1735–1782 · Germany
Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and a composer of the Classical era. He studied in Berlin and Italy, then lived in London for twenty years, which gave him the nickname the London Bach. His style influenced the young Mozart. The site has seven of his editions, including the Op. 17 sonatas.
Johann Christian was born in Leipzig on 5 September 1735. He was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and his second wife, Anna Magdalena, and the eleventh of the thirteen children from that second marriage. His father was his first teacher, but they worked together only briefly, because the elder Bach's health was failing and he was rapidly losing his sight.
When his father died in 1750 the young man went to Berlin, to his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who served King Frederick II as court harpsichordist. His brother made him an excellent keyboard player who performed to applause in Berlin more than once. The productions of the Royal Opera also made a strong impression on him.
In 1754 Bach left for Italy. In Milan he entered the service of Count Agostino Litta, who paid for his counterpoint studies with Padre Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna. Until 1760 he wrote instrumental music for the count's private orchestra, but mostly church music: a Mass, a Dies irae, a double-choir Magnificat and a Te Deum were received especially warmly.
In 1760 Bach became an organist at Milan Cathedral. Changing faith was a necessary condition for a church organist, so to take up the post he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism. Carl Philipp Emanuel strongly disapproved of his younger brother breaking with the family's religious tradition.
At the same time he was entering the world of opera. At carnival in 1761 his first opera of his own, Artaserse, was staged at the Teatro Regio in Turin, and it seems to have gone down well, because he was at once commissioned to write two new operas for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. These were Catone in Utica (4 November 1761) and Alessandro nell'Indie (20 January 1762).
In 1762 Bach travelled to London to stage his operas at the King's Theatre. In May the cathedral chapter in Milan gave him a year's leave, but he never went back, even though the post was kept open for him. By the summer he was in London. There Queen Charlotte took an interest in him and made him her music master.
In 1763 the series of his printed works began with the six harpsichord concertos, Op. 1. The finale of the last of them is a set of variations on the melody of God save the King. His London operas brought him mixed fortunes: in 1763 he presented Orione (19 February) and Zanaida (7 May) at the King's Theatre, while Adriano in Siria failed in 1765. Its leading part went to the castrato Giusto Fernando Tenducci, whom Bach came to count as a close friend. Carattaco, after a two-year gap in his operas, found more favour in 1767.
In 1766 Bach met the soprano Cecilia Grassi; she later became his wife. She was 11 years younger than he was. They had no children.
As a concert organiser Bach was a great success. With Carl Friedrich Abel, a composer and gamba virtuoso, he launched the Bach-Abel Concerts, London's first concerts sold by subscription. The opening evening was on 29 February 1764 and the final one on 9 May 1781; for all 17 years they ranked high among the city's favourite social occasions. Each composer brought his latest symphonies and solo concertos, and the programmes also had opera excerpts and even sacred choral works.
The series began at Abel's home, but its growing popularity took it to larger venues. Listeners paid for the season in advance, and the concerts opened live classical music to the middle class, whereas earlier such music had been confined to private aristocratic circles. Bach also resumed his pianist's career: on 2 June 1768, at a concert of the oboist Johann Christian Fischer, he played a piano solo, giving British audiences their first sight of an instrument made by Johannes Zumpe.
Bach won a lawsuit in 1777, Bach v Longman, whose outcome meant that musical scores were protected by copyright under English law.
A meeting that mattered for the history of music was with Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who stayed in London in 1764 and 1765. In April 1764 Bach made music with the eight-year-old Mozart for the first time. Leopold Mozart urged his son to imitate Bach's compositions. Bach's stylistic influence can be seen already in Mozart's first London symphonies and traced into his later works.
Bach belonged to the Nine Muses Masonic lodge, No. 235, in London. Later, in 1779, he met Mozart again in Paris, where, by Mozart's own account, Bach greeted him like an old friend.
The outward peak of his career came with the staging of the opera Temistocle on 5 November 1772 at the court theatre in Mannheim, at the invitation of the Elector Karl Theodor. He later wrote Lucio Silla for Mannheim as well. A notable success followed once more on 4 April 1778, when La clemenza di Scipione was premiered at the King's Theatre. In 1779 he was invited to Paris, but his opera Amadis de Gaule failed on 14 December.
After 1779 his fortunes began to decline. Audiences for the Bach-Abel concerts dwindled and money troubles began, forcing Bach to move to the London suburb of Paddington; his health was also getting rapidly worse. He made his will on 14 November 1781. Bach died in London on 1 January 1782 and was laid to rest on 6 January at St Pancras Old Church. The queen took on the funeral costs and granted his widow a pension for life. When Mozart learned of Bach's death he wrote about it to his father, regretting the loss to the musical world.
Johann Christian composed cantatas, chamber music, keyboard and orchestral pieces, operas and symphonies. His list of works includes 91 symphonies, but only 48 are accepted as genuine, while the authorship of the other 43 is in doubt. These symphonies are closer to the Italian sinfonia than to the classical symphony that later took shape with Haydn and Mozart. Today Haydn and Mozart are heard far more often in concert halls, though the reason is not the quality of Bach's music but the part their symphonies played in establishing the genre. Interest in Bach is gradually growing: a complete edition of his works in 48 parts appeared between 1984 and 1999.
Bach and Abel presented their newest symphonies and solo concertos at their London subscription concerts, and the programmes also included opera excerpts and sacred choral works. Bach is credited with developing the sinfonia concertante, which grew out of the Baroque concerto grosso. The genre influenced Mozart and Haydn. His keyboard works include the six harpsichord concertos, Op. 1 (1763), and the Op. 5 sonatas, three of which Mozart arranged as keyboard concertos.
During his Italian years Bach devoted most of his energy to sacred music: a Requiem, a Te Deum and Latin Masses are among his output there. A Mass was his first large-scale success, given an excellent performance in 1757. Scholars label his pieces with W numbers, following the thematic catalogue by Ernest Warburton. Mozart's liking for wind instruments in his early symphonies also owed something to Bach, who held that winds should carry melodic material of their own rather than merely double other instruments. Charles Burney describes the course of his career in the fourth volume of his General History of Music.
The site has seven editions of Bach, all marked as medium-plus level. Six of them are for solo piano: the Allegretto con variazioni on 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman' and five sonatas from Op. 17 (Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). One more edition is the Fugue in F major on B-A-C-H for organ. A pianist should start with the variations and the sonatas: Bach was a pianist himself and in London played an instrument that was new to the public.