(CELLO SUITE)
GK: Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 into a family of musicians, with musicians going back several generations. His parents died when he was 9 and he and his brother Johann Jacob went to live with their older brother, Johann Christoph. Three Johanns under one roof. The older brother was an organist. He had studied with Johann Pachelbel.
FN BACH: Music was like plumbing or bricklaying back then, you learned it from your dad and uncles, they got you into the union, you taught it to your kids. So it wasn't like I got this big idea and had to rebel against the family and go to Paris or something. Had no desire to go to Paris. Just sat on dad's lap at the harpsichord and he said put your fingers here and I put my fingers there. On top of his fingers.
(ARIA'GOLDBERG -- HARPSICHORD)
GK: He had a lovely soprano voice before it changed and if you could sing well, then you got a full scholarship to a good school, and he went off to school in Luneberg, which had an excellent library where he could sit and read music all day, and it had a college where French music was all in vogue, and that was part of his education too. He became a good enough musician to get a full-time job at the age of 18 as organist in Arnstadt, a town of 3800.
FN: I was crazy about music. I got in a street fight once with a bassoonist over something, I forget what. I was a real hothead. And now I've had two-hundred and fifty years to think about it. Not that I want to go back, I don't. I like it where I am. I mean-- it's Paradise.
(BADINERIE -- FLUTE)
GK: He practiced constantly. He got into arguments with the church over the boys' choir -- Bach didn't want to direct choir. He was so taken with the music of Buxtehude that he walked 200 miles to Lubeck to hear his music. He was gone about three months longer than he told his boss he'd be gone.
FN: I had to figure out what Buxtehude was doing and I came back a much better organist but when I played what I'd learned, the church didn't care for it. Wanted to hear the same old stuff they were used to. And then they got mad because I skipped out on the sermon and I went down the basement of the church and -- well, they accused me of fooling around with a woman down there. During the sermon. Which was true. But I married her. So what's the big deal?
(CELLO SARABANDE)
GK: He didn't stay long in Arnstadt.He married Maria Barbara, got a good job in Weimar, they started having children, Catharina Dorothea, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried. He got in the midst of an argument between two dukes and got out of Weimar and went to Kothen to work for Prince Leopold who loved music. He also loved the high life and secular music and going to Carlsbad to the resort there and Bach went with him and came back from one trip to find that his wife Maria Barbara had died. A year later, he married Anna Magdalena. He was 36, she was 20 and a talented soprano.
FN: She was beautiful. What can I say. A man has got to go on living. And o boy did we go on living. I still see her from time to time. We have lunch and talk. Up here in heaven, there's no call for-- you know-- because we already have perfect bliss, so-- anyway, she was a beauty.
GK: Bach played harpsichord, viola, and clavichord, and his children filled in on other instruments and Anna Magdalena sang, so there always was music around the house.
(3RD MOVEMENT PRESTO / SONATA)
GK: Eventually, Bach became the Director of Choir and Music in Leipzig, where he composed his best music there, but under aggravating conditions.
FN: yeah, it was rough in Leipzig. Everything was so expensive and we had kids and the apartment was musty and and falling apart. And the choir was terrible. Really bad. I see some of them up here now and they don't sound bad. You put an angel on either side of them and they can sing pretty good.
(MUSIC)
GK: Bach worked terribly hard for the first five years, writing about 59 cantatas a year, one a week and extra for the holidays, about 300 cantatas of which almost half are lost.
FN: Hard to believe, huh? I guess I shoulda kept a better filing system, but you know-- I was so busy, I didn't have time. Some of those cantatas got used for shelf paper. Some of them got wrapped around glassware when she moved after I died. Oh well.
(D MAJOR TOCCATA -- HARPSICHORD)
GK: In Leiipzig Bach started to lose interest in sacred music and turned toward chamber music. The Collegium Musicum, or Music Society, was a band of musicians, students and professionals, who gathered on Friday nights in Zimmerman's coffee house to play music. And that became Bach's love and joy, playing the harpsichord, playing his concertos in Zimmerman's, for which he wrote his Coffee Cantata.
FN: Hey. I wrote cantatas for hire -- want a cantata for your birthday, I'll write you a cantata, you just pay me half down now and half when it's done. It's called the music business, right? Business. I loved earning money. Nowadays I've got everything a person could want so I don't think about money, but -- if they threw me out of heaven and I went down there, I could earn a living. You begt.
(B MINOR SONATA / FLUTE / HARPS. / CELLO)
GK: In his later years he started to think about posterity and imagine that his music would outlive him and he did some revising and he tried to get it published. He finished the great B Minor Mass. And then in his early sixties he started to go blind -- all those hours of copying manuscripts in dim light. And then surgeons made him completely blind and he died in 1750. He was sixty-five years old. Still at work, writing The Art of the Fugue.
FN: I don't know. I look back at it now and I sort of wish I'd gotten out of church music and written opera. Maybe gone to London. Made some money. You work in a church, don't expect a reward in this life. It ain't going to happen. Or in that life, I should say. Now I'm in this life. Paradise. Not bad. You get to meet people. All the music you want. That's what I've been doing for two-hundred fifty-nine years. Singing and playing and dancing and having a great time. Did you know that God plays cello? He does. Of course he can play any and all instruments, but when it comes right down to it-- God is a cellist. And sometimes he plays one of my sonatas. And he plays them well. Very well.