Though Bach's life was mostly spent at Weimar and Leipsic, he was at
successive periods chapel-master and concert-director at several of the
German courts, which aspired to shape public taste in matters of musical
culture and enthusiasm. But he was by nature singularly retiring and
unobtrusive, and he recoiled from several brilliant offers which would
have brought him too much in contact with the gay world of fashion,
apparently dreading any diversion from a severe and exclusive art-life;
for within these limits all his hopes, energies, and wishes were
focalized. Yet he was not without that keen spirit of rivalry, that love
of combat, which seems to be native to spirits of the more robust and
energetic type.
In the days of the old Minnesingers, tournaments of music shared the
public taste with tournaments of arms. In Bach's time these public
competitions were still in vogue. One of these was held by Augustus
II., Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, one of the most munificent
art-patrons of Europe, but best known to fame from his intimate part in
the wars of Charles XII. of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia. Here
Bach's principal rival was a French _virtuoso_, Marchand, who, an exile
from Paris, had delighted the king by the lightness and brilliancy of
his execution. They were both to improvise on the same theme. Marchand
heard Bach's performance, and signalized his own inferiority by
declining to play, and secretly leaving the city of Dresden. Augustus
sent Bach a hundred louis d'or, but this splendid _douceur_ never
reached him, as it was appropriated by one of the court officials.
In Bach's half-century of a studious musical life there is but little
of stirring incident to record. The significance of his career was
interior, not exterior. Twice married, and the father of twenty
children, his income was always small even for that age. Yet, by
frugality, the simple wants of himself and his family never overstepped
the limit of supply; for he seems to have been happily mated with wives
who sympathized with his exclusive devotion to art, and united with this
the virtues of old-fashioned German thrift.
Three years before his death, Bach, who had a son in the service of the
King of Prussia, yielded to the urgent invitation of that monarch to
go to Berlin. Frederick II., the conqueror of Rossbach, and one of the
greatest of modern soldiers, was a passionate lover of literature and
art, and it was his pride to collect at his court all the leading lights
of European culture. He was not only the patron of Voltaire, whose
connection with the Prussian monarch has furnished such rich material
to the anecdote-history of literature, but of all the distinguished
painters, poets, and musicians, whom he could persuade by his
munificent offers (but rarely fulfilled) to suffer the burden of his
eccentricities. Frederick was not content with playing the part of
patron, but must himself also be poet, philosopher, painter, and
composer.
On the night of Bach's arrival Frederick was taking part in a concert
at his palace, and, on hearing that the great musician whose name was
in the mouths of all Germany had come, immediately sent for him without
allowing him to don a court dress, interrupting his concert with the
enthusiastic announcement, "Gentlemen, Bach is here." The cordial
hospitality and admiration of Frederick was gratefully acknowledged by
Bach, who dedicated to him a three-part fugue on a theme composed by the
king, known under the name of "A Musical Offering." But he could not be
persuaded to remain long from his Leipsic home.
Shortly before Bach's death, he was seized with blindness, brought on by
incessant labor; and his end was supposed to have been hastened by the
severe inflammation consequent on two operations performed by an English
oculist. He departed this life July 30, 1750, and was buried in St.
John's churchyard, universally mourned by musical Germany, though his
real title to exceptional greatness was not to be read until the next
generation.