It was 280 miles north of his then current position in Arnstadt, definitely a long journey to make on foot, but determination was without a doubt one of Bach’s main qualities.
CALM RADIO JS BACH SERIES
When notice spread that the revered Dietrich Buxtehude, at the time an 68 year old organist and composer, was going to present a series of concerts under the tile “Abendmusik”, meaning evening music in German, the young Bach decidedly set off on the long journey through the old salt route to Lübeck on foot. In 1705, Bach was already an accomplished musician even at the young age of twenty, nevertheless, he still believed that he had much to learn. To begin this account of some of the most interesting events of Bach’s life, we are going to present the famous 280-mile walk story. Concertos, suites, partitas, organ preludes, inventions, preludes and fugues flood his catalogue by the hundreds with a level of uniformity in quality and content that few others have come close to. He was also a prolific composer of instrumental music, especially for the instruments he mastered, the harpsichord, the organ and the violin. His works are therefore very related to the sacred vocal and church music traditions featuring hundreds of cantatas, passions, masses, chorales and motets. Over the course of his long life (65 years was a long time to live in the eighteenth century), Johann Sebastian Bach worked almost exclusively for the church and the occasional private patron. Bach’s life’s work has been the object of extensive musicological study, and the modern catalogue features over eleven hundred completed works which have survived into our days, with many pieces having been lost. His accomplishments are varied and far reaching, including the composition of such a colossal corpus of works of classical music that cannot be appropriately conveyed in a few words, yet, the sheer monumentality of his oeuvre is not the most dazzling it is the level of consistency and speed at which he composed these works. This statement cannot be stressed enough, what Bach achieved as a composer has never been and probably will never be equaled by another human being. As the English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner (one of the world’s leading interpreters of Bach’s music) stated, “Bach’s sheer stature as a composer is baffling and in many respects out of scale with all normal human achievement”.
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