Sebastian Bach

ion for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity wh

astian Bach, wherein his special tastes and powers all have their

Wechmar. This Veit Bach (? 1619), named from Saint Vitus, the patron of the church there, is related to have passed some years in Hungary, and to have gone back to his home when the rigour of dominant Jesuitism made living in Hungary hard and perilous. We may here note the sole basis for the common story that the family of Bach was of Hungarian descent. Veit sold his goods and set up as a baker, and then as a miller, in his native village.

, which included apparently three Hanses and certainly two Heinrichs, he handed down, with a part of his open generous nature, that musical inheritance which in their hands grew into an artistic possession rich with the promise of greater fruit. It is worth while to stay a moment at this point to observe how deep roots music had struck into the family of Bach. For it seems that Hans had a brother whose three sons shewed sufficient excellence for the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt to send them into Italy that

ng upon especially, when we consider the troubled times on which the family was thrown at its first dispersion. For the thirty years' war in its wearisome progress makes the outward history of Germany, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, little more than a record of battles and sieges, with scant breathing-spaces of peace, not long enough for the towns to recover from exhausting occupations of foreign troops. In this age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of civil war

tury later, when all the house was extinct, the town musicians of Erfurt still retained the generic title of "the Bachs." Adding to the duties of town musician those of organist to the Dominican church, he becomes a prominent forerunner in the two paths in which the genius of his family was to reach its climax. His home, also, lying equally accessible to Arnstadt and Eisenach, remained for long the centre of the greater family of the Bachs in general. It was in Johann that his youngest brother, Heinrich, found a guardian, when he was left an orphan in his twelfth year. Heinrich was not only the greatest musician of his generation, but also specially his father's

ack to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the spirit of Germany was strong and creative, or forward to the age following, when the people had again recovered its strength. Of the greater achievements of the latter time the work of Johann Christoph and Michael appears as a prelude. In the pedigree of Sebastian Bach they fade to a comparative obscurity; viewed by themselves they are luminaries of signal brilliance. Johann Christoph was more than a complete master of the musical science of his day; he was also one of the first who ventured to deviate from the rigid rules of the early contrapuntists, to make them freer, more flexible, and more significant. He is a link between ancient and modern music, blending the old church modes with the modern tonality of major and minor. Besides this, he marks an important step in the growth of dramatic music. His Michaelmas piece, The Fight with the Dragon, follows in the track of those Germans who had invented the idea of setting to music scenes from Biblical history, Schuetz and Hammerschmidt; but it goes far beyond them in command of the orchestral body, and in the genius of dramatic utterance. The sacred drama is, in his hands, clearly on the road which leads to the perfected o

is illustrious cousin, Johann Christoph, at the latter's death. He holds an honourable rank as a composer, having written orchestral suites as well as the proper productions of his office, organ-chorales. The latter follow somewhat directly in the steps of the famous organist of Erfurt-afterwards of Nuernberg-Johann Pachelbel, whose influence is indeed paramount over all the Bachs of hi

he grandfather of Sebastian. Christoph Bach, who was born at Wechmar in 1613, is the most secular of the sons of Hans. He was simply and solely a player, first in the service-menial as well as musical-of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then at Prettin in Saxony, where he took to him a wife; and th

reputation, equally does not credit him with the prudence that is characteristic of his kin. It appears that an indiscreet though innocent friendship with one of the Arnstadt maidens, accompanied, most rashly, with an exchange of rings, brought upon the young fiddler a prosecution at the hands of his would-be mother-in-law. The consistory, it is presumed, urged amends by the marriage of the parties; but Bach was firm-this is a family trait-and appealed to the higher consistory at Weimar, from which at length he obtained release from his difficulty. An experience of this sort made him hesitate before he finally decided to take a wife; and, after his marriage, misfortune-not of his own making-followed him for some years more. His place in the Arnstadt band was harassed by the jealous persecution of the principal town musician. The Bachs of Erfurt and Arnstadt combined in a memorial in his favour, but nothing came of it. In the end the Count dismissed the entire band for indolence and disunion.

followed in two months by his death, in January, 1695. Of his character we have but one solitary notice, when a funeral sermon on a weak-minded sister gave occasion to the preacher to mark the contrast with her two brothers: whom we see to be men of a good understanding, endowed with art and skill, who are well seen and heard in churches and schools, and in the common life of the town, in such wise that the work

such a company. Many of them held a better worldly position, most were better educated than the common town player. It is a plausible inference that their number alone served to constitute them an informal guild by themselves, of which the name was that of their family, and the only regulation that which sprang from the generosity of their nature and the close ties which knit the kin together in a common pride and emulation in their common art. Emanuel Bach, Sebastian's son, has left us a genial picture of how the kinsmen would gather all together, at Erfurt, or Eisenach, or Arnstadt, once in the year, and there make merry. Firs