In his own time, Bach was respected as a virtuoso organ player-now he is known and appreciated for the emotional depth of his Baroque music.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach,Thuringia (in what is now East Germany), into a family firmly established locally as a musical one; it is reported that in some parts of Thuringia, the very word ‘Bach’ had come to denote a ‘musician’.

Johann Sebastian’s father was a good violinist and trumpeter. By the time Sebastian was ten both parents had died and he was adopted by his eldest brother Christoph, organist of church. Christoph was a skilled organist and Sebastian praised him as ‘a profound composer’. He taught Sebastian to play keyboard instruments and introduced him to the technique needed in music copying.

Bach was 15 when he left the house to take up a chorister-scholarship at the Michaelisschule, in Luneberg.

He became a member of the Matins Choir. Members of this choir were usually boys from poor families.They received free schooling, board and lodgings and were paid a small amount depending on their seniority. Bach sang in the choir until his voice broke, changing from a treble to bass baritone, then he became an instrumentalist. At school he studied Latin, Lutheranism, arithmetic, history and geography, German poetry, physics, heraldry and genealogy.

From 1702, aged 17, Bach was on his own .In August 1703, he was appointed organist of new Church in Arnstadt. He composed Toccata and Fugue in D-minor.

In 1706 Bach was obliged to find a new position at Muhlhausen . In that year he also married his cousin, Maria Barbara.

From July 1708 to December 1714 he was working as organist and concertmaster at the court of Duke of Weimar. During his Weimar period, six of his children were born. I this period he composed hundreds of pieces for solo keyboard, orchestral dance suites, trio sonatas for various instruments, and concertos for various instruments and orchestra. A master of contrapuntal technique, Bach's steady output of fugues began in Weimar. The largest single body of his fugal writing is "The well-tempered keyboard" .

The 48 Preludes and Fugues, which appared in two books, explore an infinitely wide range of fugal devices.
It consists of two collections compiled in 1722 and 1744, each containing a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations explore another very particular contrapuntal device, that of canon, in which the fugue-like imitation between the parts is always exact, as it is if you sing the round Frere Jacques.
The most famous are the six concerti composed for the Duke of Brandenburg in 1721.
Brandenburg Concerto no.3, Violin Partita no.3.
Maria Barbara suddenly died in 1720. Bach had four children to look after by himself. At the age 36 , in December 1721 he married Anna Magdalena Wilken, a singer in court.
Soon after his second marriage, Bach began looking for another position. He presented to his second wife two notebooks with keyboard music(minuets, preludes ,gavottes, musettes). The French Suites were composed between 1722 and 1725. They consist of the traditional dances like Allemande, Courante, Menuet, Gavotte, Gigue, Sarabande as well as some less-frequently encountered dances like the Anglaise, Polonaise, Air, Bourree and Loure.
In 1723, Bach was appointed Cantor of Thomasschule, adjacent to the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas' Lutheran Church) in Leipzig as well as He remained in Leipzig for the rest of his life.It was one of the most important music posts in Lutheran Europe: only Kantor of Hamburg ranked higher.
At Leipzig, bach settled down to write music for performance in the five churches under direction. The first major work the produced during this period was the St. John Passion, first perfomed in April 1724.
In Leipzig, most of Bach’s cantata texts were produced by local Commissioner of the Post Office, Friedrich Henrici. It was he who provided the text for the St. Matthew Passion, first perfomed on Good Friday 1729.
Towards the end of 1749, Bach’s failing eyesight was operated on by a traveling English surgeon, the catastrophic results of which were complete blindness. His health failing, Bach nevertheless continued to compose, dictating his work to a pupil. He finally had to a stroke on July 28, 1750. He was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Thomas’ Church.