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FOR ALL ITS SPIRES AND WATCHTOWERS AND RED-roofed houses, its cobblestoned market square bordered by church, town hall, and castle, the residents of Eisenach would not have called their hometown charming. To get a sense of Eisenach as it was when Sebastian Bach was a boy, one must conjure up the scent of animal dung from the livestock that shared its streets and walkways, the putrid breeze that wafted from the fish market and slaughterhouse in the square, and, under those red-tiled roofs, a general atmosphere strongly redolent of life before plumbing. The homes of all but Eisenach’s wealthiest residents were small—close and hot in the summer, frigid and smoky in winter—and crowded. At one point in the Bach household, Sebastian lived with seven siblings as well as two cousins (orphans from Ambrosius’s family whose parents had died of the plague) and his father’s apprentices. Death being the family’s constant visitor, Sebastian lost a brother when he was two months old, a sister died when he had just turned one, and his childhood continued to be punctuated, repeatedly and intimately, by death. In addition to the loss of numerous more distant relatives, his eighteen-year-old brother Balthasar died when he was six, and the next year one of the cousins who had been in the house his whole life died at sixteen. Both had been apprentices for his father, and Sebastian would have followed them about his father’s daily rounds, learning as he saw them learn and helping them with what small chores he could. These deaths, as difficult as they may have been, would not be the most painful losses to mark his youth and his character. Of the deaths in his adult life, it is enough for now to say that he buried twelve of his twenty children. Against this backdrop, the elaborately formal topiary gardens of the Baroque, inspired by the idea that nature needs to be tamed and improved, seem entirely understandable.

What Eisenach had in great abundance, the solace and balm of its six thousand souls, was music. In the villages of Thuringia, by an account that dates from the year of Bach’s birth, “farmers … know their instruments [and] make all sorts of string music in the villages with violins, violas, viola da gambas, harpsichords, spinets and small zithers, and often we also find in the most modest church music some works for the organ with arrangements and variations that are astonishing.” Among the Bachs especially, music was a powerful tonic, and it helped to keep the extended family together. Once a year, as Carl told Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, they gathered at one or another Thuringian town for a day of festivities at which music of a sort not meant for the church was the main event. “They sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different. They called this kind of extemporary harmony a Quodlibet, and not only laughed heartily at it themselves, but excited an equally hearty and irresistible laughter in everybody that heard them.”

Every day of Sebastian’s childhood was filled with music. His father, as director of town music and the town band, was chief dispenser of all the instrumental music in town, and his house was as busy with it as a conservatory’s practice rooms. Every morning at ten and afternoon at five, looking over the marketplace from the balcony of the town hall, Ambrosius Bach’s band played dances and folk tunes and the chorales that Luther and Lutheranism had made the most cherished of popular songs. The ensemble for such “tower pieces” included violin, viola da gamba, and other strings, brass, flutes, oboes and other reeds, and various percussion instruments. The town band numbered only five, but each member was trained on several instruments, and there were the apprentices and journeymen to call on.

Ambrosius also played regularly at St. George’s and in the duke’s court Kapelle, as did his older cousin Christoph, organist for the court as well as for the city’s three main churches. Sebastian’s “uncle” Christoph appears to have been a bit of a crank. He complained chronically of being short of funds and badly kept (he was finally given a home and stable at the Prince’s Mint, a rather grand establishment for an organist), but despite having more than sufficient skill and reputation to better himself, he complained about the same job for sixty years. Having a family member under his watch whom he could not quite control would have been an embarrassment for Ambrosius, and in fact, whether for this reason or another, the two men did not get along. But for Sebastian, having Uncle Christoph around was very good luck. Ambrosius gave the boy his first instruction on stringed instruments, but it was Uncle Christoph who would have given him his first inside view of the bellows, action, and pipes of the church organ, which with the possible exception of the clock was the most complicated mechanism of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the family’s greatest musician before Sebastian and the only person writing serious new music in Eisenach, a musician even more accomplished than Ambrosius, Christoph was also the boy’s first model as a composer. One of Sebastian’s favorite works by Christoph was an elaborate piece for choir and orchestra in which the archangel Michael and his celestial host take on Satan in the form of a dragon along with his cohort of dark angels, a story taken from Revelations 12:7–12:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels.… The great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Scored for two choirs, eight stringed instruments, organ, trumpets, and timpani, it must have been a sensation in its first performance on St. Michael’s Day, but we do not know whether young Sebastian was struck more by the beauty of the work or by the thrilling story of an archangel fighting a fire-breathing monster.

