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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) left more than a thousand surviving works, from church cantatas to keyboard pieces, concertos and chamber music. They are numbered in the BWV catalogue; his first Cello Suite, for example, is known as BWV 1007.

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BWV stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, German for “catalogue of Bach's works”. The musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder published it in 1950 and gave every known piece a number, grouped by type rather than by date: the church cantatas come first, as BWV 1 to 200, and the organ, keyboard, chamber and orchestral works follow. A revised third edition, prepared with the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, appeared in 2022. Dozens of cantatas are known to be lost, partly because his manuscripts were divided among his sons after his death in 1750, and not all of them looked after their share. After his death most of his music fell out of use, apart from keyboard works studied by musicians such as Mozart and Beethoven, until Felix Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion, Bach's great choral setting of the suffering and death of Jesus, in Berlin in 1829.

Türkçe oku
Johann Sebastian Bach'ın (1685–1750) günümüze ulaşan binden fazla eseri var: kilise kantatlarından klavye parçalarına, konçertolardan oda müziğine kadar. Bu eserler BWV kataloğunda numaralanır; örneğin 1 Numaralı Çello Süiti BWV 1007 olarak bilinir.

BWV, Almanca Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis'in, yani “Bach Eserleri Kataloğu”nun kısaltmasıdır. Müzikolog Wolfgang Schmieder kataloğu 1950'de yayımladı ve bilinen her esere bir numara verdi. Eserleri tarihe göre değil türe göre sıraladı: Kilise kantatları BWV 1–200 numaralarıyla başta gelir; org, klavye, oda müziği ve orkestra eserleri onları izler. Leipzig'deki Bach Arşivi'yle birlikte hazırlanan gözden geçirilmiş üçüncü baskı 2022'de çıktı. Onlarca kantatın kaybolduğu biliniyor. Bunun bir nedeni, Bach 1750'de ölünce el yazmalarının oğulları arasında paylaştırılması ve hepsinin kendi payına aynı özeni göstermemesidir. Ölümünden sonra müziğinin büyük bölümü, Mozart ve Beethoven gibi müzisyenlerin üzerinde çalıştığı klavye eserleri dışında unutuldu. 1829'da Felix Mendelssohn, İsa'nın çektiği acıları ve ölümünü anlatan büyük koro eseri Matta Pasyonu'nu Berlin'de uzun bir aradan sonra seslendirince Bach yeniden keşfedildi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
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In his lifetime Bach was famous as an organist and harpsichord player, and churches invited him to test and open their new organs. He wrote his keyboard music for the organ, the harpsichord and the clavichord. The piano was still a new invention, and the modern concert grand did not yet exist.

The three instruments sound very different. On an organ, air is blown through pipes. On a harpsichord, pressing a key makes a small quill pluck the string, so the player cannot make one note louder than another by touch. On the clavichord, a small brass blade strikes the string and stays against it, which allows fine shading but is too quiet for a hall. The piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700, let players play both soft and loud; its full name, pianoforte, means “soft-loud” in Italian. In the 1730s the German builder Gottfried Silbermann showed Bach one of his early pianos. Bach found the high notes too weak. In 1747, at the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great, he improvised on an improved model, and he later helped to sell Silbermann's pianos.

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Between June 1724 and March 1725, Bach wrote about 40 cantatas in a row for the churches of Leipzig, one for almost every Sunday and holiday. A cantata is a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra sung during the service, and each of these was built on a well-known Lutheran hymn, using its words and its tune.

Bach became Thomaskantor, the director of church music in Leipzig, in 1723, and in his first year he supplied a cantata almost every week, some adapted from earlier works. For his second year he set himself a plan: each cantata would be built on one Lutheran hymn, or chorale. The opening chorus sets the first verse with the hymn tune in the sopranos, the middle verses are reworded for solo singers, and a plain four-part setting of the last verse closes the piece. The idea may have been inspired by the 200th anniversary of the first Lutheran hymn books, printed in 1524. The series stopped after Palm Sunday 1725, possibly because the writer who reworded the hymns for him, probably Andreas Stübel, had died that January. The Bach scholar Klaus Hofmann has called it the largest musical project Bach ever undertook.

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

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John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.

Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.

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Next card in the archiveBetween June 1724 and March 1725, Bach wrote about 40 cantatas in a row for the churches of Leipzig, one for almost every Sunday and holiday. A cantata is a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra sung during the service, and each of these was built on a well-known Lutheran hymn, using its words and its tune.Read next →