest piano lessons not from his mother but from his older sister Ludwika (in English, "Louise"). Though the youngster's skills soon surpassed his teacher's, Chopin later spoke highly of Żywny. Seven-year-old "little Chopin" (Szopenek) began giving public concerts that soon prompted comparisons with Mozart as a child and with Beethoven.

manor where Chopin vacationed in 1824 and 1825]] In those years, Chopin was sometimes invited to the Belweder Palace as playmate to the son of Russian Poland's ruler, Grand Duke Constantine, and charmed the irascible duke with his piano-playing.

At the village of Szafarnia (where he was a guest of Juliusz Dziewanowski, father of schoolmate Dominik Dziewanowski) and at his other vacation venues, Chopin was exposed to folk melodies that he later transmuted into original compositions. His missives home from Szafarnia (the famous self-styled "Szafarnia Courier" letters), written in a very modern and lively Polish, amused his family with their spoofing of the Warsaw newspapers and demonstrated the youngster's literary gift.

In 1827 the family moved to lodgings just across the street from Warsaw University, in the south annex of the Krasiński Palace at Krakowskie Przedmieście 5 (what is now the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts). Here the parents continued running their elite boarding house for male students. Young Chopin would live here until he left Warsaw in 1830. (In 1837–39, artist and poet Cyprian Norwid would live there while he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts; later he would pen the famous poem, "Chopin's Piano", about Russian troops' 1863 defenestration of the instrument.) The Chopin family's parlor (salonik Chopinów) is now maintained as a museum open to visitors; it was in this parlor that Chopin first played many of his early compositions.

In 1829, Polish portraitist Ambroży Mieroszewski executed a set of five portraits of Chopin family members (the youngest daughter, Emilia, had died in 1827): Chopin's parents, his elder sister Ludwika, younger sister Izabela, and, in the first known portrait of him, the composer himself. (The originals perished in World War II; only black-and-white photographs remain.) In 1913, French musicologist and Chopin biographer Édouard Ganche would write that this painting of the precocious composer showed "a youth threatened by tuberculosis. His skin is very white, he has a prominent Adam's apple and sunken cheeks, even his ears show a form characteristic of consumptives." Chopin's younger sister Emilia had already died of tuberculosis at the age of fourteen, and their father would succumb to the same disease in 1844.

According to Polish musicologist and Chopin biographer Zdzisław Jachimecki, comparison of the juvenile Chopin with any earlier composer is difficult because of the originality of the works that Chopin was composing already in the first half of his life. At a comparable age, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had still been apprentices, while Chopin was perceived by peers and audiences to be already a master who was pointing the path to the coming age. His compositions were, however, often inspired by emotional and sensual experiences in his own life. One of his first such inspirations was a beautiful young singing student at the Warsaw Conservatory and later a singer at the Warsaw Opera, Konstancja Gładkowska. In letters to his friend Tytus Woyciechowski, Chopin indicated which of his works, and even which of their passages, were influenced by his erotic transports. His artist's soul was also enriched by friendships with such leading lights of Warsaw's artistic and intellectual world as Maurycy Mochnacki, Józef Bohdan Zaleski and Julian Fontana.

Youth

, 1829]] In September 1828, eighteen-year-old Chopin struck out for the wider world in the company of a family friend, the zoologist Feliks Jarocki, who planned to attend a scientific convention in Berlin. There Chopin enjoyed several unfamiliar operas directed by Gaspare Spontini, attended several concerts, and saw Carl Friedrich Zelter, Felix Mendelssohn and other celebrities. On his return trip, he was a guest of Prince Antoni Radziwiłł, governor of the Grand Duchy of Posen – himself an accomplished composer and aspiring cellist. For the Prince and his piano-playing daughter Wanda, Chopin composed his Introduction and Polonaise brillante in C major for cello and piano, Op. 3.

Back in Warsaw, in 1829, Chopin heard Niccolò Paganini play and met the German pianist and composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel. In August the same year, three weeks after completing his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, Chopin made a brilliant debut in Vienna. He gave two piano concerts and received many favorable reviews – in addition to some that criticized the "small tone" that he drew from the piano. improvisation," in his native Polish language into the pages of a little journal that he kept secret to the end of his life. He expressed fear for the safety of his family and other civilians, especially the womenfolk at risk of outrages by the Russian troops; mourned the death of "kindly [General] Sowiński" (to whose wife he had dedicated a composition); damned the French for not having come to the aid of the Poles; and expressed dismay that God had permitted the Russians to crush the Polish insurgents – "or are you [God] yourself a Russian?" These outcries of a tormented heart found musical expression in his Scherzo in B minor, Op. 20, and his "Revolutionary Étude", in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12. In February 1832 Chopin gave a concert that garnered universal admiration. The influential musicologist and critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote in Revue musicale: "Here is a young man who, taking nothing as a model, has found, if not a complete renewal of piano music, then in any case part of what has long been sought in vain, namely, an extravagance of original ideas that are unexampled anywhere..." Only three months earlier, in December 1831, Robert Schumann, reviewing Chopin's Variations on "La ci darem la mano", Op. 2 (variations on a theme from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni), had written: "Hats off, gentlemen! A genius."

After his Paris concert début in February 1832, Chopin realized that his light-handed keyboard technique was not optimal for large concert spaces. However, later that year he was introduced to the wealthy Rothschild banking family, whose patronage opened doors for him to other private salons. He formed friendships with Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Vincenzo Bellini, Ferdinand Hiller, Felix Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Eugène Delacroix, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Alfred de Vigny, and Charles-Valentin Alkan. in France he used the French versions of his given names and traveled on a French passport, possibly to avoid having to rely on Imperial Russian documents. The French passport was issued on 1 August 1835, after Chopin had become a French citizen.

In Paris, Chopin seldom performed publicly. In later years he generally gave a single annual concert at the Salle Pleyel, a venue that seated three hundred. He played more frequently at salons – social gatherings of the aristocracy and artistic and literary elite – but preferred playing at his own Paris apartment for small groups of friends. His precarious health prevented his touring extensively as a traveling virtuoso, and beyond playing once in Rouen, he seldom ventured out of the capital.

(self-portrait)]] In 1835 Chopin went to Carlsbad, where, for the last time in his life, he met with his parents. En route through Saxony on his way back to Paris, he met old friends from Warsaw, the Wodzińskis. He had made the acquaintance of their daughter Maria, now sixteen, in Poland five years earlier, and fell in love with the charming, intelligent, artistically talented young woman. The following year, in September 1836, upon returning to Dresden after having vacationed with the Wodzińskis at Marienbad, Chopin proposed marriage to Maria. She accepted, and her mother Countess Wodzińska approved in principle, but Maria's tender age and Chopin's tenuous health (in the winter of 1835–1836 he had been so ill that word had circulated in Warsaw that he had died) forced an indefinite postponement of the wedding. The engagement remained a secret to the world and never led to the altar. Chopin finally placed the letters from Maria and her mother in a large envelope, on which he wrote the Polish words "Moja bieda" ("My sorrow").

After Chopin's matrimonial plans ended, Polish countess Delfina Potocka appeared episodically in Chopin's life as muse and romantic interest. He dedicated to her his Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, the famous "Minute Waltz".

Chopin initially felt an aversion to Sand. Sand, however, in a candid thirty-two page letter to Count Wojciech Grzymała, a friend to both her and Chopin, admitted strong feelings for the composer. In her letter she debated whether to abandon a current affair in order to begin a relationship with Chopin, and attempted to gauge the currency of his previous relationship with Maria Wodzińska, which she did not intend to interfere with should it still exist. By the summer of 1838, Chopin's and Sand's involvement was an open secret. In 1842, they moved to 80 rue Taitbout in the Square d'Orléans, living in adjacent buildings.

It was around this time that we have evidence of Chopin's playing an instrument other than the piano. At the funeral of the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, who had jumped to his death in Naples but whose body was returned to Paris for burial, Chopin played an organ transcription of Franz Schubert's lied Die Gestirne.

During the summers at Nohant, particularly in the years 1839–43, Chopin found quiet but productive days during which he composed many works. They included his Polonaise in A flat major, Op. 53, the "Heroic", one of his most famous pieces. Sand describes Chopin's tumultuous creative process, filled with emotion, weeping, complaints, and hundreds of changes of concept eventually returning to the initial inspiration,

In 1847, Sand and Chopin quietly ended their ten year relationship. The two composers are buried four meters apart at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Final years

ca. 1830, by Achille Devéria]] , 1849.]] Chopin's public popularity as a virtuoso waned, as did the number of his pupils. In February 1848 he gave his last Paris concert. In April, with the Revolution of 1848 underway in Paris, he left for London, where he performed at several concerts and at numerous receptions in great houses. in Renfrewshire, near Glasgow), both owned by Jane Stirling's family members. It was by then being rumored, even internationally, that Miss Stirling and Chopin would soon announce their engagement but apparently Chopin had no amorous feelings for her. While in Edinburgh he also spent time at 10 Warriston Crescent, residing at the home of the Polish GP, Dr. Adam Łyszczyński, and being treated by him. He was generally so weak that Łyszczyński or his servant had to carry Chopin up and down stairs. He gave a single concert in Edinburgh, at the Hopetoun Rooms on Queen Street (now Erskine House).

