Bach
In praise of Bach here.
Bach's routine sadly not here.
The walk here.
Study here.
Here is a snippet of Bach's life in Leipzig not yet relayed:
"With more than a dozen people at a time living in the 800-square-foot apartment (which had only one unheated bathroom), it is possible to understand why, when he shut himself off in the evening to work in his composing room, he sometimes took along a bottle of brandy.
There were instruments in the composing room, but he had long since stopped composing at the keyboard. He wrote music at his desk, where there were stacks of paper, the raven-quill pens he always used, and rastrals for drawing staves for instrumental parts, double for keyboard. There too was the powder to make the ink, the red and black ink pots in which he mixed it with water, and a box of sand for blotting the ink dry. On a sunny day he could find his thoughts while gazing out the window of this corner room, which overlooked the river Pleisse and, in the far distance, the castle and cathedral of Merseburg.
He must have spent a good deal of time in that room, because his output was astonishing, especially in the early years. On the Sunday he took over his duties in Leipzig, in late May of 1723, he presented the first cantata in the project of 'well-organized church music' that he had considered his great goal as a composer ever since he left Mühlhausen fifteen years before, citing in his letter of resignation the 'opposition' and 'vexations' he had experienced in pursuit of it. This was the first cantata in what would become five complete cycles, a cantata for every Sunday and feast day of the ecclesiastical year, some three hundred in all. There are few achievements in the history of art to compare - in ambition, scope, or artistry - with Bach's composition of cantatas during those first years in Leipzig, and to them he added his passions, the St. John Passion for his first Easter, the St. Matthew for his fourth."
James R. Gaines
Evening in the Palace of Reason
Happy Birthday to Bach.
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