While Johann Sebastian Bach’s music has been praised for its genius in the popular press, Bach would have been perplexed and probably appalled at the notion that he had “superhuman” creative capacities. Of all the really great contributors to societies throughout the world, most did not see themselves as anything great at all. Humility is always a good and highly desirable character trait. Johann was born into a family of musicians and went on to father several performers/composers himself, two of whom (Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian) gained significantly more renown in their own lifetimes than their father ever received (or even sought).

A consummate craftsman, Bach was always conscious of his place in a legacy of hard work and dedication to a carefully practiced skill–in his case, playing the keyboard for Lutheran worship. As a young man, he worked systematically to copy and model both his keyboard technique and his improvisational skills on the great workaday Lutheran keyboardists of an earlier generation: Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and others whose work is relatively unknown today. In his prime, Bach became the most renown keyboard player in central Germany. He specialized in organ technique and served as a testing consultant to the great organ-builders of the time.

Bach had many students, and the most successful became upstanding and dedicated organists for some of the top churches of the area. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as Handel or Telemann, Bach published very little music. All of his publications were for keyboard, designed as teaching tools for the professional Lutheran organist.

Several decades after Bach’s death, his vocal works were “rediscovered” by Mendelssohn, and his complete opus was cataloged and printed as one of the first historical compendia of a bygone composer’s “master works.” But those individuals who admired Bach in his own lifetime most praised him for his dedication to his instrument and to the teaching of his craft (both in performance and in improvisation, in which his skill–honed through decades of constant practice–was legendary).

The vast majority of Bach’s works that are so highly valued today–the “Brandenburg Concertos,” the partitas for the violin–were essentially forgotten between his death and the “Bach Revival” of the mid 1800s. But, partly through the agency of his two famous sons, Bach’s keyboard works remained a key teaching tool for expert musicians, serving as a resource for such luminaries as Mozart and Beethoven.

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