Childhood then being an unprivileged state, in which children were considered simply small, unready adults, Ambrosius would have pressed Sebastian into service as soon as he was able, just as he had pressed all his sons into such menial tasks as cleaning brass and stringing violins. Sebastian’s boyhood was anything but carefree. Infractions were severely punished, at home and at St. George’s School, where the eighty-one children in Sebastian’s quinta^* class were packed into one small room whose high Gothic windows were filled not with sunlight and sky but the gray stone walls of the church. The school day ran in two sessions, mornings from seven to ten and afternoons from one to three, which left time for midday and late-afternoon work at home. The only vacation they had during the twelve-month school year was at harvesttime, which was no vacation. Choristers like Sebastian had longer hours than others to accommodate music classes and rehearsals; they had performances every Sunday and feast day and at weddings and funerals. A few times a year Sebastian would also join some of his fellow choristers to sing in the streets of Eisenach and nearby villages for small donations, called Chorgeld, a source of income for Sebastian throughout his school years.

Martin Luther had done the same thing early in the previous century, an experience that helped to seal his love of music and its place in the Lutheran liturgy. Music had had a somewhat ambiguous history in the church before the Reformation; some of the early church fathers, even Saint Augustine, were suspicious of its emotional power, but Luther put an end to that too.

You will find that from the beginning of the world [music] has been instilled and implanted in all creatures, individually and collectively. For nothing is without sound or harmony.… Music is a gift and largesse of God, not a human gift. Praise through word and music is a sermon in sound.

Sebastian had Luther to thank that his youth had at least the light of music in it.

ALL OTHER LIGHT was shut off abruptly in his ninth year. In the spring, his mother died. In the fall, his father, having quickly remarried, died as well, leaving his second wife a widow and Sebastian, suddenly, an orphan. Though more common in those days, losing both parents was just as disorienting as it has ever been. Like all newly orphaned children, Sebastian would have felt abandoned, hurt, angry; and if he had had any wish to stay in Eisenach with Uncle Christoph or his new stepmother, it was not fulfilled. He was sent to Ohrdruf, a nearby town, to live with a brother he barely knew.

This brother, also named Christoph, the oldest child of Sebastian’s parents, had left home when Sebastian was an infant to apprentice himself to the composer and family friend Johann Pachelbel. Now he was the organist in Ohrdruf, a town much smaller than Eisenach but, in spiritual terms at least, a great deal more intense. While Eisenach was orthodox Lutheran to the core, Ohrdruf was riven, a center of the fierce rivalry between orthodoxy and a more ascetic, devotional form of Protestantism known as Pietism. Over the past century and a half of the Reformation, orthodox Lutheranism had gradually allowed itself to be ground into doctrinal minutiae by constant intersectarian brawling. Lutheran pastors were reduced to giving long-winded sermons on petty theological issues useful mainly for showing how important it was not to be Calvinist or Anabaptist. Pietism, drawing inspiration from such Christian mystics as Thomas à Kempis, Johannes Tauler, and Bernard of Clairvaux, set out to reclaim some of the spiritual energy of the early Reformation by stressing the inner, spiritual life, the daily struggle for meaning, and in doing so they drew sympathizers from all Protestant sects. The Calvinist king of Prussia, Frederick William I, father of Frederick the Great, was one. His Lutheran contemporary Sebastian Bach was another. Though he remained in the camp of the orthodox Lutheran church all his life, Sebastian’s sense of vocation as a church musician was rooted in the mystic spirituality of Pietism, an influence that took hold of him here, in Ohrdruf, and in the deepest grief of his childhood.

His commitment to religious studies at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, where the Pietist-orthodox struggle was played out every day, is plain to see in his class standing. When he left Eisenach he was twenty-third in his class at St. George’s (he had missed weeks of school during his parents’ illnesses, so he did well to keep his standing that high). Despite Ohrdruf’s more rigorous standard’s, he finished his first year of tenia in fourth place, and the next year, at age twelve the youngest in his class, he finished first.

