Weimar also gave him the first full shape of what would become The Well-Tempered Clavier. He began the preludes and fugues that later formed the first book, eventually two books of twenty-four pairs, one in every major and minor key, written over twenty years. He also started the Little Organ Book, setting Lutheran chorales in intricate textures. In 1713 he was offered a post in Halle after advising on the renovation of the main organ at the Market Church of Our Dear Lady. Then, in early 1714, promotion came: Konzertmeister, with the duty of presenting a church cantata every month in the castle church. Himmelskönig, sei willkommen, BWV 182, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12, and Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten!, BWV 172, all belong to that new order.

The Weimar years ended badly. In 1717 Bach fell out of favour, and the court secretary recorded that on 6 November he was confined for stubbornly pressing his dismissal, then released on 2 December with notice of his discharge. The humiliation matters because it shows the pattern of his life: brilliance, friction, and an employer who did not know what to do with him. Yet the dismissal also opened the next great chapter. Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, hired him as Kapellmeister in 1717. Leopold was a musician himself, paid well, and gave him freedom. Because the court was Calvinist and used little elaborate church music, Bach turned largely to secular composition, and in that quieter court he wrote some of his most famous instrumental music.

Between 1717 and 1723 came the orchestral suites, the Cello Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, and the Brandenburg Concertos, a body of work that seems to gather the whole court into motion. He also wrote secular cantatas such as Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht, BWV 134a. In 1719 he made the 35-kilometre journey to Halle hoping to meet George Frideric Handel, but Handel had already left. The meeting never happened, though the idea of it lingered in Bach's life. In 1730 his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, tried again, travelling to Halle to invite Handel to Leipzig, but that visit too did not take place. Two giants kept missing each other by a few years and a few roads.

In 1720 Bach suffered a personal blow that split his life into before and after. While he was in Carlsbad with Prince Leopold, Maria Barbara Bach died suddenly on 7 July. They had married in 1707, four months after his arrival in Mühlhausen, and together they had seven children. Their first, Catharina Dorothea, was born later in 1707. Three sons followed, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard, all musicians, the first two composers. Twins born in 1713 died within a year, and their last son, Leopold, also died within a year. The household that had once been busy with children and music was left abruptly hollow.

The following year he met Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a gifted soprano sixteen years younger than he was, while she was singing at the Köthen court. They married on 3 December 1721. Their life together was crowded with children and work. They had thirteen children, though only six lived to adulthood: Gottfried Heinrich, Elisabeth Juliane Friederica, Johann Christoph Friedrich, Johann Christian, Johanna Carolina, and Regina Susanna. Anna Magdalena was not only wife but musical companion, and the house she helped create became one of the most active domestic workshops in European music. Bach's family life was marked by births, deaths, copying, teaching, and the practical business of survival.

In 1723 Bach was appointed Thomaskantor in Leipzig, and the scale of the task was immense. Leipzig was a mercantile Saxon city with the leading cantorate in Protestant Germany. He was responsible for the St. Thomas School and for music in four churches: St. Thomas, St. Nicholas, and to a lesser extent the New Church and St. Peter's. A cantata was needed every Sunday and for feast days through the liturgical year. He had been offered the post only after Johann Kuhnau died in 1722, and after both Telemann and Christoph Graupner declined. Bach took the job after others had used it as leverage. It was a practical appointment, but also a test of nerve.

Once installed, he had to teach the Thomasschule boys to sing and to teach Latin, though he was allowed four prefects to do the Latin work. He held the position for twenty-seven years, until his death. In his first year he wrote new music for almost every liturgical occasion, creating what is now called his first cantata cycle. In the second year he turned to chorale cantatas, each based on a Lutheran hymn, with the outer stanzas retained and the inner stanzas reshaped into recitatives and arias. This was not merely routine church service. It was a systematic artistic project, built around the calendar of Leipzig and the theology of the Lutheran chorale.

The Leipzig church year gave him a framework and a constraint. Advent and Lent were silent periods, except for Annunciation on 25 March, even when that feast fell close to Palm Sunday as it did in 1725. The prescribed readings for Annunciation, from Isaiah and Luke, pointed directly to the birth of Christ. Bach turned such occasions into architecture. Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4, his earlier Easter cantata, followed the per omnes versus principle, with every stanza of the hymn used without alteration. Later chorale cantatas such as Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern worked differently, setting the first stanza as an opening fantasia and the last as a closing chorale. Form became devotion made audible.

The pressures of Leipzig did not ease. Bach frequently quarrelled with the city council, which he considered penny-pinching, and he had already known difficult relations with employers in Weimar and elsewhere. Yet his prestige grew. He held honorary appointments at Köthen and Weissenfels, and in Dresden, where Augustus III of Poland, who was also Elector of Saxony, eventually made him court composer in 1736. That title came after Bach had been pushing for leverage against Leipzig for years. He was not a court flatterer, but a man who understood titles as instruments in a long negotiation. The city may have paid him grudgingly, but it could not ignore his usefulness.

