| | ||||||||
  | SPONSOR  | |||||||
| Produced in association with the American Composers Forum | ||||||||
| Friday, December 25
The Bachs at Christmas Under the rubric "Bach," the Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians has this entry: "A German family of musicians. From the 16th century to the early 19th, it produced musicians of every kind in number beyond parallel: from fiddlers and town musicians to organists, Kantors, court musicians and Kapellmeisters. The greatest among them was, of course, Johann Sebastian Bach . . . " The Grove Dictionary then provides an alphabetical list of the dozens and dozens of musical Bachs and their impressive family tree. Without getting into specifics, we can be reasonably confident that Christmas Day was, if not always "merry" at least an especially "busy" one for most of them. For example, on today's date in 1723, J.S. Bach, celebrated his first Christmas as Kantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig with performances of a German-language Sacred Cantata, "Christen, ä'tzet diesen Tag" and this spectacularly festive setting of the Latin "Magnificat," or the Song of Mary. The impressive Bach musical family tree eventually peetered out in the mid-19th century. One of the very last of the line, composer Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, died in Berlin in 1845, at the age 86 --on Christmas Day, in fact. His father was Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, the youngest of J.S. Bach's composer-children, which meant little W.F.E. could claim J.C.F. as his father and the great J.S. as grandad. |  | Music Played on Today's Program: Additional Information:
Support Composers Datebook Your support makes our online services possible. Contribute Now.
| ||||||
| ||||||||
About the Program
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment