Beginnings

There was no escaping it - Johann Sebastian just had to become a musician. As a child, he already had an insatiable appetite for learning, listening and experimenting. Shunske Sato browsed through Bach’s libraries, from his childhood with his brother Johann Christoph to his home at the Thomasschule in Leipzig. Whenever Bach came across good music, he copied it avidly, putting strict Palestrina polyphony next to brand-new notes by Conti and Biffi. It is only thanks to Bach’s copy that today we can listen to a mass by the unknown Bavarian composer Johann Baal.

And the master himself? We go back to the beginnings, with Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich. This small, fine piece is probably Bach’s very first cantata, written when our ambitious organist had just returned from Buxtehude’s town of Lübeck. A few years later, he wrote Gleich wie der Regen for the court at Weimar, a cultural hotspot of the Protestant world, with an inspiring library.