Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 to 1750) was a German composer and organist of the late Baroque period whose output of sacred and secular music, including cantatas, the Mass in B minor, the Brandenburg Concertos, and an extensive body of keyboard and organ works, is regarded as one of the summits of Western contrapuntal composition. Bach spent most of his career as a church musician, serving as organist and later as director of music in Leipzig, where he was responsible for composing and directing music for the city's principal Lutheran churches on a demanding weekly schedule, work he carried out within the framework of Lutheran worship and theology that shaped much of his output. His mastery of counterpoint, the interweaving of independent melodic lines into a coherent harmonic whole, reached its most systematic expression in works such as The Art of Fugue, composed near the end of his life. Bach's music fell into relative neglect for several decades after his death before a nineteenth century revival, associated above all with the composer Felix Mendelssohn, restored him to the central position in the Western musical canon he holds today.