There is something melancholy about this academic success, however, the suspicion that his redoubled focus on his work was more than anything else a distraction from his pain—that he was drawn to theology, as he would be drawn to the cold logic of counterpoint, out of a wish for order in his life. The death of both parents is not easily overcome in an adult, not to mention a small, unready adult. Maybe it is never overcome. In any case, from this time forward and for the rest of his life, Sebastian would pursue order, perfection, and spiritual meaning in his music, and never more movingly so than on the theme of triumph over death.

ONE OF THE MOST vivid stories of Sebastian’s years in his brother’s house in Ohrdruf concerns a collection of music Christoph had got from Pachelbel. He kept it locked in a cabinet, but one whose door was a grille through which ten-year-old Sebastian could just barely squeeze a hand. At night, when his brother was asleep, he would reach in, roll up the book of music, pull it out, and since he had no lamp, so the story goes, he would copy it by moonlight. Six months later, just about the time he had finished copying the manuscript, his brother discovered what he had done and took his copy of the book away. Sebastian himself had to have perpetuated this story, perhaps to demonstrate his youthful defiance, a quality that would have been healing for him at such a time. Increasingly that quality would come to the foreground of his character, and naturally so: Martin Luther was his model, after all, a man whose entire career was a heroic act of defiance.

The meaning taken from the story of the “moonlight manuscript” is usually the drive with which Sebastian undertook his own musical education, a drive sufficient to keep him up all night copying music, but the oddest part of the story is his brother’s role in it. Why would he have taken away the copy Sebastian had made, and why did he forbid its use in the first place? This part of the story would make no sense if there were not other stories like it. The organist and Bach scholar David Yearsley cites a letter from the composer and theorist J. G. Walther to the well-known cantor Heinrich Bokemeyer—both of whom were renowned for their knowledge of counterpoint—in which Walther complains that his teacher had made him pay to see a musical treatise, then stood over him as he read it and only allowed him to copy a little at any one time. Finally, Walther resorted to bribing his teacher’s son to smuggle the work to him at night, when he was able to copy it in one sitting.

Yearsley cited Walther’s letter to demonstrate the connection between the practice of learned counterpoint and that of alchemy, the then still-active search for the elusive “philosopher’s stone” that could mediate the transformation of base metal into gold, and the connections he found are indeed intriguing. Like alchemy, the roots of counterpoint were centuries old. Ever since the early Middle Ages, when the single chanted line of Gregorian plainsong gave way grudgingly to the presence of another voice, the rich acoustic medium of the medieval stone church had encouraged composers’ experiments writing note against note (punctus contra punctum) and eventually of braiding related vocal lines through one another to form increasingly rich weaves of melody. The most rigorous such part writing, such as canon and fugue, came to be known collectively as learned counterpoint, and its elaborated codes and principles were handed down as carefully and discreetly as the secrets of alchemy, from artifex to artifex (the Latin term for alchemist, which Bokemeyer used to describe the composer of counterpoint as well).

Just as the alchemist’s ambition was to discover God’s laws for “perfecting” iron into gold, the learned composer’s job was to attempt to replicate in earthly music the celestial harmony with which God had joined and imbued the universe, and so in a way to take part in the act of Creation itself. Understanding what possessed young Sebastian to spend his nights trying to steal his brother’s notebook (after very long days at school and more daily hours at his music practice) requires understanding how the practice of threading musical voices into the fabric of counterpoint could have been endowed with such metaphysical power.

The key is music’s relation to number, a connection that was as old as Plato and as new as Newton, dating from the mythic day in the sixth century B.C. when Pythagoras heard a hammer strike an anvil. In his Textbook of Harmony of the second century A.D., Nichomachus of Gerasa recorded the moment:

One day he was out walking, lost in his reflections [when he] happened by a providential coincidence to pass by a blacksmith’s workshop … and heard there quite clearly the iron hammers … giving forth confusedly intervals which, with the exception of one, were perfect consonances. He recognized among these sounds the consonances of the diapason (octave), diapente (fifth) and diatessaron (fourth).… Thrilled, he entered the shop as if a god were aiding his plans.…

It is a lovely and dubious story that later gets a bit loopy, perhaps through centuries of retelling. As a historical figure, Pythagoras is irretrievably lost in myth, in part because he forbade his disciples to write down anything he said. There is little reason to believe he did not exist, but it may have been someone else, perhaps one of his followers, who figured out Euclid’s “Theorem of Pythagoras,” which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. That was one of the Pythagoreans’ more useful ideas. They also posited the existence of a “counter-earth” because they could make out only nine planetary bodies and there had to be ten because ten was the perfect number.