In late October 1848, at the home of Dr. Łyszczyński, Chopin wrote out his last will and testament—"a kind of disposition to be made of my stuff in the future, if I should drop dead somewhere," he wrote his friend Wojciech Grzymała. In his thoughts he was now constantly with his mother and sisters, and conjured up for himself scenes of his native land by playing his adaptations of its folk music on cool Scottish evenings at Miss Stirling's castle.

At the end of November, Chopin returned to Paris.

Death

Feeling ever more poorly, Chopin longed to have a family member with him. In June 1849 his sister Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, who had given him his first piano lessons, agreed to come to Paris. , 1849, commissioned by Jane Stirling. Chopin sits in bed, in presence of (from left) Aleksander Jełowicki, Chopin's sister Ludwika, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, Wojciech Grzymała, Kwiatkowski.]] On 15 October, when his condition took a marked turn for the worse, his numerous visitors were asked to leave, and a handful of his closest friends remained with him. A couple of times during those last two days, they thought that the end had come, but the composer was able to catch his breath again. He asked Delfina Potocka to play sonatas and prayed and called out to God, though only a few days earlier he had refused confession, saying that he did not believe in it. He complained that George Sand had promised that he "would die in her arms." He asked for a piece of paper and wrote: "Comme cette terre m'étouffera, je vous conjure de faire ouvrir mon corps pour [que] je ne sois pas enterré vif." ("As this earth will suffocate me, I implore you to have my body opened so that I will not be buried alive.")

Frédéric Chopin's illness and the cause of his death remained unclear and consequently have become a matter of medical argument. His death certificate stated the cause as tuberculosis. In 2008 an alternative cause of Chopin's death would be proposed: cystic fibrosis. In counterpoint, it can well be argued that survival with cystic fibrosis in the 19th century until the age of 39 was virtually impossible, without modern respiratory therapy and medical support. A full review of the possible causes of Chopin's long illness has recently been published. Given the contextual facts, it is much more likely that Chopin suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis.

Many people who had not been present at Chopin's death would later claim to have been there. "Being present at Chopin's death," writes Tad Szulc, "seemed to grant one historical and social cachet." Those actually around his bed appear to have included his sister Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, Solange and Auguste Clésinger (George Sand's daughter and son-in-law), Chopin's friend and former pupil Adolf Gutmann, his friend Thomas Albrecht, and his confidant, Polish Catholic priest Father Aleksander Jełowicki. Also played were Chopin's Préludes No. 4 in E minor and No. 6 in B minor. The organist was Franz Liszt.

The funeral was attended by nearly three thousand people, but George Sand was not among them.

The funeral procession traversed the considerable distance from the church, in the center of town, adjacent to the Opera, to Père Lachaise Cemetery at the city's eastern edge. It was led by the dean of the Polish Great Emigration, the aged Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski; immediately after the casket, which was borne by shifts of artists (including Eugène Delacroix, cellist Auguste Franchomme and pianist Camille Pleyel), walked Chopin's sister Ludwika.

Chopin's tombstone, featuring the muse of music, Euterpe, weeping over a broken lyre, was designed and sculpted by Auguste Clésinger. The expenses of the funeral and monument, in the amount of five thousand francs, were covered by Jane Stirling, who also paid for Chopin's sister's return to Warsaw.

In 1926 a bronze statue of Chopin, designed by sculptor Wacław Szymanowski in 1907, was erected in the upper part of Warsaw's Royal Baths (Łazienki) Park, adjacent to Ujazdów Avenue (Aleje Ujazdowskie). The statue was originally to have been installed in 1910, on the centenary of Chopin's birth, but its execution was delayed by controversy about the design, then by the outbreak of World War I.

On 31 May 1940, during the German occupation of Poland in World War II, the statue was destroyed by the Nazis. It was reconstructed after the war, in 1958. Since 1959, free piano recitals of Chopin's compositions have been performed at the statue's base on summer Sunday afternoons. The stylized willow over Chopin's seated figure echoes a pianist's hand and fingers. Until 2007, the statue was the world's tallest monument to Chopin.

A 1:1-scale replica of Szymanowski's Art Nouveau statue is found in Warsaw's sister city of Hamamatsu, Japan. There are also preliminary plans to erect another replica along Chicago's lakefront in addition to a different sculpture commemorating the artist in Chopin Park for the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth.

A bronze bust memorializing Chopin stands at Symphony Circle outside Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York.

There are numerous other monuments to Chopin around the world. The most recent, by a small margin taller than the Warsaw statue, is a modernistic bronze sculpture by Lu Pin in Shanghai, China, that was unveiled on 3 March 2007.

The world's oldest monographic music competition, the International Chopin Piano Competition, founded in 1927, is held every five years in Warsaw.

Established in 1954, the Fryderyk Chopin Museum is housed in Warsaw's Ostrogski Palace, seat of the Fryderyk Chopin Society. Refurbished for the 200th anniversary (2010) of Chopin's birth, the Fryderyk Chopin Museum is the most modern museum in Poland.

Periodically the Grand prix du disque de F. Chopin is awarded for notable Chopin recordings, both remastered and newly recorded work.

Named for the composer are the largest Polish music conservatory, the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw; Warsaw Chopin Airport; the Chopin crater on Mercury; and asteroid 3784 Chopin.

Music

, signed by Chopin on 25 May 1845]] The great majority of Chopin's compositions were written for the piano as solo instrument; all of his extant works feature the piano in one way or another. Chopin, according to Arthur Hedley, "had the rare gift of a very personal melody, expressive of heart-felt emotion, and his music is penetrated by a poetic feeling that has an almost universal appeal.... Present-day evaluation places him among the immortals of music by reason of his insight into the secret places of the heart and because of his awareness of the magical new sonorities to be drawn from the piano." of all progones until now." Chopin's works emphasize nuance and expressive depth rather than sheer virtuosity. Vladimir Horowitz referred to Chopin as "the only truly great composer for the piano."

Chopin's music for the piano combined a unique rhythmic sense (particularly his use of rubato), frequent use of chromaticism, and counterpoint. This mixture produces a particularly fragile sound in the melody and the harmony, which are nonetheless underpinned by solid and interesting harmonic techniques. He took the new salon genre of the nocturne, invented by Irish composer John Field, to a deeper level of sophistication. Three of Chopin's twenty-one Nocturnes were published only after his death in 1849, contrary to his wishes. He also endowed popular dance forms, such as the Polish mazurek and the Viennese Waltz, with a greater range of melody and expression.

Chopin's mazurkas, while based somewhat on the traditional Polish dance (the mazurek), were different from the traditional variety in that they were suitable for concerts halls as well as dance settings. With his mazurkas, Chopin brought a new sense of nationalism, which was an idea that other composers writing both at the same time as, and after, Chopin would also incorporate into their compositions. Chopin’s nationalism was a great influence and inspiration for many other composers, especially Eastern Europeans, and he was one of the first composers to clearly express nationalism through his music. Furthermore, he was the first composer to take a national genre of music from his home country and transform it into a genre worthy of the general concert-going public, thereby creating an entirely new genre.

Chopin was the first to write ballades and scherzi as individual pieces. He also took the example of Bach's preludes and fugues, transforming the genre in his own Préludes. Chopin reinvented the étude, expanding on the idea and making it into a gorgeous, eloquent and emotional showpiece. He also used his Études to teach his own revolutionary style, The Revolutionary Étude was not written with the failed Polish uprising against Russia in mind; it merely appeared at that time. The Funeral March was written before the rest of the sonata within which it is contained, but the exact occasion is not known; it appears not to have been inspired by any specific personal bereavement. Other melodies have been used as the basis of popular songs, such as the slow section of the Fantaisie-Impromptu (Op. posth. 66) and the first section of the Étude, Op. 10, No. 3. These pieces often rely on an intense and personalised chromaticism, as well as a melodic curve that resembles the operas of Chopin's day – the operas of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and especially Vincenzo Bellini. Chopin used the piano to recreate the gracefulness of the singing voice, and talked and wrote constantly about singers.

Chopin's style and gifts became increasingly influential. Robert Schumann was a huge admirer of Chopin's music, and he used melodies from Chopin and even named a piece from his suite Carnaval after Chopin. This admiration was not generally reciprocated, although Chopin did dedicate his Ballade No. 2 in F major to Schumann.

Franz Liszt was another admirer and personal friend of the composer, and he transcribed for piano six of Chopin's Polish songs. However, Liszt denied that he wrote Funérailles (subtitled "October 1849", the seventh movement of his piano suite Harmonies poétiques et religieuses of 1853) in memory of Chopin. Though the middle section seems to be modeled on the famous octave trio section of Chopin's Polonaise in A flat major, Op. 53, Liszt said the piece had been inspired by the deaths of three of his Hungarian compatriots in the same month. However, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor borrows heavily from the "funeral march" third movement of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor. This influence can be seen in the first segment of Liszt's piece: this section expands on Chopin's minimalist melody.

Johannes Brahms and the younger Russian composers, too, found inspiration in Chopin's examples.

The series of seven Polonaises published in his lifetime (another nine were published posthumously), beginning with the Op. 26 pair, set a new standard for music in the form, and were rooted in Chopin's desire to write something to celebrate Polish culture after the country had fallen into Russian control. The Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1, the "Military," and the Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53, the "Heroic," are among Chopin's best-loved and most-often-played works.

