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Leipzig was a thriving center both of commerce, with its trade fairs that drew thousands, and of learning, with its renowned university. Not to be sidelined where music was concerned, Bach moved on. Unfortunately, as the prince became preoccupied with his new marriage, his interest in music waned. Cöthen’s cosmopolitanism inspired a new creative period in which Bach composed secular music bristling with vitality - keyboard suites, chamber and orchestral music, and the Brandenburg concerti. With a growing interest in secular music, Bach applied to Prince Leopold of Cöthen for a recently vacated kapellmeister position in his court and was promptly accepted. In the Weimar court, Prince Ernst August encouraged him to study Italian Baroque music. He resigned from his Arnstadt post and shortly thereafter left a similar post in Mühlhausen, due to the vehement quarrels between pietism and orthodoxy there as well.īach moved to Weimar to take a post as court organist and chamber musician, where he was no less plagued with conflict over his sacred works. He would not compromise his direction in music. Greatly influenced by the raging debate within Lutheranism between pietism and orthodoxy, Bach took pietism’s intimate spirituality to heart. In the Baroque era, the supposed aim of any music was simply to entertain, and his choral compositions caused strong reprimands for basing the melody more deeply on the meaning of the text. As a young man, he took a leave of absence from his Arnstadt post as organist to visit composers who were trying to create more unified music for Lutheran services. He was 48 years old, experiencing what we might describe as a midlife crisis, and embarking on a life change that would fuel a creative surge of secular compositions.īach’s intent to restructure the music used in Lutheran services began to take form in 17. In 1733 he approached the Catholic court in Dresden, submitting the Kyrie and Gloria of what would become the Mass in B Minor, with his request for an appointment.
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Bach formulated a goal to “impart to church music a new structure … a new regulation of religious life through music.”(3) At the same time, the widespread influence of Italian secular baroque music reached into his quiet, simple life, and his dissatisfaction with the lack of distinctive style in German music finally overshadowed his original goal. Thomas in Leipzig (1723-1750), he wrote about 200 cantatas(2), which systematically explore a wide range of vocal-instrumental compositional possibilities. Indeed, during his 27-year tenure as kantor of St. We might look at a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach and see unwavering determination, as though his life purpose were the essence of Baroque unity, order, and control, residing with unshakeable confidence beneath his broad brow.