For Western music, the most important discovery attributed to Pythagoras was that halving a string doubles its frequency, creating an octave with the full string in the proportion of 1:2. A little further experimentation showed that the interval of a fifth was sounded when string lengths were in the proportion of 2:3, the fourth in that of 3:4, and so on. This congruence was taken to have great cosmic significance. As elaborated over a few centuries around the time B.C. became A.D., the thinking (much oversimplified) was that such a sign of order had to be reflective of a larger, universal design—and sure enough, the same musical proportions were found in the distances between the orbits of the planets. Further, since such enormous bodies could not possibly orbit in complete silence, they must be sounding out these intervals together, playing a constant celestial harmony. Certified by Plato’s Republic and Timaeus, where the celestial music is said to be sung by sirens seated aboard their respective planets, the mathematical-cosmic nature of music was transmitted to Baroque composers and their predecessors by the Roman scholar Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, whose sixth-century writings constituted the most widely read treatise on music theory for the next thousand years.

Of course such a perfectly ordered universe could only be the work of God, the all-encompassing One (represented by the unison in the proportion 1:1), and the unswerving reliability of this order was taken as proof of His continuing presence in the world. Despite that, the early church fathers continued to oppose anything but plainsong in the liturgy, hearing the work of the devil in more elaborate music. Saint Augustine finally resolved the question in favor of liberating music to glorify God, but not without torment.

I waver between the danger that lies in gratifying the senses and the benefits which, as I know from experience, can accrue from singing. Without committing myself to an irrevocable opinion, I am inclined to approve the custom of singing in church, in order that by indulging the ears weaker spirits may be inspired with feelings of devotion. Yet when I find the singing itself more moving than the truth which it conveys, I confess that this is a grievous sin, and at those times I would prefer not to hear the singer.

Of critical importance for Bach and his time, Martin Luther sided with the Platonic idea of music as evidence of divine order, and he set out to rehabilitate Pythagoras as a servant of God. In his commentary on Genesis he laments the fact that “we have become deaf toward what Pythagoras aptly terms this wonderful and most lovely music coming from the harmony of the spheres.” No less than the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler gave Luther’s position the stamp of scientific certainty in his great work, Harmonices Mundi, where he correlates the orbits of the planets to the intervals of the scale and finds them to be “nothing other than a continuous, many voiced music (grasped by the understanding, not the ear).” This last point was debated: Some thought the celestial music was abstract, an ephemeral spiritual object, but others insisted it was real, inaudible to us only because it had been sounding constantly in the background from the time of our birth. In either case music was a manifestation of the cosmic order. “Now one will no longer be surprised,” Kepler wrote, “that man has formed this most excellent order of notes or steps into the musical system or scale, since one can see that in this matter he acts as nothing but the ape of God the Creator, playing, as it were, a drama about the order of celestial motions.” One of his chapters is titled “There Are Universal Harmonies of All Six Planets, Similar to Common Four-Part Counterpoint.”

Never were allegories packed into music more enthusiastically than in Bach’s time. Andreas Werckmeister was far from alone in attaching specific integers, for example, to the Trinity: 1 stood for the Father, 2 for the Son, 3 for the Holy Spirit, the last being the sum and proportion of Father and Son (1:2, a unison at the octave). Elsewhere we find that 4 represented the four elements of matter and the four seasons, that 5 meant justice (because it stands at the center of the first ten numbers) and humanity (five senses and the five appendages of arms, legs, and head). Saint Augustine favored the number 6 (creation took six days, so God must have found 6 to be a perfect number), 7 stood for the planets, virtues, liberal arts, deadly sins, and ages of man (although sometimes it is said not to stand for anything, since on the seventh day God rested). Twelve covered apostles, months, prophets, etc. Then there were the combinations, for example: 7 being 3 (the Trinity) plus 4 (elements of matter), and 12 being 3 (ditto) times 4 (ditto), it followed (trust me) that 7 and 12 were perfect numbers. And so on. All this from Pythagoras, whose followers thought the best number was 10 because it was the sum of 1, 2, 3, and 4, elemental components of the “figured number” known as the Pythagorean Tetraktys:

It is easy to have fun with number theory, and some of the best such fun is in the distant reaches of the Bach literature, where one can read, for example, that he left a prophecy in musical code of the date of his death on the Rosicrucian calendar. On the other hand, it is only the extent to which Bach’s music contains meanings coded in numbers that is hotly debated. The fact that it contains such coded meanings is not.

