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Johann Sebastian Bach

Biography

[edit] Childhood (1685–1703)
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, a town of some 6,000 residents in the German-speaking electorate of secular music and participation in church music. His uncles were all professional musicians, whose posts ranged from church organists and court chamber musicians to composers. Bach was proud of his family's musical achievements, and around 1735 he drafted a geneaology, "Origin of the musical Bach family",[1] tracing the history of generations of 53 musical Bachs, beginning with Veit (Vitus) Bach (d. 1619) "a white-bread baker in Hungary" who was forced to flee that country because he was a Lutheran and who "found the greatest pleasure in a little Cittern". His son Johannes (d. 1626) became a piper, his son Christoph (1613–61) was an instrumentalist, and his twin son was JS Bach's father.


The house in Eisenach where Bach is said to have been bornBach's mother died in 1694, and his father died the following year. The nine-year-old orphan moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at nearby Ohrdruf. There he copied, studied and performed music, and apparently received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord. He exposed him to the work of the great South German composers of the day—such as Pachelbel and Johann Jakob Froberger—and possibly to the music of North German composers, and of Frenchmen such as Lully, Louis Marchand, Marin Marais, and the Italian clavierist Girolamo Frescobaldi. The young Bach probably witnessed and assisted in the maintenance of the organ. Bach's obituary indicates that he copied music out of Johann Christoph's scores, but his brother had apparenty 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, Georg Erdmann, was awarded a choral scholarship to study at the prestigious St Michael's School in Lüneburg, not far from...