Nekrolog is the name with which Johann Sebastian Bach's obituary, which appeared four years after the composer's death, is usually indicated.
Nekrolog is the name with which Johann Sebastian Bach's obituary, which appeared four years after the composer's death, is usually indicated.
The "Nekrolog" appeared in Lorenz Christoph Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, a series of publications appearing from 1736 to 1754, reporting on and criticising music. As such it was the organ of Mizler's Musical Society, of which Bach had been a member from 1747. Bach's "Nekrolog" appeared in its last installment, Volume 4, Part 1 in 1754, as the third of three obituaries of former members of the Musical Society. Although no author is indicated in the article, its authors are known to be Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach's son, and Johann Friedrich Agricola, one of Bach's students. [1] [2] [3]
The "Nekrolog" contains basic data about Bach's family and where he lived, lists compositions, and elaborates a few scenes, notably the young Bach secretly copying a score owned by his eldest brother, the story about a musical competition which Bach "won" by his competitor fleeing the town, and the visit to Frederick the Great in Sanssouci in the later years of his life. The last pages of the "Nekrolog" contain verse in memory of the composer.
The "Nekrolog" sets out with tracing some of Bach's forefathers, listing previous composers of the Bach family, and elaborating on their work (pp. 158–160).
Follows a description of Bach's early youth in Eisenach, the stay with his eldest brother Johann Christoph in Ohrdruf after their parent's death, and the period when he was a student and chorister in Lüneburg (pp. 160–162).
More than a page is devoted to the episode of the secret copying of his brother's manuscript (pp. 160–161). According to the "Nekrolog", Bach went to Lüneburg after his brother's death; however, later research pointed out that Johann Christoph lived at least another 20 years.
Next Bach is followed through his first positions as a musician (pp. 162–166). Again there is an anecdote that is elaborated over more than one page: the failed competition with Louis Marchand in Dresden, while the latter had left the town in the early morning of the day when the competition was scheduled (pp. 163–165).
The description of Bach's last position as Thomascantor is relatively short, with most attention going to his visit to Potsdam in 1747, and the composer's death in 1750 (pp. 166–167).
Follows a list of the compositions printed during the composer's life, which however omits the cantata(s) printed in Mühlhausen and songs and arias printed in Schemelli's Gesangbuch (pp. 167–168). The list of unpublished works that follows is all but detailed (pp. 168–169), and seems to exaggerate in numbers and/or indicates that a great number of Bach compositions went lost.
The next paragraphs are devoted to Bach's two marriages, and his children (pp. 169–170).
The narrative of the "Nekrolog" ends with a sketch of Bach as a musician, and his significance as a composer, with, in its last paragraph, a few sentences on the composer's character (pp. 170–173).
As an epilogue to the "Nekrolog" pp. 173–176 contain poetry in remembrance of Bach.
The "Nekrolog" played a determining role for the biographies of the composer that were written after it. In the introduction to his normative 19th-century biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, Philipp Spitta names the "Nekrolog" as one of a very few earlier biographies he trusts. [4] Even in the 20th century Bach biographers name the "Nekrolog" as a direct source for their work. [5]
An English translation of the "Nekrolog" is included in The New Bach Reader. [6]
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel was a prolific German composer of the Baroque era. Stölzel was an accomplished German stylist who wrote a good many of the poetic texts for his vocal works.
"Bist du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden" is an aria from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's opera Diomedes, which was first staged on 16 November 1718. The aria is best known as "Bist du bei mir," BWV 508, a version for voice and continuo found as No. 25 in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
Lorenz Christoph Mizler von Kolof was a German physician, historian, printer, mathematician, Baroque music composer, and precursor of the Enlightenment in Poland.
Johann Christoph Bach was a musician of the Bach family. He was the eldest of the brothers of Johann Sebastian Bach who survived childhood.
As Thomaskantor, Johann Sebastian Bach provided Passion music for Good Friday services in Leipzig. The extant St Matthew Passion and St John Passion are Passion oratorios composed by Bach.
Geschwinde, geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde, BWV 201, is a secular cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, on a libretto by Picander. It is a dramma per musica, likely composed for a public performance in 1729, around which time its oldest extant printed libretto was published. The text, titled Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan, is based on the "Ears of a Donkey" story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and mocks unsophisticated music in favour of a more intelligent composition style.
The concerto for two harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1060, is a concerto for two harpsichords and string orchestra by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is likely to have originated in the second half of the 1730s as an arrangement of an earlier concerto, also in C minor, for oboe and violin. That conjectural original version of the concerto, which may have been composed in Bach's Köthen years (1717–1723), is lost, but has been reconstructed in several versions known as BWV 1060R.
Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde, BWV 53, is an aria for alto, bells, strings and continuo. It was likely composed in the early 18th century, although its date of first performance is unknown. From the second half of the 18th century until the early 1950s the aria was attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1955, it was suggested by the Bach scholar Karl Anton that the aria's composer was more likely to be a member of Melchior Hoffmann's circle.
BWV Anh., abbreviation of Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis Anhang, is a list of lost, doubtful, and spurious compositions by, or once attributed to, Johann Sebastian Bach.
The first major biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach, including those by Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Philipp Spitta, were published in the 19th century. Many more were published in the 20th century by, among others, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Sanford Terry, Christoph Wolff and Klaus Eidam.
Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work is an early 19th-century biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, written in German by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and later translated by, among others, Charles Sanford Terry.
Johann Sebastian Bach is a 19th-century biography of Johann Sebastian Bach by Philipp Spitta. The work was published in German in two volumes, in 1873 and 1880 respectively.
The Kyrie–Gloria Mass for double choir, BWV Anh. 167, is a mass composition in G major by an unknown composer. The work was likely composed in the last quarter of the 17th century. The composition has two sections, a Kyrie and a Gloria, each subdivided in three movements. It has twenty-two parts for performers: twelve parts for singers, and ten for instrumentalists, including strings, wind instruments and organ. Johann Sebastian Bach may have encountered the work around 1710, when he was employed in Weimar. In the 1730s he produced a manuscript copy of the Mass.
The Triple Concerto, BWV 1044, is a concerto in A minor for traverso, violin, harpsichord, and string orchestra by Johann Sebastian Bach. He based the composition on his Prelude and Fugue BWV 894 for harpsichord and on the middle movement of his Organ Sonata BWV 527, or on earlier lost models for these compositions.
An Wasserflüssen Babylon is a chorale fantasia for organ by Johann Adam Reincken, based on "An Wasserflüssen Babylon", a 16th-century Lutheran hymn by Wolfgang Dachstein. Reincken likely composed the fantasia in 1663, partly as a tribute to Heinrich Scheidemann, his tutor and predecessor as organist at St. Catherine's Church, Hamburg. With its 327 bars, it is the most extended repertoire piece of this kind. Reincken's setting is a significant representative of the north German style of organ music.
The Magnificat in A minor, BWV Anh. 21, TWV 1:1748, is Melchior Hoffmann's musical setting of a German version of the Song of Mary from the Gospel of Luke. The composition originated around 1707, when the composer was director musices and organist of the Neue Kirche in Leipzig. Composed in A minor, the Magnificat is scored for soprano and small orchestra. The work was first published in the 1950s, and it was recorded by Magda László, by Joshua Rifkin, by Wolfgang Helbich, and by Deborah York, among others.