The German composer who, working most of his life as a church and court musician far from any limelight, brought the art of weaving independent melodic lines into a single structure to one of its highest and most influential summits — and wrote music of such order and depth that it became a foundation of Western art-music training and contrapuntal thought since.
When Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750, the wider public did not mourn a great composer. Outside musical circles he was little known. He was remembered as a brilliant church organist whose written music was already going out of fashion, the kind of dense, learned writing a lighter age was leaving behind. His own sons earned more fame than he had. Much of his music remained unpublished, passed quietly between musicians who knew its worth. Then, in 1829, a twenty-year-old named Felix Mendelssohn staged the St Matthew Passion in Berlin — its first major public performance in about a century. The hall was stunned. That concert launched what came to be called the Bach revival, and within a few generations the half-forgotten organist of Leipzig was being called the foundation of Western music. The notes had not changed. The world had finally caught up to them.