Wikipedia j&s bach biography

19th-century biography

Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work is an early 19th-century biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, written in German by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and later translated by, among others, Charles Sanford Terry.

When Forkel published his Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke: Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst in 1802 it was the first biography on the composer published as a separate book.

Forkel dedicated the work to Gottfried van Swieten. Van Swieten was an early Bach adept, for instance making Mozart familiar with the baroque composer.

Bach biography before Forkel

The best known predecessor of Forkel's biography was Bach's Obituary, the "Nekrolog", an article of less than 20 pages published a few years after the composer's death in 1750.^[1] Short biographies in reference works that appeared before Forkel's biography mostly derived from the "