Chopin also wrote 24 different preludes as a tribute to J. S. Bach's "The Well Tempered Clavier." Chopin's preludes move up the circle-of-fifths, whereas Bach uses the chromatic scale to create a prelude in every major and minor tonality achievable on the clavier.

Rubato

Chopin's music is well known for benefiting from rubato (which was how he himself performed his music), as opposed to a strictly regular playing. Yet there is usually call for caution when the music is performed with wobbly, over-exaggerated, inappropriate "rubato" (e.g. attempting to justify insecure playing, with reference to expressive rubato).

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However, while some can provide restrictive quotes about Chopin such as the above, often to the effect that "the accompanying hand always played in strict tempo", these quotes need to be considered in better context in terms both of the time when they were made and of the situations that may have prompted the original writer to set down the thoughts. Constantin von Sternberg (1852–1924) has written: }}

There are also views of contemporary writers such as Hector Berlioz.

This suggests that Chopin is not to be found at commonly encountered one-sided extremes. The unbalanced views are:

that Chopin requires metronomic rhythm in the left hand;

that insecure performances of Chopin can be justified with reference to rubato;

that performances with particular inflections, that result from technical limits/insecurities rather than a performer's intentions, can be justified with reference to rubato.

Some performers' (and piano-schools') "too strongly held one-sided views on Chopin's way of playing rubato" may account for some unsatisfactory interpretations of his music.

Romanticism

Chopin is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music.

Chopin regarded most of his contemporaries with indifference, though he had many acquaintances who were associated with romanticism in music, literature, and the fine arts—many of them via his liaison with George Sand. Chopin's music is, however, considered by many to epitomise the Romantic style. The relative classical purity and discretion in his music, with little extravagant exhibitionism, partly reflects his reverence for Bach and Mozart.

Chopin never indulged in explicit "scene-painting" in his music, or used programmatic titles. He castigated publishers who renamed his compositions in this way.

Nationalism

]] , which inspired Chopin's Revolutionary Étude]]

Chopin's Polish biographer Zdzisław Jachimecki notes that "Chopin at every step demonstrated his Polish spirit – in the hundreds of letters that he wrote in Polish, in his attitude to Paris' [Polish] émigrés, in his negative view of all that bore the official stamp of the powers that occupied Poland." Likewise Chopin composed music to accompany Polish texts but never musically illustrated a single French or German text, though he numbered among his friends several great French and German poets. He referred to Chopin as "a Polish artist." Composer Robert Schumann acknowledged the strength of Chopin's personal reaction to Russia's suppression of the November 1830 Uprising when he wrote that in Chopin's music one found "guns buried among the flowers."

Some Polish writers have used, for Chopin's surname, the Polonized phonetic spelling, "Szopen" (pronounced ).

Works

Over 230 of Chopin's works survive; some manuscripts and pieces from his early childhood have been lost. All of his known compositions involved the piano. Only a few of them ranged beyond solo piano music, as either piano concertos or chamber music works.

Chopin composed:

58 mazurkas

27 études (twelve in the Op. 10 cycle, twelve in the Op. 25 cycle, and three in a collection without an opus number)

27 preludes

21 nocturnes

20 waltzes

18 polonaises, including one with orchestral accompaniment and one for cello and piano accompaniment

5 rondos

4 ballades

4 impromptus

4 scherzi

4 sets of variations, including Souvenir de Paganini

3 écossaises

3 piano sonatas

2 concerti for piano and orchestra, Op. 11 and 21

He also composed: a fantaisie, an Allegro de concert (which is possibly the remnant of an incomplete concerto), a barcarole, a berceuse, a bolero, a tarantelle, a contredanse, a fugue, a cantabile, a lento, a Funeral march, and a Feuille d'album.

Chopin's other works include: a krakowiak for piano and orchestra; Variations on "Là ci darem la mano" for piano and orchestra; fantasia on themes from Polish songs with accompanying orchestra; a trio for violin, cello and piano; a sonata for cello and piano; a Grand Duo in E major for cello and piano on themes from Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Robert le diable, co-written with Auguste Franchomme; and 19 Polish songs for voice and piano.

Opus numbers

The last opus number that Chopin himself used was 65, allocated to the Cello Sonata in G minor.

Chopin expressed a deathbed wish that all his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed. However, at the request of the composer's mother and sisters, his pianist friend and musical executor Julian Fontana selected 23 unpublished piano pieces and grouped them into eight opus numbers (Opp. 66–73). These works were published in 1855.

In 1857, 17 Polish songs which Chopin wrote at various stages of his life were collected and published as Op. 74—the order within that opus having little regard to the actual order of composition. Two other songs were published in 1910.

Works that have been published since 1857 have not received opus numbers. Instead, alternate catalog designations have been applied to them.

Publishing

Chopin published much of his music simultaneously in Germany, France, and England. While this certainly earned the composer triple exposure and likely a good sum of revenue, the discrepancies between these three (or more) editions can be quite the conundrum. Ever the romantic, Chopin lived in a constant state of inspiration and improvisation, and was certainly prone to editing and revising his own music even after sending final drafts to his publishers. Especially considering that all published editions of his work during his lifetime were in fact proofed and approved by the composer himself, this is a popular source of anxiety amongst pianists and scholars.

How is one to know what the composer truly meant and wanted when we are presented with autographs and first drafts bearing the composer’s approval that differ in content? Details such as phrase markings, dynamics, fingerings, even the notes themselves are often subject to suspicion. The several editions of the time had different ways of dealing with this problem; the Germans of course believed that their version was infallible, the French called Chopin their own, having spent most of his adult life based in Paris, and the English publisher (a German who largely copied the French editions) annoyed Chopin by insisting on adding flowery titles to his pieces. Nearly 200 years later, the state of affairs in regards to Chopin editions has turned over a new leaf.

Today, several scholarly editions exist that attempt to organize the vast array of sources and compile the information in one presentable volume, notably the Paderewski and Polish National editions which contain lengthy and scholarly explanations and discussions regarding choices and sources. Even so, it is ultimately up to the taste of an editor as to which version of which piece suits them most at the given time, and perhaps Chopin himself faced the same dilemma, resulting in the variations we have today.

TV documentaries

In 2010, the 90-min. BBC TV documentary Chopin – The Women Behind The Music explores Chopin's life, notably his encounters with the singers who enchanted the composer with their voices. The BBC announcement for the premiere refers to Jenny Lind as the "Swedish opera star, who so affected Chopin in the final years of his life." Another documentary about Chopin was realized by Angelo Bozzolini and Roberto Prosseda for Italian Television in 2010: "Fryderik Chopin". Featuring interviews with Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Charles Rosen, it is currently distributed by Euroarts.

Fiction

Possibly the first venture into fictional treatments of Chopin's life was a fanciful operatic version of some of its events. This opera, entitled Chopin, was written by Giacomo Orefice and produced in Milan in 1901. Orefice incorporated Chopin's music, arranged as arias; the operatic arrangements have been described as "coarse". Various arias have been recorded by well-known singers, but the opera has long been out of the repertoire. Orefice also applied an operatic treatment to one of George Sand's novels, Consuelo.

Chopin's life and his relations with George Sand have been fictionalized in film. The 1945 biopic A Song to Remember earned Cornel Wilde an Academy Award nomination as Best Actor for his portrayal of the composer. Other film treatments have included: Impromptu (1991), starring Hugh Grant as Chopin; La note bleue (1991); and (2002). The 1975 Ken Russell film Lisztomania outlandishly portrayed Chopin and Sand's relationship as dominant and submissive, with Sand fulfilling the role of dominatrix over Chopin's submissive attitude.

Another reference to Chopin in cinema occurs in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata. The difference of interpretation of Chopin's Prelude No. 2 in A minor by the pianist Charlotte Andergast and her daughter Eva constitutes a major scene in the film.

Kate Beaton did a series of comics starring Chopin and Liszt, focusing on a fictionalized account of their friendship.

Chopin is the main character in the console role-playing game titled Eternal Sonata.

See also

Maria Kalergis

Salon Frédéric Chopin in Paris

Toruń gingerbread (young Chopin's enthusiasm for the Polish confection).

Chopin's disease

List of Poles

Notes

Bibliography

Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris: the Life and Times of the Romantic Composer, New York, Scribner, 1998, ISBN 0-684-82458-2.

Zdzisław Jachimecki, "Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek," Polski słownik biograficzny, vol. III, Kraków, Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1937, pp. 420–26.

Arthur Hedley et al., "Chopin, Frédéric (François)," Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2005, vol. 3, pp. 263–64.

Édouard Ganche, Frédéric Chopin: sa vie et ses œuvres (Frédéric Chopin: His Life and Works), Mercure de France, 1913.

Gastone Belotti, Chopin, l'uomo (Chopin the Man), 3 vols., Milan, Sapere, 1974.

Gastone Belotti, Chopin, Turin, EDT, 1984, ISBN 88-7063-033-1.

Gerald Abraham, "Chopin Frédéric," Encyclopedia Americana, 1986 ed., vol. 6, pp. 627–28.

Adam Zamoyski, Chopin: a Biography, New York, Doubleday, 1980, ISBN 0-385-13597-1.

Michałowski, Kornel, and Jim Samson, Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek, Grove Music Online, edited by L. Macy (accessed 31 October 2006) (subscription access)

Benita Eisler, Chopin's Funeral, Abacus, 2004.

