J.S. Bach

Ten Spooky Classical Music Favorites for Halloween

It’s Halloween, and you’re looking for that perfect, spooky Halloween music that’s a little more sophisticated than “The Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “Werewolves of London.” Look no further, friends. I’ve done my own hopping around...

“Coffee Cantata”

Editor's Note: Johann Sebastian Bach composed his comic "Coffee Cantata" in 1735. Likely first premiered in a Leipzig coffee house, it depicts a scene in which a father berates his daughter for drinking the intoxicating beverage. She in turn protests: Ah! how sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than...

Five Great Classical Pieces for Cello

Having played the cello for more than thirty years, I am often asked what I would recommend for listeners, especially for those who aren’t necessarily concertgoers. As a cellist, it’s hard to categorize what to listen to. Some...

An Amateur’s Week With Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet

What do amateurs glean from such a week, inundated in the particulars of one piece of music and its composer?... What a treat is it for a group of amateur string players,...

The Power of Song in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”

In the St. Matthew Passion, Bach indulges his gypsy soul. It is as though Bach, in his broad and deep humanity, his capacity for feeling all kinds and degrees of sorrow and joy, was reaching out to all his fellow human beings, believers and non-believers alike, and...

Bach’s Mass for All Christians

Bach's Mass in B Minor is the summation of his life's work and one of the supreme masterpieces of Western classical music. Yet mystery surrounds the work. What was its purpose, how did it come to be written, and how was it intended to be performed?...

Laudamus Te: From the “Mass in B Minor”

Johann Sebastian Bach completed what came to be known as the Mass in B minor in 1749, near the end of the his life, though he had worked on various sections of it for twenty-five years. Why the Lutheran Bach wrote what his son Carl Philipp Emanuel later catalogued...

The “Czech Bach”: Who Was Jan Dismas Zelenka?

J.S. Bach was among the few who recognized the genius of Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Czech composer who passed into total oblivion after his death. But in listening to Zelenka's wondrous music, one can only deem the reason for his neglect a mystery...

Music for Christmas: Ten Great Classical Pieces

What better gift than music for the season in which we celebrate God, the source of all beauty, becoming man? Here are some familiar and less familiar classical pieces. 1. G.F. Handel: Messiah  Though especially popular at Christmas time, it is only “Part the First” of Handel's Messiah that pertains...

Ten Scary Classical Music Pieces for Halloween

Great music pierces the soul...and can sometimes terrify it. Over the centuries, composers, like nearly all artists of every variety, have been fascinated by the subject of death and by...