Category: Germany

C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg: The Son Who Inherited Telemann’s City

C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg: The Son Who Inherited Telemann’s City When Georg Philipp Telemann died in Hamburg on 25 June 1767, aged 86, the city lost the musician who had run its church music for 46 years. The man chosen to replace him was his own godson, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second […]

The Bach Family in Erfurt: A Musical Network Before Johann Sebastian

The Bach Family in Erfurt: A Musical Network Before Johann Sebastian As late as 1793, more than forty years after Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig, the town musicians of Erfurt were still known as “die Bache”, the Bachs, although by then no one of that name remained among them. The word had become a […]

Young Bach in Arnstadt: A First Organist’s Post and a Restless Reputation

Young Bach in Arnstadt: A First Organist’s Post and a Restless Reputation On 21 February 1706, the church consistory in Arnstadt summoned its young organist to explain himself. He had been away for months longer than his leave allowed, and the congregation was unhappy with his playing: he had “made many curious variations in the […]

Bach in Dresden: Saxon Court Culture, Petition and Musical Prestige

Bach in Dresden: Saxon Court Culture, Petition and Musical Prestige On 27 July 1733, Johann Sebastian Bach handed a set of hand-copied parts for a Kyrie and Gloria to the new Elector of Saxony in Dresden, together with a petition. In it he asked for a court title and complained that in Leipzig he had […]

The Musical Offering: Bach’s Potsdam Encounter with Frederick the Great

The Musical Offering: Bach’s Potsdam Encounter with Frederick the Great On the evening of 7 May 1747, Frederick the Great was about to begin his usual private concert at Potsdam when he was handed the list of visitors to the town. According to the story told ever after, he put down his flute and told […]

Bach’s Organ Music in Weimar: Court, Church and the Orgelbüchlein

Bach’s Organ Music in Weimar: Court, Church and the Orgelbüchlein In the ducal palace at Weimar there was once a chapel known as the Weg zur Himmelsburg, the “way to the heavenly castle”. Its organ stood about twenty metres above the altar, in an open gallery under the roof, and the music drifted down to […]

Bach House Eisenach: Family, Instruments and the Making of a Musical Childhood

Bach House Eisenach: Family, Instruments and the Making of a Musical Childhood For the rest of his life, Johann Sebastian Bach described himself as “Isenacus”, a man of Eisenach, though he left the town at the age of ten. He was born there in March 1685 into a household where music was the family trade, […]

The Brandenburg Concertos: Bach, Prince Leopold and the Köthen Court

The Brandenburg Concertos: Bach, Prince Leopold and the Köthen Court The six works we call the Brandenburg Concertos were never called that by Bach, were probably never played in Brandenburg, and may have sat unused in a margrave’s library for years. Bach wrote out the fair copy in Köthen in 1721, with a dedication in […]

The Well-Tempered Clavier and Köthen: Courtly Freedom, Keyboard Practice and Craft

The Well-Tempered Clavier and Köthen: Courtly Freedom, Keyboard Practice and Craft In 1722, in the small princely town of Köthen, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote out a title page for a collection of keyboard music. It promised preludes and fugues “through all the tones and semitones”, written “for the profit and use of the studious musical […]

Thomaskirche and the Office of the Thomaskantor

Thomaskirche and the Office of the Thomaskantor “Since the best can’t be obtained, mediocre ones will have to be accepted.” So said a Leipzig councillor in 1723, as the city settled for its third choice to run its school choir and church music. The candidate was Johann Sebastian Bach, and the post he accepted, Thomaskantor […]

Mendelssohn and Bach in Berlin: The 1829 Revival of the St Matthew Passion

Mendelssohn and Bach in Berlin: The 1829 Revival of the St Matthew Passion On 11 March 1829, in the concert hall of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, a twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn raised his hands before a choir of 158 singers and began a work that had never been performed outside Leipzig and had not been heard there […]

Bach in Germany: A 16-Day Music-History Itinerary

Bach in Germany: A 16-Day Music-History Itinerary Johann Sebastian Bach never left the German-speaking lands, yet he worked for almost every kind of employer his world offered: a town council, a duke, a prince, a city school, and, by title at least, a king. Each move changed what he wrote, because each employer needed different […]

Bach Cantatas in Leipzig: A Weekly Cycle of Sacred Music

Bach Cantatas in Leipzig: A Weekly Cycle of Sacred Music At seven o’clock on a Sunday morning in Leipzig in the 1720s, the main service began, and somewhere inside its three hours came roughly half an hour of new music that had not existed a week before. Week after week, the composer was Johann Sebastian […]

Bach Museum Leipzig: Objects, Archives and a Composer’s Afterlife

Bach Museum Leipzig: Objects, Archives and a Composer’s Afterlife For years a heavy iron chest with eleven bolts served as a donation box in the cathedral museum at Meissen, until in 2009 it was recognised as property of the Bach household, its painted monogram the same “JSB” that Johann Sebastian used to seal his letters. […]

Bachfest Leipzig: How a City Performs Bach’s Legacy

Bachfest Leipzig: How a City Performs Bach’s Legacy For eleven days each June, Leipzig hands itself over to one composer. In 2026 Bachfest Leipzig staged 212 events at 30 venues and drew close to 96,000 visitors from 56 countries, many of them crossing the old town between the two churches where Johann Sebastian Bach’s music […]

Hanseatic League

The Hanseatic League, or German Hansa, was a medieval trading confederation of merchant guilds and market towns along the shore of the Baltic and North Sea, and across great swathes of the north German hinterland.

Berlin, Germany

Berlin, capital of Germany, venue of the Berlinale, seat of the German Parliament, and location of UNESCO-protected Museum Island, occupies a place of prominence as a cultural and economic powerhouse. Dynamic and vibrant with a richly textured history, there is no shortage of things to see and do in Berlin

Walhalla Memorial, Germany

Walhalla Memorial, Germany The Neoclassical Walhalla Memorial, reminiscent of the Parthenon and reaching for the grandeur of the mythological Norse Valhalla after which it was named, is located high above the Danube River, east of Regensburg, Bavaria. The white stone temple was conceived in 1807 by King Ludwig I—at the time still the crown prince […]

Bayreuth, Germany

Bayreuth, Germany Bayreuth is located on the Red Main river in Northern Bavaria. The pretty, mid-sized town is world famous for the Bayreuth Festival, and for its affiliation with the German composer Richard Wagner. The composer lived here from 1872 until his death in 1883. He constructed a villa here, called “Wahnfried” (a compound of […]

Munich, Germany

Munich, Germany Munich, capital of Bavaria, lies on the elevated plains north of the edge of the Bavarian Alps. The city of Munich is the third largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. It traces its origins to a monastery founded in 750; Munich, or Munchen means “Home of the Monks”. Munich was first […]

Dresden, Germany

Dresden, Germany Dresden is the capital of the German state of Saxony, and the third largest city in eastern Germany after Berlin and Leipzig. It lies in the basin of the Elbe River between Meissen and Pirna, 30 kilometres north of Germany’s border with the Czech Republic. Historically, this “Florence on the Elbe” had been […]