Cosmological harmony was actually one of the few ideas on which the philosophers, scientists, and theologians of Bach’s time were agreed. Newton, for example, could not imagine that a world as orderly as this one could have occurred by “natural Cause alone.” A “powerful, ever-living Agent … governs all things,” he concluded, “not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all.” Newton’s Agent was Luther’s Celestial Contrapuntist, whose woven voices were like so many planetary orbits.

We marvel when we hear music in which one voice sings a simple melody, while three, four, or five other voices play and trip lustily around … reminding us of a heavenly dance.

This heavenly dance was nowhere more sublime than in canon, the strictest form of contrapuntal writing, in which an entire piece of music is built from a single melodic phrase playing over itself at different intervals of time and key, in varying rhythms and tempi, sometimes appearing backward, inside out, or upside down, and sometimes continuing, at least theoretically, forever. Andreas Werckmeister drew the analogy of cosmos to counterpoint even more explicitly than Luther had done:

The heavens are now revolving and circulating steadily so that one [body] now goes up but in another time it changes again and comes down.… We also have these mirrors of heaven and nature in musical harmony, because a certain voice can be the highest voice, but can become the lowest or middle voice, and the lowest and middle can again become the highest.…[In the case of canon] one voice can become all the other voices and no other voice must be added.…

Another of Bach’s contemporaries imagined the moment when the first contrapuntist, stumbling on a perpetual canon, found “the beginning and end bound together” and discovered “the eternal unending origins as well as the harmony of all eternity”

From such a celestial height, perhaps it is possible to look again at a young boy copying music from his brother’s notebook on a moonlit night and see what he is doing a bit more clearly. The composers in the “moonlight manuscript”—Kerll, Froberger, Pachelbel—were the reigning masters of counterpoint, men who knew about the great design, who plied its strings and levers. To a boy so recently an orphan, simply the belief that there was such a design—that God was present in an orderly universe—must have been as comforting as it was elusive. His brother’s notebook was the closest Sebastian had ever come to such an idea of life and music, and the gesture of putting his hand through the grille of that cupboard was about more than the desire for a musical education: He was reaching for answers. Christoph had been Pachelbel’s (the sorcerer’s) apprentice, so the secrets in his notebook were worth any amount of lost sleep to Sebastian. But in this light, Christoph’s attitude is no less understandable: What gave his little brother, a schoolboy, the right to such precious and hard-won knowledge? Of course his brother took away Sebastian’s copy of the notebook, and of course he would have forbidden anyone to copy it in the first place.

Such a reading of this anecdote requires no great psychoanalytic reach. Sebastian’s worldview was profoundly allegorical, like that of his time and culture. The favored allegories at the time were Lutheran, of course, but not exclusively so. After all, Kepler had read horoscopes, and both Newton and Leibniz still had hopes for alchemy. Efforts to advance the education of Sebastian’s day could hardly be called enlightened, confounded as they still were by ignorance and superstition. The seventeenth-century educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius, for example, introduced physics into the curriculum, but it was a physics in which the world’s qualities were exactly three: “consistence, oleosity and aquasity,” the attributes of salt, sulfur, and mercury, a decidedly medieval stew. So Sebastian’s education was as thoroughly theological, or, more broadly, mythological, as his father’s and grandfather’s had been.

In tertia, where Sebastian began his Lyceum studies in Ohrdruf, there was some reading of classics and history, but it was carefully edited for religious content; most of his class time was spent on Scripture and the catechism. In secunda and the first part of prima, he got lots of Latin—especially rhetoric and oratory—as well as some Greek, math, history and science, but his hardest work was on Leonhard Hutter’s exhaustive and exhausting exegesis on Lutheran doctrine, the Compendium locorum theologicorum, hundreds and hundreds of pages in Latin, great chunks of which he was expected to memorize.

Given his class standing, he obviously mastered it, but it is difficult to see how, even for someone trying to throw himself into work. Outside of class, the lovely singing voice that got him his scholarship made him an anchor not only of the chorus musicus but also of a smaller group that did advanced works for the church as well as weddings and funerals. At the same time he must have been practicing the organ and harpsichord for long hours every day. He credited his brother Christoph with giving him his first keyboard lessons, but by the time he left Ohrdruf, after only five years, his technical mastery was already prodigious. The transformation of a novice into a budding virtuoso in five years would have been a remarkable feat even without all his other work, an accomplishment for which even the best teacher could not take credit.

