Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and virtuoso organist whose works — the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B minor, and hundreds of cantatas — stand at the summit of Western music. Almost none of his own words survive: a handful of letters, dedications, and account-book entries, plus recollections gathered by his first biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel. That scarcity is exactly why folksy one-liners about ‘the right notes at the right time’ get pinned on him — there is little documented voice to contradict them.