Bach, J.S.: Guitar Transcriptions

Description

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)Guitar Transcriptions Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 at Eisenach, where his father was employed as a town musician and as a member of the court orchestra, the youngest of six children of a family that was part of an extended musical dynasty. After the death of his parents, he moved at the age of ten to Ohrdruf, to the house of his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, organist there at the Michaeliskirche. His schooling in Ohrdruf continued until 1700, when he moved to the Michaelisschule at Lüneburg some two hundred miles away. Two years later he began his professional career with employment at the court in Weimar, followed very shortly by appointment as organist at Arnstadt, where his family had connections. In 1707 some dissatisfaction with the conditions and musical possibilities at Arnstadt led him to enter the necessary test for appointment as organist at Mühlhausen, where he married his first wife, his second cousin Maria Barbara. The following year he was appointed court organist at Weimar, where, as in 1703, he also served as a violinist or viola player in the court orchestra. In 1714 he was appointed Konzertmeister, but his relationship with his employer, Duke Wilhelm Ernst, was uneasy, partly through his collaboration in the musical activities of the co-regent of Weimar, Duke Ernst August. In 1716 Bach was passed over for the position of Kapellmeister, which he might have expected on the death of the existing incumbent, and this led him to look elsewhere. His association with Duke Ernst August provided a way out, when employment as Court Kapellmeister to the Duke’s new brother-in-law, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen was offered on relatively generous terms. Duke Wilhelm Ernst was unwilling to release him from his duties at Weimar, showing his displeasure finally by imprisoning Bach for a month, before dismissing him from his service. The court at Cöthen offered all that Bach could have wished. Prince Leopold was young and an enthusiastic musical amateur and the Pietist persuasions of the court meant that there was no call for church music. Instead Bach could devote himself primarily to secular music for the court orchestra and its members in a fruitful series of concertos, sonatas and suites. The period was a happy one for Bach, marred only by the sudden death of his wife in 1720, while he was at Carlsbad in the company of the Prince. The following year he married again. His new wife, Anna Magdalena, was the youngest daughter of the court trumpeter at Weissenfels and employed as a court singer at Cöthen. Prince Leopold’s marriage in the same year to a woman whom Bach described as ‘amusica’, however, made life at court much less satisfactory. In December 1722 Bach applied for the position of Cantor in Leipzig, where he moved the following spring, exchanging his position at a princely court for the duties of organist and choirmaster, soon to be varied