TEN DAYS BEFORE his fifteenth birthday, Sebastian put his clothes in a bag, strung a violin over his shoulder, and set out, on foot, for a new school more than two hundred miles away. Nobody in his family had ventured so far from their Thuringian heartland, but of course Sebastian was not anybody else. The move was forced on him. Christoph’s home was becoming overcrowded as his family grew, and Sebastian could no longer pay for his keep because for unknown reasons he had lost his job as a tutor to the children of wealthy citizens. He may have felt he was being orphaned yet again, but in fact the offer of a choral scholarship to St. Michael’s Lyceum in Lunüeburg, a town almost four times the size of Ohrdruf, was providential. His brother would probably have told him not to go there but to apprentice himself to a master as Christoph had done at this age. None of Sebastian’s siblings or ancestors had gone as far in school as he had gone already. But there was a wonderful library at St. Michael’s, with a famous collection of all the contrapuntal art of Europe; and Lüneburg was not far from Hamburg, the largest and most musical city in Germany.

For a boy who had known only Eisenach and Ohrdruf, Lüneburg was another country, with large open public squares, Renaissance architecture, and a distractingly robust musical life. We know that Sebastian graduated St. Michael’s, but there are no claims for his academic excellence there. When his voice changed soon after he arrived, he kept his music scholarship by singing bass and playing keyboards and violin, but apart from choral service the plainest trail he left in Luüneburg was extravagantly extracurricular.

While St. Michael’s tried to teach him yet more Latin, Sebastian taught himself French and Italian, which he needed to make his way through the music library. As Leo Schrade noted in his deceptively small book, Bach: The Conflict Between the Sacred and the Secular, the richness of the library at St. Michael’s must have been dazzling to Sebastian but also somewhat disorienting: There was a great deal of German church music in the collection, but none of it was as German as it was the work of German composers writing in French or English or Italian or Dutch, the problem that sent Handel off to Italy and Telemann into the opera. After serving as a battleground for the great powers, Germany had not developed its own musical (or any other) traditions since the Thirty Years War so much as it absorbed them, a fact which Bach’s foremost predecessor, the great composer Heinrich Schütz, bemoaned in his late life even as he continued to write in the style of Monteverdi. German princes spoke French. The best music came to Germany from Venice or Amsterdam—by sea, to the port of Hamburg.

Hamburg thus became the seedbed of change for German music, and in search of Germany’s musical future and his own, Sebastian more than once made the arduous several days’ walk to Hamburg and back, taking on the role of journeyman musician. Hamburg had not only a robust, distinctly German school of organists but also an opera. Astride both was the octogenarian Johann Adam Reinken, organist at St. Catherine’s Church and one of the opera’s founders. Reinken’s magnificent organ, with its four keyboards, fifty-eight stops, and full pedal keyboard, had enormous range and power—from the great thirty-two-foot pipes and their thunderous bass to the tiniest whistles, for piccolo and flute. Reinken’s was the largest organ Bach had ever seen and became the measure by which he would judge all others. Perhaps first at Reinken’s Hamburg apartment, he came under the influence of the great Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St. Mary’s in Lübeck and a composer of outsize ambition and ability who was working with all the styles and traditions of Europe. Buxtehude would have a more than musical influence on Sebastian in his first job, and it was in him perhaps more than anywhere else that Sebastian would find the inspiration for what was perhaps his greatest gift to Western culture: forging from a multinational babel a single language of European music.

SIXTY MILES OF very bad roads from St. Michael’s school in Lüneburg, in another direction entirely from the road to Hamburg, lay one of Germany’s many mini-Versailles, the very fashionable dukedom of Celle, where, according to his son Carl, Sebastian was exposed to the latest in French culture and music, including the works of Lebègue, Marais, Marchand, Couperin, and especially Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Sun King’s own composer and so the paragon of French music (himself however a Florentine, an embarrassment Louis was persuaded to overlook only by the richness of Lully’s sycophancy).

