Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

Birth : 1685-03-31, Eisenach, Germany

Death : 1750-07-28

History

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He enriched established German styles through his skill in counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Mass in B minor, two Passions, and over three hundred cantatas of which around two hundred survive. His music is revered for its technical command, artistic beauty, and intellectual depth.

Profile

Johann Sebastian Bach

Movies

Keys to the Heart
Music
Troubled and alone, a boxer moves in with his long-lost mother and autistic pianist brother — but must fit in with a family he hasn't known for years.
Bleat
Musician
A black and white silent short film, set on the Greek Cycladic island of Tenos. A woman in black is mourning inside a simple house. Reality blends with dreamy imagination, and tradition with insidious desires.
Bleat
Music
A black and white silent short film, set on the Greek Cycladic island of Tenos. A woman in black is mourning inside a simple house. Reality blends with dreamy imagination, and tradition with insidious desires.
The Big Tree
Music
A man tries to meet death by the tree where playful children come and go.
Gregorio
Music
One morning, after a restless sleep, Gregorio wakes up a generous conversationalist who shares some of his biggest secrets.
Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon Tribute concert
Music
The Radio France philarmonic orchestra plays the two recurring themes in "Barry Lyndon". A bewitching travel into music-loving Kubrick's universe.
Why The Hell Are We Going Who?
Original Music Composer
Everyone pindyuryat somewhere at different speeds, someone on their own, someone - for authority.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048
Writer
Live performance from Morris-Jumel Mansion's annual George Washington Dinner
Happy Ending
Other
A taciturn Zamboni driver finds comfort in his work, preferring the company of his icy rink to other people. When his shift is suddenly called off one day, he grapples with his newfound freedom by following a discarded coupon to an underground massage parlor.
La Femme qui pleure dans les nuages
Music
Placed under the auspices of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose maxim "The human being has the fate of flowing water", is quoted in the epistle of the film, La Femme qui pleure dans les nuages is a film-poem by Gerard Courant to the glory of nine women engulfed in Alpine and Pyrenean torrents.
Johann Sebastian Bach - Weihnachtsoratorium BWV 248
Compositor
Paris Opera Ballet: Tribute to Jerome Robbins 2
Original Music Composer
Jerome Robbins considered the Paris Opera Ballet as his second home after the New York City Ballet. This production in his honour brings together works displaying the infinite diversity of his sources of inspiration and his genius on stage. Be it in the energy of the large-scale Glass Pieces or the intimate sweetness of Afternoon of a Faun and A Suite of Dances, there emerges that rare capacity to make bodies follow the flow in a living comprehension of music. As the celebrated ballet Fancy Free, a veritable theatrical portrait of an era, enters the repertoire, Robbins reveals another facet of his talent.
Johannes-Passion
Sound
Ever Forward
Music
An abstract depiction of life in motion.
The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street
Music
The film tells the life story of its director, Jan Nemec, one of the most known and important filmmakers of Czech New Wave.
Roger D'Astous
Music
A documentary about montreal architect Roger D'astous, who battled all his life to create a nordic architecture. Starchitect in the 60s, this Frank L. Wright student then fell from grace before rising again at the dawn of the century.
Klippningen
Music
Maria Jansson is a teacher in Tyresö. Every other month she travels to Åkersvängen, a home for people with disabilities on Åland. She travels to cut the hair of her brother and his friends at Åkersvängen.
National Theatre Live: The Hard Problem
Music
Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) returns to the National Theatre with his highly-anticipated new play The Hard Problem, directed by Nicholas Hytner (Othello, Hamlet, One Man, Two Guvnors). Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brainscience institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? This is ‘the hard problem’ which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and the fMRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.
Bach: St. John Passion
Original Music Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle was one of the outstanding events of the past season. As before with the St Matthew Passion, star director Peter Sellars succeeded in creating a staging which made the spiritual and dramatic content of the Passion story even more intensive. The New York Times also praised the “brilliant and energetic” playing of the orchestra, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the “haunting, almost unsurpassable singing of all those involved.”
Christmas with Johann Sebastian Bach
Compositors
Mind in the Wilderness: Khatia Buniatishvili
Music