The first Leipzig decade brought some of his most important sacred works. The St John Passion and the St Matthew Passion both belong here, and the latter was first performed on Good Friday, 11 April 1727. The lost St Mark Passion followed in 1731, first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday, 23 March. Bach's music for these works drew on the power of the Gospel narrative, the chorales of the Lutheran tradition, and a dramatic sense that listeners could hear as almost operatic. In 1733 he composed a Kyrie-Gloria Mass in B minor for the Catholic court in Dresden and presented it to the Elector in a successful bid for the title of Court Composer, later expanding it into the full Mass in B minor.

The Christmas Oratorio of 1734 and 1735 shows another side of his Leipzig method. He built it from earlier cantatas and church music, reusing material for all seven occasions of the Christmas season. That same period saw him prepare his first organ music publication, printed as the third Clavier-Übung in 1739. Around then he also began compiling and composing the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1736 he received the title of Royal Court Composer from Augustus III. Between 1737 and 1739 Carl Gotthelf Gerlach directed the Collegium Musicum. Bach had written for that student ensemble too, showing that his Leipzig life was not confined to church, but also reached the public musical world of the city.

By the 1740s Bach was turning increasingly to the older stile antico, copying, transcribing, and expanding works by Palestrina, Kerll, Torri, Bassani, Gasparini, and Caldara. He was not retreating into the past so much as testing how old forms could still bear new weight. His style in the last decade integrated canons and polyphonic structures more closely than before. In 1741 he published the Goldberg Variations, his fourth and last Clavier-Übung, for two-manual harpsichord, complete with nine canons. At the same time he kept revising earlier works, including the St Matthew and St John Passions and the Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes. He was still changing his own past.

His late years show a composer who never stopped studying. He adapted Handel and Stölzel, and even music by Pergolesi and by his own pupil Goldberg. He was preparing to enter Lorenz Christoph Mizler's Society of Musical Sciences in 1746, and for admission he submitted the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her, along with a portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann showing his Canon triplex á 6 Voc. Then, in May 1747, he visited Frederick the Great at Potsdam. The king played a theme and challenged him to improvise a fugue. Bach did so on one of the early fortepianos, and on returning to Leipzig he composed The Musical Offering, a set of fugues, canons, and a trio sonata based on the King's Theme, and dedicated it to Frederick.

The Musical Offering was not the end of that late burst. Within a year the Schübler Chorales appeared, six chorale preludes transcribed from cantata movements he had written decades earlier. Around the same time the canonic variations for Mizler's society were printed. Two large works occupied his final years. The Art of Fugue, begun around 1742, gathered canons and fugues into a sequence he was still preparing for publication shortly before death. And from the mid-1740s he expanded the 1733 Dresden Kyrie-Gloria into the Mass in B minor, adding the Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. The complete mass was never performed in his lifetime, yet it stands among the greatest choral works in history.

The final months carry a family note as well as a musical one. In January 1749, with Bach already declining, his daughter Elisabeth Juliane Friederica married his pupil Johann Christoph Altnickol. On 2 June Heinrich von Brühl wrote to one of the Leipzig burgomasters asking that Gottlob Harrer be prepared to replace Bach upon his eventual decease. The city was already planning for the silence after him. Meanwhile his eyesight worsened, and in March 1750 he underwent surgery, followed by another operation in April by John Taylor, the British eye surgeon later regarded as a charlatan. The procedures failed, and the consequences were fatal.

Bach died on 28 July 1750 from complications following unsuccessful eye surgery, after suffering a stroke a few days earlier. He was buried at Old St John's Cemetery in Leipzig, and his grave went unmarked for nearly 150 years. An inventory drawn up a few months later listed five harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, three violins, three violas, two cellos, a viola da gamba, a lute, a spinet, and fifty-two sacred books, including works by Martin Luther and Josephus. C. P. E. Bach ensured that The Art of Fugue was published in 1751, unfinished but intact in its ambition. He also helped prepare the obituary, the Nekrolog, with Johann Friedrich Agricola, printed in 1754.

At first, the world knew him chiefly as an organist. Then, in 1829, Felix Mendelssohn gave the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, and the Bach Revival began in earnest. By 1850 the Bach-Gesellschaft had been founded, and by the end of the century his known music had been printed. Johann Nikolaus Forkel's biography appeared in 1802, and through the nineteenth century Bach became one of the great names of Western music, admired by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and many others. In the twentieth century Casals, Gould, Stokowski, and Harnoncourt carried him into new sound worlds. In 2015 his handwritten copy of the Mass in B minor entered UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. The man buried in Leipzig in 1750 had become, by the fact of his work, the composer whom the world still returns to first.

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The Leipzig Master