Though he learned and adopted a great deal from French music, Sebastian must have been mystified by the French attitude toward it. Like everything else at Versailles and in seventeenth-century France, music was a slave to the narcissism and power of Louis XIV. Its purpose was, simply, to serve the king: as background to his clavecin or lute playing, as accompaniment to the ballets he danced in, and to cover for the noise of the brilliant new machines that allowed whales to belch fireworks and permitted Louis himself to fly as Jupiter on the back of an eagle and as various other deities to float along on clouds in the ostentatious theatricals staged to reinforce his myth. Bach certainly would write flattering music to and for kings and princes, but his music always had a higher goal in mind, the glory of which royal power was but a pale shadow. In France, though, music had only one purpose more important than the glorification of Louis. The palace gossip sheet Mercure galant prattled on about how music mirrored the harmony of the universe and was therefore the king’s handmaiden as the arbiter and source of all good order, etc., but the fact was that Louis needed music and musical spectacles to keep his nobles occupied. Dukes with time on their hands had been no end of trouble to his father and Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis knew that a rich court life would keep them distracted and keep them where he could see them. He learned that from his own Cardinal Mazarin, who imported Italian singers, composers, and instrumentalists to distract Louis himself from the notion of meddling in state affairs as a boy king.

In time the Italian composers began to experiment with chromaticism and dissonance, to introduce passion into their music. This was controversial, and so the Italians were banished. Louis then put his imprimatur on Lully’s elaborately ornamented, courtly pleasantries, whose halting, ceremonial rhythms were difficult enough to walk much less dance to, a kind of musical Stump the Nobles. (There were other, similarly hobbling fashions; ladies were forced to kneel in their coaches, for example, to compete in that heyday of haute coiffure.) Lully’s Florentine background was inconvenient, but the Mercure galant, which commented frequently and with great assurance on matters of music theory, reported that Lully

knew perfectly well the necessity of renouncing the taste of his nation in order to accommodate himself to ours; he found that the French judged some things more sanely than the Italians; and he knew that music had no other end than to titillate the ear; it was unnecessary to charge it with affected dissonances.

One of Lully’s jobs was to rationalize, in just so many words, Louis’s various religious and territorial wars. In Amadis, as French armies marched on the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1683, Lully put this operatic encomium to Louis in the mouth of his heroine Urgande:

This hero triumphs so that everything will be peaceful. In vain, thousands of the envious arm themselves on all sides. With one word, with one of his glances he knows how to bend their useful fury to his will. It is for him to teach the great Art of war to the Masters of the Earth.… The whole universe admires his exploits; let us go to live happily under his laws.

Pleased, Louis gave Lully a state monopoly on the staging of operas, and Lully became filthy rich. Scandal attached to him now and then. People were given to having sex in the upper galleries at the opera, Lully himself was upbraided by Louis more than once for outrageously gay behavior in public, and the nobles kept getting his singers pregnant. Fiercely disliked and openly opposed by many, including Molière and Boileau (who called Lully an “odious buffoon”), he hung on, getting richer and richer, until finally he made them all happy by impaling himself in the foot with his baton and dying of gangrene. In one of the many satires at his death, an Italian composer attempts to turn him back at the gates of Parnassus, arguing that he had played upon the French weakness for the merely fashionable in order to line his pockets. Lully replies loftily, “I declare quite frankly … that I have worked usefully for the corruption of my country, but they [the French] are no less deserving of the glory, because they have followed the composer’s intentions.”

It hardly needs to be said that nothing could be further from Bach’s exalted sense of purpose for music than Louis’s utilitarian or Lully’s mercenary one, but this early exposure to French music turns up in his earliest compositions and clearly left a deep impression on him.

Attached to St. Michael’s was a school for young nobles, called a Knights’ Academy, and probably through a friendly sponsor there he had access to the recently completed castle in Lüneburg of Duke Georg Wilhelm, where he also heard the latest music of France. The Knights’ Academy also exposed him to a less pleasant aspect of his future. The curriculum of these cadet princelings included not only the usual Latin, history, and science but also French, dancing, heraldry, and other prerequisites for the life of a francophone German noble. Bach and the other choral scholars slept every night in a dormitory just next to that of the Knights’ Academy, and some of them served the young princes as valets or tutors. Whether as valet, tutor, or just another invisible spectator among the scholarship boys, Sebastian would have witnessed every day the worst aspects of the petty nobles then living off Germany’s fractured territories, and he had every reason to be sobered by the thought that one of them might someday be his patron.

* In the Latin school system there were six grades for students ranging in age from seven to the early twenties—sixth grade (sextaj to first (prima), the last grade before university.