Steven Isserlis - Bach Cello Suites

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in the town of Eisenach (where Martin Luther had attended school about 190 years earlier) in 1685, on what was then 21 March but now, thanks to the change to the Gregorian calendar, answers to the name of 31 March. Bachs family were almost all musicians; particularly appropriate, since their surname aside from meaning brook is one of the few that can be entirely converted into musical notes (in the German system the letter B is used for the note we know as B flat, the letter H for our B natural). Orphaned before the age of ten, little Bach was taken in by an elder brother, Johann Christoph, an organist, who made a start on J. S.s musical education; it can be assumed that the latter was a more than willing pupil. The obituary published a few years after Bachs death written by Johann Friedrich Agricola, a musical theoretician, in collaboration with the most famous of Bachs four renowned composer sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel tells us a rather charming, if sad, story. Shortly after commencing his studies, little Johann Sebastian longed to play more challenging pieces than those his brother was giving him. Having espied a manuscript volume of promising-looking keyboard works belonging to Johann Christoph, he begged to be allowed to learn them. His brother sternly prohibited it, and shut the volume away in a bookshelf secured with a latticed front. He had not reckoned, however, with the delicacy of little Bachs hands; waiting until his brother was safely in bed, Johann Sebastian would steal up to the cupboard, push his fingers through the small holes, roll up the volume and extract it. Although he was not allowed a candle of his own (his brother sounds as strict as any father), he would copy the music on nights during which the moon shone through his window. Alas, scarcely had he completed the mammoth task, which had taken him six months, when Johann Christoph found out, and as a punishment hid both original and copy; our Bach had to wait many years, until after his brothers lamented death, before he could recover them.

Despite this setback, J. S.s musical studies must have progressed brilliantly, and in 1703 he was engaged for his first proper job, as organist in the town of Arnstadt. It cannot be said to have gone smoothly, however. Bach was perhaps not the ideal employee: aside from his gripes about the musical idiocies of the town council, he managed during this time to get into an unseemly brawl with a bassoonist, who accused him of having insulted both his playing and his instrument; to take three months unauthorised leave; to quarrel with various students; and ahem to be accused of inviting a stranger maiden to make music (!) in the church. (In later life, Bach forbade the telling of many stories from his early life. I wonder what else happened?) Furthermore, the council complained that at the organ Bach mingled many strange tones to the chorale, thereby confusing the congregation. It must have been rather a relief to some of the Arnstadt councillors, if not to the music-lovers, when in 1707 Bach resigned and went to take up a new job in nearby Mhlhausen. Here, once his new employers had mastered his admittedly complicated surname (in the first of the few surviving documents they call him Herr Pach, in the second Herr Bache), things seem to have gone better. Nevertheless, the following year he accepted a more lucrative and prestigious offer of employment in a major town, Weimar, where he was to remain until 1717. Despite the brevity of Bachs stay in Mhlhausen, one very important event in his life occurred there: he married his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach.