Johann Christian Bach, painted in London by Thomas Gainsborough, 1776 ( Museo Civico, Bologna)
He was the eleventh son of Johann Sebastian Bach, and was born in Leipzig, Germany. His father, and possibly also Johann Christian's second cousin Johann Elias Bach, trained young Johann Christian in music. It is believed that Book II of Johann Sebastian’s The Well-Tempered Clavier was written and used for Johann Christian's instruction. Johann Christian served as copyist to his father. On the death of his father in 1750, Johann Christian became the pupil of his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Berlin.
In 1754 he went to Italy where he studied counterpoint under Giovanni Battista Martini, and from 1760 to 1762 held the post of organist at Milan cathedral, for which he wrote two Masses, a Requiem, a Te Deum and other works. Around this time he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism.
He was the only one of Johann Sebastian's sons to write opera in Italian, starting with arias inserted into the operas of others, then pasticcios. The Teatro Regio in Turin commissioned him to write Artaserse, an opera seria that was premiered in 1760. This led to more opera commissions and offers from Venice and London to compose operas for them. He accepted the London opportunity and travelled there in 1762, and it was to be London where he would spend the rest of his life. Thus, he is often referred to as the "London Bach". The Milan Cathedral kept his position open, hoping he would return.
For twenty years he was the most popular musician in England. His dramatic works, produced at the King’s theatre, were received with great cordiality. The first of these, Orione, was one of the first few musical works to use clarinets. His final opera seria, La Clemenza di Scipione (1778), remained popular with London audiences for many years and shows interesting parallels with Mozart's last opera in this genre, La Clemenza di Tito (1791), suggesting the younger composer may have been influenced by the elder's score.
Johann Christian was appointed music master to the Queen, and his duties included giving music lessons to her and her children, and accompanying on piano, the King playing flute. His concerts, given in partnership with Abel at the Hanover Square rooms, soon became the most fashionable of public entertainments.
During his first years in London, Bach made friends with a very young but very promising musician, Mozart, who was there as part of the endless tours arranged by his father Leopold for the purpose of displaying him as a child prodigy. Many scholars judge that J. C. Bach was one of the most important influences on Mozart, who learned from him how to produce a brilliant and attractive surface texture in his music. This influence can be seen directly in the opening of Mozart’s piano sonata in B‐flat (KV 315c, the Linz sonata from 1783 – 1784) which very closely resembles that of two sonatas of Bach’s which Mozart would have known; and indirectly in Bach’s attempt in an early sonata (the C minor piano sonata, Op. 5 no. 6) to more effectively combine the galant style of his day with fugal music.
Johann Christian Bach died in London on the first day of 1782. Mozart said in a letter to his father that it was "a loss to the musical world." At the time of Bach's death, Mozart was composing his Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414; the Andante second movement of this concerto has a theme close to one found in Bach's La calamità del cuori overture. It has been suggested that Mozart's slow movement was intended as a tribute to Bach, his music, and his importance to Mozart's own work.
Evaluation
Although Bach's fame declined in the decades following his death, his music still showed up on concert programmes in London with some regularity, often coupled with works by Haydn. In the 19th century, scholarly work on the life and music of Johann Christian's father began, but often this led to exaltation of J.S. Bach's music at the expense of that of his sons; Phillip Spitta claimed towards the end of his J.S. Bach biography that "it is especially in Bach's sons that we may mark the decay of that power which had culminated [in Sebastian] after several centuries of growth" (Spitta, Vol. 3, p. 278), and Sebastian's first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, said specifically of Christian that "The original spirit of Bach is . . . not to be found in any of his works" (New Bach Reader, p. 458). It was not until the 20th century that scholars and the musical world began to realize that Bach's sons could legitimately compose in a different style than their father without their musical idioms being inferior or debased, and composers like Johann Christian began to receive renewed appreciation.
He is of some historical interest as the first composer who preferred the piano to older keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord. Johann Christian’s early music shows the influence of his older brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, while his middle period in Italy shows the influence of Sammartini.
Miscellaneous
A full account of J. C. Bach’s career is given in the fourth volume of Charles Burney's History of Music.
There are two others named Johann Christian Bach in the Bach family tree, but neither was a musician.
Further reading
- Ernest Warburton, "Johann Christian Bach," in Christoph Wolff et. al., The New Grove Bach Family. NY: Norton, 1983 (ISBN 0393300889), pp. 315ff..
- Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach, trans. Clara Bell & J.A. Fuller-Maitland, NY: Dover, 1951 (reprint of 1889 ed.).
- Christoph Wolff, ed., The New Bach Reader, NY: Norton, 1998.
This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.