[The Book of the Second International Musicological Congress, Warsaw, 10–17 October 1999:] Chopin and His Work in the Context of Culture, studies edited by Irena Poniatowska, vols. 1–2, Warsaw, 2003.

Samson, Jim. The Cambridge Companion to Chopin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, as Seen by His Pupils, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-36709-3.

Samson, Jim. The Music of Chopin. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

André Maurois, Leila: the Life of George Sand, translated by Gerard Hopkins, Penguin, 1980 (c 1953).

Jan Zygmunt Jakubowski, ed., Literatura polska od średniowiecza to pozytywizmu (Polish Literature from the Middle Ages to Positivism), Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1979, ISBN 83-01-00201-8.

George Richard Marek and Maria Gordon-Smith, Chopin: A Biography, New York, Harper & Row, 1978.

Chopin's Letters, collected by Henryk Opieński, translated by E.L. Voynich, New York, 1973.

The Book of the First International Musicological Congress Devoted [to] the Works of Frederick Chopin, Warsaw, 16–22 February 1960, edited by Zofia Lissa, Warsaw, PWN, 1963.

Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, collected and annotated by B.E. Sydow, translated and edited by Arthur Hedley, London, 1962.

Krystyna Kobylańska, Chopin in His Own Land: Documents and Souvenirs, Kraków, P.W.M., 1955.

David Ewen, Ewen's Musical Masterworks: The Encyclopedia of Musical Masterpieces, 2nd ed., New York, ARCO Publishing Company, 1954.

Artur Szklener, "Fryckowe lato: czyli wakacyjne muzykowanie Chopina" ("Fritz's Summers: Chopin's Musical Vacations"), Magazyn Chopin: Miesięcznik Narodowego Instytutu Fryderyka Chopina (Chopin Magazine: Monthly of the Fryderyk Chopin National Institute), no. 4, 2010, pp. 8–9.

Maria Barcz, "Etiuda paryska" ("Paris Étude"), Gwiazda Polarna (The Pole Star), vol. 101, no. 17 (14 August 2010), pp. 15–16.

Chopin and Other Musical Essays (1889) by Henry T. Finck

Jeffrey Kallberg, “Chopin in the Marketplace: Aspects of the International Music Publishing Industry in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Notes 39, no. 3 (March 1983): 539.

Kazimierz Wierzyński, The Life and Death of Chopin, translated from the Polish by Norbert Guterman, foreword by Arthur Rubinstein, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1949.

External links

Klasikal.com, Website dedicated to classical music. Includes video performances and sheet music of every composition of Frédéric Chopin.

The Chopin Project, A guide to Chopin's solo keyboard music, with individual entries, on-demand audio, essays, quotes, references, biographies, and abundant links.

The Chopin Society, The website of the Chopin Society in London provides information about their monthly concerts, membership of the Society, and offers insights into the life of the composer.

Chopin Music, Website and forum devoted to the life and works of Chopin: biographies, study guides, recordings, sheet music.

Chopin: the poet of the piano, A favourite Chopin place since 1999 with biography, images, complete music and score, discussion forum, work list and analysis, quizzes and contests, noted interpreters/great pianists...

Internet Chopin Information Centre, Chopin portal including calendar, catalogues, other information about Chopin, Chopin on the Web, and pianists' biographical notes.

Chopin.pl, website under the auspices of Warsaw-based Fryderyk Chopin Society. Contains a biography, an outline of Chopin's works and musical style and pictures of original manuscripts.

Bachtrack.com, Listings of live concerts of Chopin's music at Bachtrack, also see anniversary page at

Frédéric Chopin and Samuel Barber, ArtsEditor.com opinion article 2010: Certain composers are so ubiquitous that to celebrate them seems unnecessary, especially as many others languish in relative obscurity. Still, every few years the public is reminded of the anniversary of a particular composer's birth, prompting a slew…

Biographies

Biography of Chopin at Fryderyk Chopin Society's website

Frédéric Chopin biography

Brief Chopin essay at Classical Music Pages

Biographies (Project Gutenberg e-texts):

*Life of Chopin, book by his friend Franz Liszt

*Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician, by Frederick Niecks

*Chopin: The Man and his Music, by James Huneker

Music scores

Chopin scores from Mutopia Project

Chopin Early Editions, a collection of over 400 first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin published before 1881.

Chopin's First Editions Online features an interface that allows three navigable scores to be open simultaneously in frames to facilitate comparison.

Recordings

Performances by Angela Lear: 'The Chopin Collection' volumes 1–5, include rarely-heard original variants.

www.200chopin.com, Recordings by all Deutsche Grammophon and Decca artists, full track streaming for free: Argerich, Freire, Pollini, Zimerman, Pires, Wang, Ott etc.

Performances by Daniel Wnukowski: 'Heroic' polonaise, 2 nocturnes, 1 scherzo, 1 prelude

Performances by Michael Sayers: Preludes Op. 28 Nos. 1 and 20

Performances by Donald Betts: 3 ballades, 3 études, 2 nocturnes, 1 mazurka

Performances by Paul Cantrell from In the Hands

Performances by Alberto Cobo: Sonata No. 3, Ballade No. 1 and Fantasie-Impromptu, Sonata No. 2, Scherzo No. 2, Prelude No. 16

Various performers from PianoParadise (some links are broken)

MIDI files from Kunst der Fuge

Preludes No. 4 and No. 6 arranged for voices, guitar, and bass by the John Link Project

Performances of works by Frédéric Chopin in MP3 and MIDI formats at Logos Virtual Library

Free Chopin Downloads (MP3 and WMA)

the original Chopin Chopin as played by Angela Lear from autograph manuscripts. "Hear what Chopin really intended" BBC Music Magazine; "...Her Chopin recitals were altogether exceptional for perfect interpretation and maximum faithfulness to Chopin's intentions " Le Matin.

Chopin selected works (MP3)

Piano Society – A short biography and some free recordings in MP3 format, performed by Chiara Bertoglio, Roberto Carnevale, Eric Clark, Alexander Djordjevic, Ken Sasaki, Robert Ståhlbrand, Evelina Vorontsova

Miscellaneous

Chopin With A Polish Touch, audio report by National Public Radio

Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, Warsaw, Poland

Memorial Page at FindaGrave

University of Michigan Chopin Project

Chopin Works Review

International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition

Chopin2010 a/k/a "The Chopin Currency", a daily compendium of Chopiniana: news, reviews, videos, blogs, and more leading up to the Chopin Bicentennial in 2010

Valldemossa, Majorca small town whose major asset is the remains of The Royal Chartreuse of Jesus Nazareth where Chopin lived for a short period with George Sand (the memories of this period are recorded in her book Winter in Majorca) in 1838/1839.

The International Foundation Can Mossenya – Friends of Jorge Luis Borges, Historic estate, a significant part of The Royal Chartreuse of Jesus of Nazareth

The safekeeping of a large collection of original Chopin manuscripts, including Concerto in F-minor among a total of 49 compositions and other priceless Polish art treasures in Canada during World War II, is documented by new research in 2004–2005 which was published in Chopin in the World.

Category:1810 births Category:1849 deaths Category:Polish classical pianists Category:Polish composers Category:French composers Category:Romantic composers Category:19th-century composers Category:Child classical musicians Category:French music educators Category:University of Warsaw alumni Category:Activists of the Great Emigration Category:Polish expatriates in France Category:Polish people of French descent Category:Polish Roman Catholics Category:People from Sochaczew County Category:People from Warsaw Category:19th-century Polish people Category:Infectious disease deaths in France Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery Category:Mazovians

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he did not introduce new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France.

Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach's works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B minor, the St Matthew Passion, the St John Passion, the Magnificat, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, the English and French Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, the Cello Suites, more than 200 surviving cantatas, and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.

Bach's abilities as an organist were highly respected throughout Europe during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognised as a great composer until a revival of interest and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century. He is now generally regarded one of the main composers of the Baroque style, and as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Childhood (1685–1703)

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach, on 31 March (O.S. 21 March) 1685. He was the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach, the director of the Stadtpfeifer or town musicians, and Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt. His father taught him to play violin and harpsichord. His uncles were all professional musicians, whose posts ranged from church organists and court chamber musicians to composers. One uncle, Johann Christoph Bach (1645–93), was especially famous and introduced him to the art of organ playing. Bach was proud of his family's musical achievements, and around 1735 he drafted a genealogy, "Origin of the musical Bach family".

Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father eight months later. The 10-year-old orphan moved in with his oldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach (1671–1721), the organist at the Michaeliskirche in nearby Ohrdruf. There, he copied, studied and performed music, and apparently received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord. J.C. Bach exposed him to the works of the great South German composers of the day, such as Johann Pachelbel (under whom Johann Christoph had studied) and Johann Jakob Froberger; possibly to the music of North German composers; to Frenchmen, such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis Marchand, Marin Marais; and to the Italian clavierist Girolamo Frescobaldi. The young Bach probably witnessed and assisted in the maintenance of the organ music. Bach's obituary indicates that he copied music out of Johann Christoph's scores, but his brother had apparently forbidden him to do so, possibly because scores were valuable and private commodities at the time.