Framed by the tranquil beauty of a forest near Berlin, Khatia Buniatishvili gives a recital of pianistic masterpieces dappled by the shade of verdant ferns and leafy canopies. As a special treat, her older sister Gvantsa joins her for four-handed works by Dvořák, Brahms, and Piazzolla. Described as a “force of nature”, Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili takes her art into the wilderness with this concert. On a wooden stage, she sits in an earthy concert hall performing works of particular meaning for her, and beloved by audiences the world over. From Debussy’s Clair de Lune to Ravel’s La Valse, from Stravinsky’s Petrushka to Piazzolla’s Improvisations on Libertango, Buniatishvili demonstrates her wide palette of expression and lyric approach to her instrument. Interspersed with the music are intimate interviews of the artist herself in which she discusses on her musical upbringing, her career, and her impressions of the pieces she has chosen to include in the program.
Christmas Oratorio
Original Music Composer
This recording of all six cantatas from the Salle Henry Le Bœuf in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium, in December 2012 features internationally renowned Bach expert Philippe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Gent.
Bach Matthäus-Passion
Compositor
A beautiful, sensitive, reverent performance. Fischer allows Bach to speak with no unnecessary flourishes. Padmore as the Evangelist is superb, and the other soloists and choirs are near perfect. And of course the Concertgebouw orchestral musicians are absolutely first class.
András Schiff plays Bach
Music
Surely Bach’s French Suites, which he composed during his years at Cöthen (1717–1723), are among the finest inducements to practise that any teacher has ever made to a pupil. In this case Bach wrote them for his young wife, Anna Magdalena. The over-riding impression left by these suites is one of endearing tunefulness. Clavier-Übung II is a later collection of didactic keyboard pieces. It comprises two greatly contrasted works: the Italian Concerto and the Overture in the French Style. These performances admirably demonstrate the thoughtful and persuasive approach that András Schiff adopts when performing Bach. Recorded live at the Bachfest 2010, Protestant Reformed Church of Leipzig, 11 June 2010 Repertoire J.S. Bach: French Suites Nos. 1–6, Overture in the French Style in B minor, Italian Concerto in F major, BWV 971
The Destiny
Music
A young cellist is submerged by the sick love of his father, an acclaimed cellist, who does not let her be herself. Her father dies after the last concert of his daughter Mariel. This represents a break in her life because her possesive father planned everything, and she does not know how to face the world on her own. On a trip to Colonia, she discovers a person who sells trinkets to the tourists, who helps her take control of her life.
Bach: St. Matthew Passion
Original Music Composer
Sir Simon Rattle was in no doubt: the performance of the St Matthew Passion which he realised together with the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Rundfunkchor Berlin in 2010 was for him “the single most important thing we ever did here”. Critics around the world agreed. They praised the semi-staged “ritualization” by American star-director Peter Sellars, as well as the outstanding musical performances by the soloists, including Magdalena Kožená, Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff and Mark Padmore as the Evangelist.
Notes on an American Film Director at Work
Music
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas follows his friend, film director Martin Scorsese, and his cast and crew, through various locations during the shooting of his film The Departed, released in 2006.
Cyber
Music
A short trip on an easychair.
Bach The Cello Suites
Compositor
Johann Sebastian Bach composed his Six Suites for Solo Cello in the early 1720's. Unlike the Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, composed around the same time, there is no extant autograph manuscript. Only four copies exist, of which one made by Anna Magdelena Bach is the standard performing edition Maisky has acknowledged the period instruments style of Bach in these performances. His playing is slightly more reserved, somewhat analytical, very broad and powerful with a rich and deeply resonant string sound
Lapsus
Original Music Composer
A curious nun ventures into the darker side of her animated world.
Rain Down from Above
Original Music Composer
A film about an act of nature in the mountains, caused by a strong downpour.
Revisiting Solaris
Music
The astronaut Chris Kelvin receives a visit from a woman who is a double of his dead wife. This story, told in Stanislaw Lem’s eponymous novel, was once adapted into the film Solaris by the legendary Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. According to Deimantas Narkevičius, Tarkovsky was not as critical of the increasing impact of electronic media on relationships and on the complex nature of human memory as Lem, the original author of the story. In this video, the actor Donatas Banionis reappears in his role as Kelvin, forty years after Tarkovsky’s film was shot. Revisiting Solaris is based on the last chapter of Lem's book, which had been left out of Tarkovsky’s adaptation. In order to visualize the landscape of Solaris and expose complex specters of the past, Narkevičius combines the new footage and a series of photos from 1905 taken by the Lithuanian painter and composer Mykolojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.
A View from Space With Heavenly Music
Music
