These books include the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Inventions, and the Little Organ Book.
Bach's first wife died in 1720, and the next year he married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, a fine singer and daughter of a court musician. She bore him 13 children in addition to the 7 he had had by his first wife, and she helped him in his work by copying the scores of his music for the performers.
Later Years
Bach moved to Leipzig in 1723 and spent the rest of his life there. His position as musical director and choirmaster of Saint Thomas's church and church school in Leipzig was unsatisfactory in many ways. He squabbled continually with the town council, and neither the council nor the populace appreciated his musical genius. They saw in him little more than a stuffy old man who clung stubbornly to obsolete forms of music. Nonetheless, the 202 cantatas surviving from the 295 that he wrote in Leipzig are still played today, whereas much that was new and in vogue at the time has been forgotten. Most of the cantatas open with a section for chorus and orchestra continue with alternating recitatives and arias for solo voices and accompaniment, and conclude with a chorale based on a simple Lutheran hymn. The music is at all times closely bound to the text, ennobling the latter immeasurably with its expressiveness and spiritual intensity. Among these works are the Ascension Cantata and the Christmas Oratorio, the latter consisting of six cantatas. The Passion of St. John and the Passion of St. Matthew also were written in Leipzig, as was the epic Mass in B Minor. Among the works written for the keyboard during this period are the famous Goldberg Variations; Part II of the Well-Tempered Clavier; and the Art of the Fugue, a magnificent demonstration of his contrapuntal skill in the form of 16 fugues and 4 canons, all on a single theme. Bach's sight began to fail in the last year of his life, and he died on July 28, 1750, after undergoing an unsuccessful eye operation.
The Bach Revival
After Bach's death he was remembered less as a composer than as an organist and harpsichord player. His frequent tours had ensured his reputation as the greatest organist of the time, but his contrapuntal style of writing sounded old-fashioned to his contemporaries, most of whom preferred the new preclassical styles then coming into fashion, which were more homophonic in texture and less contrapuntal than Bach's music. Consequently, for the next 80 years the public neglected his music, although a few musicians admired it, among them Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. A revival of interest in Bach's music occurred in the mid-19th century.