Today, Johann Sebastian Bach’s name and music are known virtually all around the world. But during his lifetime, he never traveled more than 200 miles from the small town, Eisenach, where he was born. There are other interesting items and anecdotes up old Sebas’ sleeve. The Weekly checked in with in-house Bach expert David Gordon, a veteran of 23 festivals, and peeled through Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff, and gather 19 others to complete a score.


Even before his birth, the Bachs were well-known as a musical family. At that time, the word “Bach” was simply used as a nickname for any musician.


When Bach was around the age of 10, both of his parents died within a year of each other, leaving him as one of four orphaned children.


As a young man, Bach believed that he could play any music by sight. When a friend put him to the test, Bach admitted that he couldn’t.


Once, after comparing a fellow court bassoonist’s playing to the bleating of a goat, the bassoonist threatened Bach with a club – and Bach drew his dagger. Reports differ on how the fight went, but Bach was punished and the bassoonist wasn’t. 


As a still-rising German musician, Bach was asked to compete publicly on keyboard with French celebrity Louis Marchand in Dresden. Early on the morning of the event, Marchand fled the city by coach. In lieu of the contest, Bach played for hours, wowing the crowd.


Throughout his life, Bach felt his primary goal was “to make a well-sounding harmony to the honor of God and the permissible delectation of the soul.”


When pressing for his dismissal from one duke’s court in favor of another, Bach apparently lost his temper and was consequently imprisoned for four weeks.


Bach was likely unaware of his importance to future generations. He lived a middle-class life, and was known primarily as a virtuoso organist and as a boys’ school choir master.


Certainly a family man, Bach had 20 children (seven with his first wife, 13 with his second). Only nine of them survived him, which speaks to child mortality in 18th-Century Germany.


Bach once described organ playing as “nothing remarkable… all one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”


J.S. Bach and George Handel were born within weeks of each other in 1685, in towns less than 80 miles apart. But the two men never met.


Late in his life, his collection of instruments included eight harpsichords, one pedal harpsichord, two lute claviers, one spinet, two violins, a piccolo violin, three violas, a viola pomposa, two cellos, a viola da gamba and a lute.


Bach worked as director of music for the city of Leipzig for the final 27 years of his life, Gordon reports. “Yet,” he adds, “after he died, the town council voted to reduce the pension to his widow, Anna Magdalena. She died in poverty 10 years later.”


At his death, Bach’s manuscripts were divided among his family. Scholars think that much of it was lost or sold. Some speculate that less than two-thirds of his compositions are on record.


Four of Bach’s sons(Carl, Wilhelm, Johann Christoph, and Johann Christian) became renowned composers, though they each had a unique style, regarding their father’s as complicated and passé.


Bach’s remains were exhumed in 1894 by Professor Wilhelm His for “scientific” study. It was concluded, among other things, that Bach’s height was 5 feet and 7 inches, and, based on his skull measurements, his ears were exceptionally suited to music.


Bach was known to incorporate letter and number combinations in his music, including B-A-C-H. Scholars believe he was simply amusing himself with his own private word and number games even as he was composing his masterpieces.


“Bach” is the German word for stream or brook. Beethoven famously said: “His name should not be ‘Brook,’ it should be ‘Ocean.’”


When eminent biologist and author Lewis Thomas was asked what message he would choose to send from Earth into outer space in the Voyager spacecraft, he answered, “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach. But that would be boasting.”