At the age of 14, Bach, along with his older school friend George Erdmann, was awarded a choral scholarship to study at the prestigious St. Michael's School in Lüneburg, not far from the northern seaport of Hamburg, one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire. This involved a long journey with his friend, probably undertaken partly on foot and partly by coach. His two years there appear to have been critical in exposing him to a wider palette of European culture than he would have experienced in Thuringia. In addition to singing in the a cappella choir, it is likely that he played the School's three-manual organ and its harpsichords. He probably learned French and Italian, and received a thorough grounding in theology, Latin, history, geography, and physics. He would have come into contact with sons of noblemen from northern Germany sent to the highly selective school to prepare for careers in diplomacy, government, and the military.

Although little supporting historical evidence exists at this time, it is almost certain that while in Lüneburg, young Bach would have visited the Johanniskirche (Church of St. John) and heard (and possibly played) the church's famous organ (built in 1549 by Jasper Johannsen and nicknamed the "Böhm organ" after its most prominent master, Georg Böhm). Given his innate musical talent, Bach would have had significant contact with prominent organists of the day in Lüneburg, most notably Böhm (the organist at Johanniskirche) as well as organists in nearby Hamburg, such as Johann Adam Reincken.

Arnstadt to Weimar (1703–08)

In January 1703, shortly after graduating and failing an audition for an organist's post at Sangerhausen, Bach took up a post as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar, a large town in Thuringia. His role there is unclear, but appears to have included menial, non-musical duties. During his seven-month tenure at Weimar, his reputation as a keyboard player spread. He was invited to inspect and give the inaugural recital on the new organ at St. Boniface's Church in Arnstadt. The Bach family had close connections with this oldest town in Thuringia, about 40 km to the southwest of Weimar at the edge of the great forest. In August 1703, he accepted the post of organist at that church, with light duties, a relatively generous salary, and a fine new organ tuned to a modern system that allowed a wide range of keys to be used. At this time, Bach was embarking on the serious composition of organ preludes; these works, in the North German tradition of virtuosic, improvisatory preludes, already showed tight motivic control (in which a single, short music idea is explored cogently throughout a movement). In these works the composer had yet to fully develop his powers of large-scale organisation and his contrapuntal technique (in which two or more melodies interact simultaneously).

Strong family connections and a musically enthusiastic employer failed to prevent tension between the young organist and the authorities after several years in the post. He was apparently dissatisfied with the standard of singers in the choir; more seriously, there was his unauthorised absence from Arnstadt for several months in 1705–06, when he visited the great master Dieterich Buxtehude and his Abendmusiken at the Marienkirche in the northern city of Lübeck. This well-known incident in Bach's life involved his walking some 400 kilometres (250 mi) each way to spend time with the man he probably regarded as the father figure of German organists. The trip reinforced Buxtehude's style as a foundation for Bach's earlier works, and that he overstayed his planned visit by several months suggests that his time with the old man was of great value to his art. According to legend, both Bach and George Frideric Handel wanted to become amanuensis (assistant and successor) to Buxtehude, but neither wanted to marry his daughter, as that was a condition for the position. Johann Christian Schieferdecker eventually accepted the job in 1707.

According to a translation (see reference that follows) of minutes from the proceedings of the Arnstadt consistory in August 1705, Bach was involved in a brawl in Arnstadt: |}}

Despite his comfortable position in Arnstadt, by 1706 Bach appeared to have realised that he needed to escape from the family milieu and move on to further his career. He was offered a more lucrative post as organist at St. Blasius's in Mühlhausen, a large and important city to the north. The following year, he took up this senior post with significantly improved pay and conditions, including a good choir. Four months after arriving at Mühlhausen, he married his second cousin from Arnstadt, Maria Barbara Bach. They had seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Two of them—Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach—became important composers in the ornate Rococo style that followed the Baroque.

The church and city government at Mühlhausen agreed to his plan for an expensive renovation of the organ at St. Blasius's. Bach, in turn, wrote an elaborate, festive cantata —Gott ist mein König, BWV 71— for the inauguration of the new council in 1708. The council was so delighted with the piece that they paid handsomely for its publication, and twice in later years had the composer return to conduct it. That same year, Bach was offered a better position in Weimar.

Weimar (1708–17)

After barely a year at Mühlhausen, Bach left, to become the court organist and concertmaster at the ducal court in Weimar, a far cry from his earlier position there as 'lackey'. The munificent salary on offer at the court and the prospect of working entirely with a large, well-funded contingent of professional musicians may have prompted the move. The family moved into an apartment just five minutes' walk from the ducal palace. In the following year, their first child was born and they were joined by Maria Barbara's elder, unmarried sister, who remained with them to assist in the running of the household until her death in 1729. It was in Weimar that the two musically significant sons were born—Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Bach's position in Weimar marked the start of a sustained period of composing keyboard and orchestral works, in which he had attained the technical proficiency and confidence to extend the prevailing large-scale structures and to synthesise influences from abroad. From the music of Italians such as Vivaldi, Corelli and Torelli, he learned how to write dramatic openings and adopted their sunny dispositions, dynamic motor-rhythms and decisive harmonic schemes. Bach inducted himself into these stylistic aspects largely by transcribing for harpsichord and organ the ensemble concertos of Vivaldi; these works are still concert favourites. He may have picked up the idea of transcribing the latest fashionable Italian music from Prince Johann Ernst, one of his employers, who was a musician of professional calibre. In 1713, the Duke returned from a tour of the Low Countries with a large collection of scores, some of them possibly transcriptions of the latest fashionable Italian music by the blind organist Jan Jacob de Graaf. Bach was particularly attracted to the Italian solo-tutti structure, in which one or more solo instruments alternate section-by-section with the full orchestra throughout a movement.

In Weimar, he had the opportunity to play and compose for the organ, and to perform a varied repertoire of concert music with the duke's ensemble. A master of contrapuntal technique, Bach's steady output of fugues began in Weimar. The largest single body of his fugal writing is Das wohltemperierte Clavier ("The well-tempered keyboard"—Clavier meaning keyboard instrument). It consists of two collections compiled in 1722 and 1744, each containing a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key. This is a monumental work for its masterful use of counterpoint and its exploration, for the first time, of the full range of keys–and the means of expression made possible by their slight differences from each other—available to keyboardists when their instruments are tuned according to systems such as that of Andreas Werckmeister.

(BWV 1001) in Bach's handwriting]] During his tenure at Weimar, Bach started work on the "Little Organ Book" for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann; this contains traditional Lutheran chorales (hymn tunes), set in complex textures to assist the training of organists. The book illustrates two major themes in Bach's life: his dedication to teaching and his love of the chorale as a musical form. Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and was, according to a translation (see reference that follows) of the court secretary's report, jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed:

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Köthen (1717–23)

Bach began once again to search out a more stable job that was conducive to his musical interests. Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen hired Bach to serve as his Kapellmeister (director of music). Prince Leopold, himself a musician, appreciated Bach's talents, paid him well, and gave him considerable latitude in composing and performing. The prince was Calvinist and did not use elaborate music in his worship; thus, most of Bach's work from this period was secular, including the Orchestral suites, the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and the Sonatas and partitas for solo violin. The well-known Brandenburg concertos date from this period. Bach composed secular cantatas for the court such as the Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht, BWV 134a.

On 7 July 1720, while Bach was abroad with Prince Leopold, tragedy struck: his wife, Maria Barbara, the mother of his first 7 children, died suddenly. The following year, the widower met Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a young, highly gifted soprano 17 years his junior, who performed at the court in Köthen; they married on 3 December 1721. Together they had 13 more children, six of whom survived into adulthood: Gottfried Heinrich, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, all of whom became significant musicians; Elisabeth Juliane Friederica (1726–81), who married Bach's pupil Johann Christoph Altnikol; Johanna Carolina (1737–81); and Regina Susanna (1742–1809).

Leipzig (1723–50)

In 1723, Bach was appointed Cantor of Thomasschule, adjacent to the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas's Lutheran Church) in Leipzig, as well as Director of Music in the principal churches in the town. This was a prestigious post in the leading mercantile city in Saxony, a neighbouring electorate to Thuringia. Apart from his brief tenures in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, this was Bach's first government position in a career that had mainly involved service to the aristocracy. This final post, which he held for 27 years until his death, brought him into contact with the political machinations of his employer, the Leipzig Council. The Council comprised two factions: the Absolutists, loyal to the Saxon monarch in Dresden, Augustus the Strong; and the City-Estate faction, representing the interests of the mercantile class, the guilds and minor aristocrats. Bach was the nominee of the monarchists, in particular of the Mayor at the time, Gottlieb Lange, a lawyer who had earlier served in the Dresden court. In return for agreeing to Bach's appointment, the City-Estate faction was granted control of the School, and Bach was required to make a number of compromises with respect to his working conditions. Although it appears that no one on the Council doubted Bach's musical genius, there was continual tension between the Cantor, who regarded himself as the leader of church music in the city, and the City-Estate faction, which saw him as a schoolmaster and wanted to reduce the emphasis on elaborate music in both the School and the Churches. The Council never honoured Lange's promise at interview of a handsome salary of 1,000 talers a year, although it did provide Bach and his family with a smaller income and a good apartment at one end of the school building, which was renovated at great expense in 1732.

