The great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach

The greatest composer of music that has ever lived. Bach did not invent any new styles of forms of music, but rather perfected every single one of those that existed in his day. He remains the all-time master of the fugue, a form that is so difficult to write that even Mozart and Beethoven, both of whom wrote fugal masterpieces, hated writing them. Bach, however, improvised fugues for 2 hours at a stretch and then wrote them down from memory afterward. Bach wrote universal masterpieces in every genre, including the 6 finest concerti grossi ever written, nicknamed the Brandenburg Concerti (clip below). He also wrote the finest single work of sacred music in history, the Mass in b minor, which has been argued by many musicologsts and composers to be the single greatest work of music of all time, in any genre, in any style. Whereas, most composers did not typically relish complexity, Bach was at home in it. The Sanctus from his b minor Mass is a 6-part chorus, including a 4-voiced fugue. In the annals of fugal composition, no composer as ever attempted what Bach accomplished and he did so without difficulty. Using one theme, Bach explains in music all the possibilities of contrapuntal composition inherent in a single musical subject: The fugue, the double fugue, the triple fugue, the quadruple fugue, the stretto fugue, the mirror fugue, canonizing the fugues, etc. If you were to turn the scores of the two mirror fugues upside down and play them, they would sound the same. He wrote in the Baroque style, but his music is as Romantic as anything Beethoven or Wagner or Schumann ever composed; and films can be set to it. He is the greatest of all composers of all time, because of the intellectual depth of his music, the technical demand and the artistic beauty.

source listverse.com/

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 (Freiburger Barockorchester)