Christian History Magazine Collection

Fueled by his Lutheran faith, J. S. Bach devoted his life to creating music for refreshment, proclamation, and praise.

by Calvin R. Stapert from Christian History magazine no. 95

In the 16th century, a baker named Veit Bach fled Hungary because of his Lutheran beliefs. He settled in the small town of Wechmar in Thuringia in central Germany. His descendants survived the Thirty Years’ War and spread throughout Thuringia over the next century. They became so prevalent in musical positions in towns and churches that the name “Bach” came to be synonymous with “musician.”

In a genealogy compiled in 1735, one of those descendants wrote with a mixture of loving amusement and pride about Veit: “He found his greatest pleasure in a little cittern [a wire-strung plucked instrument], which he took with him even into the mill and played upon while the grinding was going on. (How pretty it must have sounded together! Yet in this way he had a chance to have time drilled into him.) And this was, as it were, the beginning of a musical inclination in his descendants.”

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
—J.S. Bach

The great-great-grandson who wrote those words was none other than Johann Sebastian Bach, arguably the greatest composer in the history of Western music and a man whose staunch Lutheran faith informed his life, his career, and his view of music. He believed that music was a “refreshment of spirit,” as some of the title pages of his works stated. He believed that music was a powerful tool for the proclamation of the gospel, as his cantatas, Passions, organ chorales, and other compositions clearly show. And ultimately, he believed that music brought glory to God, as the initials SDG (Soli Deo Gloria, “To God alone be glory”) at the end of most of his scores bear witness.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21, 1685, in the small town of Eisenach in western Thuringia. He was the eighth and last child of Johann Ambrosius Bach, Eisenach’s town piper. At the top of a hill overlooking the town is Wartburg Castle, where Frederick the Wise gave refuge to Martin Luther after Pope Leo X excommunicated the reformer in 1521. During his time there, Luther translated the New Testament into German. At the foot of the hill is St. George’s Church. Luther preached there while traveling to and from the Diet of Worms, where he was called by Emperor Charles V to answer the charge of heresy. 164 years later, Bach was baptized there. Luther had attended the Latin School in Eisenach as a child, and Bach attended the same school nearly two centuries later. Almost literally from cradle to grave, Bach lived and worked in a part of the world where, as James R. Gaines put it, “Luther was a great deal more compelling than gravity.”

Bach’s childhood home was busy and crowded. In addition to seven siblings, there were two orphaned cousins, some of Ambrosius’s apprentices, and other relatives from time to time. The environment was saturated with music. Bach probably studied violin with his father and perhaps got his initial organ training from his uncle Johann Christoph, who was the town and court organist. In the family genealogy, Bach described him as “the profound composer.”

Bach’s first biographer Johann Nicholas Forkel described the family gatherings: “[T]he first thing they did … was to sing a chorale. From this pious commencement they proceeded to drolleries which often made a very great contrast with it. For now they sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different.”

Bach’s life in Eisenach was brief. Before he was ten years old, his parents died within a year of each other. For the next seven years, the orphaned boy lived first in Ohrdruf in the home of an older brother, Johann Christoph, and then in Luneburg at St. Michael’s School, where as a choirboy he received free tuition, room, and board plus a small stipend. In Ohrdruf and Luneburg, Bach completed the general education he had begun in Eisenach. His studies in Lutheran theology laid a firm foundation for his later work as a composer of music for worship.

Ohrdruf and Luneburg also provided ample opportunity for musical growth. In Ohrdruf, Bach studied organ with his brother, the organist at St. Michael’s Church. Christoph owned a manuscript of keyboard music by some of the most notable organists of the day, including his teacher Pachelbel. Bach would get up at night, slip his hand through the grate of the locked cabinet, pull out the prized manuscript, and copy the music by moonlight. But when Christoph discovered the copy, he confiscated it.

Luneburg offered Bach opportunities to absorb a wider range of musical influences, including performances by great organists and even French music from the ducal court of Celle. But as a boy chorister, the center of his musical world shifted toward choral music, not only because of the daily rehearsals and services, but also because of the excellent library of music by leading composers of both Latin and German church music dating back to the 16th century.