, in the 21st century]] Bach's job required him to instruct the students of the Thomasschule in singing and to provide weekly music at the two main churches in Leipzig, St. Thomas and St Nicholas. His post obliged him to teach Latin, but he was allowed to employ a deputy to do this instead. In an astonishing burst of creativity, he wrote up to five annual cantata cycles during his first six years in Leipzig (two of which have apparently been lost). Most of these concerted works expound on the Gospel readings for every Sunday and feast day in the Lutheran year; many were written using traditional church hymns, such as Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, and Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern as inspiration for chorale cantatas.

To rehearse and perform these works at St. Thomas Church, Bach probably sat at the harpsichord or stood in front of the choir on the lower gallery at the west end, his back to the congregation and the altar at the east end. He would have looked upwards to the organ that rose from a loft about four metres above. To the right of the organ in a side gallery would have been the winds, brass and timpani; to the left were the strings. The Council provided only about eight permanent instrumentalists, a source of continual friction with the Cantor, who had to recruit the rest of the 20 or so players required for medium-to-large scores from the University, the School and the public. The organ or harpsichord was probably played by the composer (when not standing to conduct), the in-house organist, or one of Bach's elder sons, Wilhelm Friedemann or Carl Philipp Emanuel.

Bach drew the soprano and alto choristers from the School, and the tenors and basses from the School and elsewhere in Leipzig. Performing at weddings and funerals provided extra income for these groups; it was probably for this purpose, and for in-school training, that he wrote at least six motets, mostly for double choir. As part of his regular church work, he performed motets of the Venetian School and Germans such as Heinrich Schütz, which would have served as formal models for his own motets.

Having spent much of the 1720s composing cantatas, Bach had assembled a huge repertoire of church music for Leipzig's two main churches. He now wished to broaden his composing and performing beyond the liturgy. In March 1729, he took over the directorship of the Collegium Musicum, a secular performance ensemble that had been started in 1701 by his old friend, the composer Georg Philipp Telemann. This was one of the dozens of private societies in the major German-speaking cities that had been established by musically active university students; these societies had come to play an increasingly important role in public musical life and were typically led by the most prominent professionals in a city. In the words of Christoph Wolff, assuming the directorship was a shrewd move that 'consolidated Bach's firm grip on Leipzig's principal musical institutions'. During much of the year, Leipzig's Collegium Musicum gave twice-weekly, two-hour performances in Zimmerman's Coffeehouse on Catherine Street, just off the main market square. For this purpose, the proprietor provided a large hall and acquired several musical instruments. Many of Bach's works during the 1730s and 1740s were probably written for and performed by the Collegium Musicum; among these were almost certainly parts of the Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice) and many of the violin and harpsichord concertos.

During this period, he composed the Kyrie and Gloria of the Mass in B minor, and in 1733, he presented the manuscript to the King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and Elector of Saxony, August III in an ultimately successful bid to persuade the monarch to appoint him as Royal Court Composer. He later extended this work into a full Mass, by adding a Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, the music for which was almost wholly taken from some of the best of his cantata movements. Bach's appointment as court composer appears to have been part of his long-term struggle to achieve greater bargaining power with the Leipzig Council. Although the complete mass was probably never performed during the composer's lifetime, it is considered to be among the greatest choral works of all time. Between 1737 and 1739, Bach's former pupil Carl Gotthelf Gerlach took over the directorship of the Collegium Musicum.

In 1747, Bach went to the court of Frederick II of Prussia in Potsdam, where the king played a theme for Bach and challenged him to improvise a fugue based on his theme. Bach improvised a three-part fugue on Frederick's pianoforte, then a novelty, and later presented the king with a Musical Offering which consists of fugues, canons and a trio based on the "royal theme," nominated by the monarch. Its six-part fugue includes a slightly altered subject more suitable for extensive elaboration.

The Art of Fugue, published posthumously but probably written years before Bach's death, is unfinished. It consists of 18 complex fugues and canons based on a simple theme. A magnum opus of thematic transformation and contrapuntal devices, this work is often cited as the summation of polyphonic techniques.

The final work Bach completed was a chorale prelude for organ, dictated to his son-in-law, Johann Altnikol, from his deathbed. Entitled Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (Before thy throne I now appear, BWV 668a); when the notes on the three staves of the final cadence are counted and mapped onto the Roman alphabet, the initials "JSB" are found. The chorale is often played after the unfinished 14th fugue to conclude performances of The Art of Fugue.

Death (1750)

Bach's health may have been in decline in 1749; on 2 June, Heinrich von Brühl wrote to one of the Leipzig burgomasters to request that his music director, Gottlob Harrer, fill the post of Thomascantor and Director musices posts "upon the eventual ... decease of Mr. Bach." Bach became increasingly blind, and the celebrated British eye surgeon John Taylor (who would later operate unsuccessfully on Handel) operated on Bach while visiting Leipzig in 1750. Bach died on 28 July 1750 at the age of 65. A contemporary newspaper reported the cause of death as "from the unhappy consequences of the very unsuccessful eye operation". Some modern historians speculate the cause of death was a stroke complicated by pneumonia. His estate was valued at 1159 thalers and included five Clavecins, two lute-harpsichords, three violins, three violas, two cellos, a viola da gamba, a lute and a spinet, and 52 "sacred books" (many by Martin Luther, Muller and Pfeiffer, including Josephus' History of the Jews and nine volumes of Paul Wagner's Leipzig Song Book).

A modern reconstruction of Bach's head using computer modelling techniques, unveiled 3 March 2008 in Berlin, showed the composer as a strong-jawed man with a slight underbite, his large head topped with short, silver hair.

Musical style

Bach's musical style arose from his extraordinary fluency in contrapuntal invention and motivic control, his flair for improvisation at the keyboard, his exposure to South German, North German, Italian and French music, and his apparent devotion to the Lutheran liturgy. His access to musicians, scores and instruments as a child and a young man, combined with his emerging talent for writing tightly woven music of powerful sonority, appear to have set him on course to develop an eclectic, energetic musical style in which foreign influences were injected into an intensified version of the pre-existing German musical language. Throughout his teens and 20s, his output showed increasing skill in the large-scale organisation of musical ideas, and the enhancement of the Buxtehudian model of improvisatory preludes and counterpoint of limited complexity. The period 1713–14, when a large repertoire of Italian music became available to the Weimar court orchestra, was a turning point. From this time onwards, he appears to have absorbed into his style the Italians' dramatic openings, clear melodic contours, the sharp outlines of their bass lines, greater motoric and rhythmic conciseness, more unified motivic treatment, and more clearly articulated schemes for modulation.

There are several more specific features of Bach's style. The notation of Baroque melodic lines tended to assume that composers would write out only the basic framework, and that performers would embellish this framework by inserting ornamental notes and otherwise elaborating on it. Although this practice varied considerably between the schools of European music, Bach was regarded at the time as being on one extreme end of the spectrum, notating most or all of the details of his melodic lines—particularly in his fast movements—thus leaving little for performers to interpolate. This may have assisted his control over the dense contrapuntal textures that he favoured, which allow less leeway for the spontaneous variation of musical lines. Bach's contrapuntal textures tend to be more cumulative than those of Händel and most other composers of the day, who would typically allow a line to drop out after it had been joined by two or three others. Bach's harmony is marked by a tendency to employ brief tonicisation—subtle references to another key that lasts for only a few beats at the longest—particularly of the supertonic, to add colour to his textures.

At the same time, Bach, unlike later composers, left the instrumentation of major works including The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering open. It is likely that his detailed notation was less an absolute demand on the performer and more a response to a 17th-century culture in which the boundary between what the performer could embellish and what the composer demanded to be authentic was being negotiated.

Bach's apparently devout, personal relationship with the Christian God in the Lutheran tradition and the high demand for religious music of his times inevitably placed sacred music at the centre of his repertory; more specifically, the Lutheran chorale hymn tune, the principal musical aspect of the Lutheran service, was the basis of much of his output. He invested the chorale prelude, already a standard set of Lutheran forms, with a more cogent, tightly integrated architecture, in which the intervallic patterns and melodic contours of the tune were typically treated in a dense, contrapuntal lattice against relatively slow-moving, overarching statements of the tune.

Bach's theology informed his compositional structures: Sei Gegrüsset is perhaps the finest example where there is a theme with 11 variations (making 12 movements) that, while still one work, becomes two sets of six—to match Lutheran preaching principles of repetition. At the same time the theological interpretation of 'master' and 11 disciples would not be lost on his contemporary audience. Further, the practical relationship of each variation to the next (in preparing registration and the expected textural changes) seems to show an incredible capacity to preach through the music using the musical forms available at the time.

Bach's deep knowledge of and interest in the liturgy led to his developing intricate relationships between music and linguistic text. This was evident from the smallest to the largest levels of his compositional technique. On the smallest level, many of his sacred works contain short motifs that, by recurrent association, can be regarded as pictorial symbolism and articulations of liturgical concepts. For example, the octave leap, usually in a bass line, represents the relationship between heaven and earth; the slow, repeated notes of the bass line in the opening movement of cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106) depict the laboured trudging of Jesus as he was forced to drag the cross from the city to the crucifixion site.

On the largest level, the large-scale structure of some of his sacred vocal works is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning: for example, the overall form of the St Matthew Passion illustrates the liturgical and dramatic flow of the Easter story on a number of levels simultaneously; the text, keys and variations of instrumental and vocal forces used in the movements of the Ascension Oratorio Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen, BWV 11) may form a structure that resembles the cross.

Beyond these specific musical features arising from Bach's religious affiliation is the fact that he was able to produce music for an audience that was committed to serious, regular worship, for which a concentrated density and complexity was accepted. His natural inclination may have been to reinvigorate existing forms, rather than to discard them and pursue more dramatic musical innovations. Thus, Bach's inventive genius was almost entirely directed towards working within the structures he inherited, according to most critics and historians.

, composed in 1722 for his second wife]] Bach's inner personal drive to display his musical achievements was evident in a number of ways. The most obvious was his successful striving to become the leading virtuoso and improviser of the day on the organ. Keyboard music occupied a central position in his output throughout his life, and he pioneered the elevation of the keyboard from continuo to solo instrument in his numerous harpsichord concertos and chamber movements with keyboard obbligato, in which he himself probably played the solo part. Many of his keyboard preludes are vehicles for a free improvisatory virtuosity in the German tradition, although their internal organisation became increasingly more cogent as he matured. Virtuosity is a key element in other forms, such as the fugal movement from Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, in which Bach himself may have been the first to play the rapid solo violin passages. Another example is in the organ fugue from BWV 548, a late work from Leipzig, in which virtuosic passages are mapped onto Italian solo-tutti alternation within the fugal development.

Related to his cherished role as teacher was his drive to encompass whole genres by producing collections of movements that thoroughly explore the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in those genres. The most famous examples are the two books of the Well Tempered Clavier, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, in which a variety of contrapuntal and fugal techniques are displayed. The English and French Suites, and the Partitas, all keyboard works from the Köthen period, systematically explore a range of metres and of sharp and flat keys. This urge to manifest structures is evident throughout his life: the Goldberg Variations (1746?), include a sequence of canons at increasing intervals (unison, seconds, thirds, etc.), and The Art of Fugue (1749) can be seen as a compendium of fugal techniques.

Family members

Bach married his second cousin Maria Barbara Bach in 1707. They had seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood:

Catharina Dorothea (1708–74).

Wilhelm Friedemann, "the Halle Bach" (1710–84).

Carl Philipp Emanuel, "the Hamburg Bach" (1714–88).

Johann Gottfried Bernhard (1715–39).

Maria died in 1720, and Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcke in 1721. They had a further 13 children, six of whom survived to adulthood:

Gottfried Heinrich (1724–63)

Elisabeth Juliana Friederica, called "Lieschen" (1726–81)

Johann Christoph Friedrich, "the Bückeburg Bach" (1732–95)

Johann Christian, "the London Bach" (1735–82)

Johanna Carolina (1737–81)

Regina Susanna (1742–1809)

There are direct descendants of him living in Germany.

Works

J.S. Bach's works are indexed with BWV numbers, an initialism for Bach Werke Verzeichnis (Bach Works Catalogue). The catalogue, published in 1950, was compiled by Wolfgang Schmieder. The catalogue is organised thematically, rather than chronologically: BWV 1–224 are cantatas; BWV 225–249, the large-scale choral works; BWV 250–524, chorales and sacred songs; BWV 525–748, organ works; BWV 772–994, other keyboard works; BWV 995–1000, lute music; BWV 1001–40, chamber music; BWV 1041–71, orchestral music; and BWV 1072–1126, canons and fugues. In compiling the catalogue, Schmieder largely followed the Bach Gesellschaft Ausgabe, a comprehensive edition of the composer's works that was produced between 1850 and 1905. For a list of works catalogued by BWV number, see List of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Organ works

Bach was best known during his lifetime as an organist, organ consultant, and composer of organ works in both the traditional German free genres—such as preludes, fantasias, and toccatas—and stricter forms, such as chorale preludes and fugues. He established a reputation at a young age for his great creativity and ability to integrate foreign styles into his organ works. A decidedly North German influence was exerted by Georg Böhm, with whom Bach came into contact in Lüneburg, and Dieterich Buxtehude in Lübeck, whom the young organist visited in 1704 on an extended leave of absence from his job in Arnstadt. Around this time, Bach copied the works of numerous French and Italian composers to gain insights into their compositional languages, and later arranged violin concertos by Vivaldi and others for organ and harpsichord. His most productive period (1708–14) saw the composition of several pairs of preludes and fugues and toccatas and fugues, and of the Orgelbüchlein ("Little organ book"), an unfinished collection of 45 short chorale preludes that demonstrate compositional techniques in the setting of chorale tunes. After he left Weimar, Bach's output for organ fell off, although his best-known works (the six trio sonatas, the "German Organ Mass" in Clavier-Übung III from 1739, and the "Great Eighteen" chorales, revised late in his life) were all composed after this time. Bach was extensively engaged later in his life in consulting on organ projects, testing newly built organs, and dedicating organs in afternoon recitals. One of the high points may be the third part of the Clavier-Übung, a setting of 21 chorale preludes uniting the traditional Catholic Missa with the Lutheran catechism liturgy, the whole set interpolated between the mighty "St. Anne" Prelude and Fugue on the theme of the Trinity.

Other keyboard works

Bach wrote many works for the harpsichord, some of which may have been played on the clavichord. Many of his keyboard works are anthologies that show an eagerness to encompass whole theoretical systems in an encyclopaedic fashion. The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books 1 and 2 (BWV 846–893). Each book comprises a prelude and fugue in each of the 24 major and minor keys in chromatic order from C major to B minor (thus, the whole collection is often referred to as 'the 48'). "Well-tempered" in the title refers to the temperament (system of tuning); many temperaments before Bach's time were not flexible enough to allow compositions to move through more than just a few keys.

The 15 Inventions and 15 Sinfonias (BWV 772–801). These short two- and three-part contrapuntal works are arranged in the same chromatic order as the Well-Tempered Clavier, omitting some of the less used keys. The pieces were intended by Bach for instructional purposes.

Three collections of dance suites: the English Suites (BWV 806–811), the French Suites (BWV 812–817) and the Partitas for keyboard (BWV 825–830). Each collection contains six suites built on the standard model (Allemande–Courante–Sarabande–(optional movement)–Gigue). The English Suites closely follow the traditional model, adding a prelude before the allemande and including a single movement between the sarabande and the gigue. The French Suites omit preludes, but have multiple movements between the sarabande and the gigue. The partitas expand the model further with elaborate introductory movements and miscellaneous movements between the basic elements of the model.

The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), an aria with thirty variations. The collection has a complex and unconventional structure: the variations build on the bass line of the aria, rather than its melody, and musical canons are interpolated according to a grand plan. There are nine canons within the 30 variations, one placed every three variations between variations 3 and 27. These variations move in order from canon at the unison to canon at the ninth. The first eight are in pairs (unison and octave, second and seventh, third and sixth, fourth and fifth). The ninth canon stands on its own due to compositional dissimilarities.

Miscellaneous pieces such as the Overture in the French Style (French Overture, BWV 831), Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (BWV 903), and the Italian Concerto (BWV 971).

Among Bach's lesser known keyboard works are seven toccatas (BWV 910–916), four duets (BWV 802–805), sonatas for keyboard (BWV 963–967), the Six Little Preludes (BWV 933–938), and the Aria variata alla maniera italiana (BWV 989).

Orchestral and chamber music

Bach wrote music for single instruments, duets and small ensembles. Bach's works for solo instruments—the six sonatas and partitas for violin (BWV 1001–1006), the six cello suites (BWV 1007–1012) and the Partita for solo flute (BWV 1013)—may be listed among the most profound works in the repertoire. Bach composed a suite and several other works for solo lute. He wrote trio sonatas; solo sonatas (accompanied by continuo) for the flute and for the viola da gamba; and a large number of canons and ricercare, mostly for unspecified instrumentation. The most significant examples of the latter are contained in The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering.

Bach's best-known orchestral works are the Brandenburg concertos, so named because he submitted them in the hope of gaining employment from Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721; his application was unsuccessful. These works are examples of the concerto grosso genre. Other surviving works in the concerto form include two violin concertos (BWV 1041 and BWV 1042); a Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor (BWV 1043), often referred to as Bach's "double" concerto; and concertos for one, two, three and even four harpsichords. It is widely accepted that many of the harpsichord concertos were not original works, but arrangements of his concertos for other instruments now lost. A number of violin, oboe and flute concertos have been reconstructed from these. In addition to concertos, Bach wrote four orchestral suites, a series of stylised dances for orchestra, each preceded by a French overture. The work now known as the Air on the G String is an arrangement for the violin made in the nineteenth century from the second movement of the Orchestral Suite No. 3. An arrangement of the Air for cello and piano was the very first piece of Bach's music to be recorded, in 1902 in Saint Petersburg, by the Russian cellist Aleksandr Verzhbilovich.

Vocal and choral works

Bach performed a cantata on Sunday at the Thomaskirche, on a theme corresponding to the lectionary readings of the week, as determined by the Lutheran Church Year calendar. He did not perform cantatas during the seasons of Lent and Advent. Although he performed cantatas by other composers, he composed at least three entire sets of cantatas, one for each Sunday and holiday of the church year, at Leipzig, in addition to those composed at Mühlhausen and Weimar. In total he wrote more than 300 sacred cantatas, of which approximately 195 survive.

His cantatas vary greatly in form and instrumentation. Some of them are only for a solo singer; some are single choruses; some are for grand orchestras; some only a few instruments. A common format consists of a large opening chorus followed by one or more recitative-aria pairs for soloists (or duets) and a concluding chorale. The recitative is part of the corresponding Bible reading for the week and the aria is a contemporary reflection on it. The melody of the concluding chorale often appears as a cantus firmus in the opening movement. Among the best known cantatas are Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 (Actus Tragicus), Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140 and Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147.

In addition, Bach wrote a number of secular cantatas, usually for civic events such as council inaugurations. These include wedding cantatas, the Wedding Quodlibet, the Peasant Cantata and the Coffee Cantata, which concerns a girl whose father will not let her marry until she gives up her addiction to that extremely popular drink.

Bach's large choral-orchestral works include the grand scale St Matthew Passion and St John Passion, both written for Good Friday vespers services at St. Thomas and St. Nicholas Churches in alternate years, and the Christmas Oratorio (a set of six cantatas for use in the Liturgical season of Christmas). The Magnificat in two versions (one in E-flat major, with four interpolated Christmas-related movements, and the later and better-known version in D major), the Easter Oratorio, and the Ascension Oratorio compare to large, elaborate cantatas, of a lesser extent than the Passions and the Christmas Oratorio.

Bach's other large work, the Mass in B minor, was assembled by Bach near the end of his life, mostly from pieces composed earlier (such as cantata Gloria in excelsis Deo, BWV 191 and Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12). It was never performed in Bach's lifetime, or even after his death, until the 19th century.

All of these works, unlike the six motets (Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied; Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf; Jesu, meine Freude; Fürchte dich nicht; Komm, Jesu, komm!; and Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden), have substantial solo parts as well as choruses.

Bach's signature in a copy of a three volume Bible commentary by the orthodox Lutheran theologian, Abraham Calov, was discovered in 1934 in a house in Frankenmuth, Michigan in the US. It is not known how the Bible came to America, but it was purchased in a used book store in Philadelphia in the 1830s or 1840s by an immigrant and taken to Michigan. Its provenance was verified and it was subsequently deposited in the rare book holdings of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. It contains Bach's markings of texts for his cantatas and notes. It is only rarely displayed to the public. A study of the so-called Bach Bible was prepared by Robin Leaver, titled J.S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses from the Calov Bible Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1985).

Performances

Present-day Bach performers usually pursue either of two traditions: so-called "authentic performance practice", utilising historical techniques, or alternatively the use of modern instruments and playing techniques, with a tendency towards larger ensembles. In Bach's time orchestras and choirs were usually smaller than those known to, for example, Brahms, and even Bach's most ambitious choral works, such as his Mass in B minor and Passions, are composed for relatively modest forces. Some of Bach's important chamber music does not indicate instrumentation, which gives greater latitude for variety of ensemble.

Easy listening realisations of Bach's music and their use in advertising contributed greatly to Bach's popularisation in the second half of the twentieth century. Among these were the Swingle Singers' versions of Bach pieces that are now well-known (for instance, the Air on the G string, or the Wachet Auf chorale prelude) and Wendy Carlos's 1968 groundbreaking recording Switched-On Bach, using the then recently invented Moog electronic synthesiser. Jazz musicians have adopted Bach's music, with Jacques Loussier, Ian Anderson, Uri Caine and the Modern Jazz Quartet among those creating jazz versions of Bach works.

Legacy and modern reputation

statue of Bach now stands in the Frauenplan in Eisenach. The pedestal has been shortened and the relief is now at the wall in the background.]]

After his death, Bach's reputation as a composer declined; his work was regarded as old-fashioned in favour of the emerging classical style. Initially he was remembered more as a player, teacher and as the father of his children, most notably Johann Christian and Carl Philipp Emanuel. (Two other children, Wilhelm Friedmann and Johann Christoph Friedrich, were composers.)

During this time, his most widely known works were those for keyboard. Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin were among his most prominent admirers. On a visit to the Thomasschule, for example, Mozart heard a performance of one of the motets (BWV 225) and exclaimed "Now, here is something one can learn from!"; on being given the motets' parts, "Mozart sat down, the parts all around him, held in both hands, on his knees, on the nearest chairs. Forgetting everything else, he did not stand up again until he had looked through all the music of Sebastian Bach". Beethoven was a devotee, learning the Well-Tempered Clavier as a child and later calling Bach the "Urvater der Harmonie" ("Original father of harmony") and, in a pun on the literal meaning of Bach's name, "nicht Bach, sondern Meer" ("not a brook, but a sea"). Before performing a concert, Chopin used to lock himself away and play Bach's music. Several notable composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn began writing in a more contrapuntal style after being introduced to Bach's music.

The revival of the composer's reputation among the wider public was prompted in part by Johann Nikolaus Forkel's 1802 biography, which was read by Beethoven. Goethe became acquainted with Bach's works relatively late in life through a series of performances of keyboard and choral works at Bad Berka in 1814 and 1815; in a letter of 1827 he compared the experience of listening to Bach's music to "eternal harmony in dialogue with itself". But it was Felix Mendelssohn who did the most to revive Bach's reputation with his 1829 Berlin performance of the St Matthew Passion. Hegel, who attended the performance, later called Bach a "grand, truly Protestant, robust and, so to speak, erudite genius which we have only recently learned again to appreciate at its full value". Mendelssohn's promotion of Bach, and the growth of the composer's stature, continued in subsequent years. The Bach Gesellschaft (Bach Society) was founded in 1850 to promote the works; by 1899, the Society had published a comprehensive edition of the composer's works, with a conservative approach to editorial intervention.

Thereafter, Bach's reputation has remained consistently high. During the 20th century, the process of recognising the musical as well as the pedagogic value of some of the works has continued, perhaps most notably in the promotion of the Cello Suites by Pablo Casals. Another development has been the growth of the "authentic" or period performance movement, which, as far as possible, attempts to present the music as the composer intended it. Examples include the playing of keyboard works on the harpsichord rather than a modern grand piano and the use of small choirs or single voices instead of the larger forces favoured by 19th- and early 20th-century performers.

Bach's contributions to music—or, to borrow a term popularised by his student Lorenz Christoph Mizler, his "musical science"—are frequently bracketed with those by William Shakespeare in English literature and Isaac Newton in physics. Scientist and author Lewis Thomas once suggested how the people of Earth should communicate with the universe: "I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later."

, Germany]] Some composers have paid tribute to Bach by setting his name in musical notes (B-flat, A, C, B-natural; B-natural is notated as "H" in German musical texts, while B-flat is just "B") or using contrapuntal derivatives. Liszt, for example, wrote a prelude and fugue on this BACH motif in versions for organ and piano). Bach himself set the precedent for this musical acronym, most notably in the final unfinished fugue from Art of Fugue, where it might be interpreted as a signature. While Bach might have conceived this cruciform melody (among other similar ones) as a religious symbol of Christ and the cross, later composers have employed the BACH motif as a secular homage to the composer himself. Examples include Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, Arthur Honegger's Prelude, Arioso and Fughetta on the name BACH, and Brahms's Cello Sonata in E, whose finale is based on themes from the Art of Fugue in general. Another work explicitly influenced by Bach is Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras.

Veneration

Bach is commemorated as a musician in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church on 28 July.

He is honored together with George Frideric Handel and Henry Purcell with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 28 July.

See also

Abraham Calovius, commentator for his three-volume study Bible

List of students of Johann Sebastian Bach

Lutheran Orthodoxy, religious convictions which motivated his sacred works Luther's Small Catechism, he taught this catechism as the Thomascantor in Leipzig. and some of his pieces represent it.

Notes

References

. .

External links

;General reference

The J.S. Bach Home Page – JSBach.org, by Jan Hanford—extensive information on Bach and his works; huge and growing database of user-contributed recordings and reviews

J.S. Bach bibliography, by Yo Tomita of Queen's Belfast—especially useful to scholars

Bach-Cantatas.com, by Aryeh Oron—information on the cantatas as well as other works

Canons and Fugues, by Timothy A. Smith—various information on these contrapuntal works

Fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier: Interactive scores calibrated to recordings by David Korevaar and analysis by Tim Smith.

Bach manuscripts – video lectures by Christoph Wolff on the Bach family's hidden manuscripts archive

BACH & friends Documentary

;Scores

Bach Gesellschaft Download Page—the BGA volumes available for download in DJVU format.

—the BGA volumes split up into individual works (PDF files), plus other editions

;Recordings

Free MP3 recordings of the Motets Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf – BWV 226, Jesu Meine Freude, BWV 227 and Komm, Jesu Komm – BWV 229, from Umeå Akademiska Kör

Mostly organ works by Bach played on virtual instruments

Free recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos in MP3 and FLAC provided by Czech Radio (see FLAC)

Orchestral Suites, Brandenburg Concertos and Keyboard Concertos

In the BBC Discovering Music: Listening Library

Category:1685 births Category:1750 deaths Category:18th-century German people Category:Anglican saints Johann Sebastian Bach Category:Baroque composers Category:Classical composers of church music Category:Composers for cello Category:Composers for lute Category:Composers for pipe organ Category:Composers for violin Category:German composers Category:German classical organists Category:German Lutherans Category:Music from Leipzig Category:Organ improvisers Category:Organists and composers in the North German tradition Category:People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar Category:People from Eisenach Category:People from Saxe-Eisenach