As viewed and filmed in High Definition by astronauts on the space shuttle, this is the Planet Earth as few have seen before. One hour of High Definition visual space scenery, coupled with eight separate one hour soundtracks of the world's most treasured clasical music in Dolby Digital Surround Sound. Choose your favorite classics for this High Definition trip around the world - complete classical music collection on one disc. Classical Masters featuring Wagner, Pachelbel, Ravel, Strauss, Beethoven,Handel, Debussy, Marcello, Satie, Mozart, Vivaldi/Mendelssohn, Bach, Rossini, Dvorak, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and other great composers.
Saraband
Music
In this sequel to Scenes from a Marriage (1973), we revisit the characters of Johan and Marianne, then a married couple. After their divorce, Johan and Marianne haven't seen each other for 32 years. Marianne is still working, as a divorce lawyer. Johan is quite well off and has retired to a house in the Orsa finnmark district of Sweden. On a whim, Marianne decides to visit him. Johan's son from a previous marriage, Henrik, lives nearby in a cottage with his daughter Karin, a gifted cello player. The relationship between father and son is strained.
J.S. Bach: The Music, The Life, The Legend
Music
A dramatic exploration of the life and struggles of the great composer, J.S. Bach, from his orphaning at the age of nine, through his struggles for the freedom to compose music in a restrictive society, to his eventual recognition after death.
Mit geschlossenen Augen
Music
Cinema essayist Mansur Madavi returned to the director's chair for the first time in nine years with this meditation on growing up in a small village in Chile. An elderly man (Lorenzo Montalban) looks back on the town where he grew up and recalls the mysteries of his youth, as well as the disappointments that led him to seek his fortune elsewhere. As the past travels by him, he recalls buildings that fell to dust, the arrest of his teachers, adventures with his schoolmates, watching a close friend catch pigeons, and discovering a boy who lived in tunnels he dug under the earth.
Pozo de zorro
Music
Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht: The Kaffee Kantate - Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir
Music
Johann Sebastian Bach's "Reefer Madness" to the social menace known as coffee.
Rozhdestvo
Original Music Composer
The film is about the birth of the Child
Christophe Coin, le musicien
Music
Ein Moment - Vorbei - Ein Film
Music
On 27th September 1992, 11 yards in front of a Viennese supermarket and 12 minutes before closing time, Helga, 30, is confronted with a fleeting moment of pleasure. She shrugs off the incident. The customer-friendly opening hours are more reliable.
Cage
Music
A cinematographic attempt at a maximum of exertion and a maximum of relaxation based on the thoughts of John Cage, Chuang Tzu and others.
Benny's Video
Music
A 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.
100 Days Before the Command
Music
Visually astonishing, erotically charged and emotionally jarring. '100 Days Before the Command' is Hussein Erkenov's courageous and stinging indictment of communism. Five young Red Army recruits struggle for survival against the merciless violence that surrounds them on a daily basis. Their only means of saving their dignity is by preserving the humanity and compassion they share for each other.
Auf dem Weg
Music
Voted for in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll
Postadresse: 2640 Schlöglmühl
Music
Documentary about a small town in Austria.
Соната для Гитлера
Music
As with so many early films by Sokurov, this film has two dates: the first is the date of its creation (the film was then banned), the second is the date of the final edition and legal public screening. The film consists of German and Soviet archive footage of the World War II — to be exact, from the end of the war. An attempt to make a large–scale documentary on this subject had been undertaken in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s: the film — “Ordinary Fascism” — by the outstanding Soviet film–maker Mikhail Romm had become a classic retrospective investigation of fascism. But Sokurov uses the expressive power of the documentary image in an absolutely different way. He does not amass materials for a large–scale picture of Nazi crimes.
Kinderfilm
Music
The sunday ritual at home with parents, an alumni meeting of former school colleagues who once again, and some of them as young mothers and fathers, are confronted with the world of (their) children. Shots of mentally and physically disabled people who are brought to work in a bus early in the morning: people who have remained children. Many other images about childhood and being a child.
The Bear
Music
One day the landlord Smirnov demands the widow Popova to pay an old debt which her husband left. She has no money at home and begs Smirnov to wait. The polite conversation turns quickly into an argument. Popova fetches the pistols. Smirnov realizes now that he’s in love with Popova. He confesses his love.
Bach Brandenburg Concertos & Coffee Cantata
Compositors
Deutsche Grammophon celebrates Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 80th birthday with this 2-DVD release of rare, vintage, period Bach performances for the first time. Never released on DVD and, to the dismay of fans, long unavailable--these glorious Bach pieces are conducted by period instrument pioneer, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, as only he can. Harnoncourt, a notable cellist, performs in two concertos and on gamba in one. Harnoncourt warns, "If we lose contact with the great works of Bach, we lose our contact with humanity." Vocalists Janet Perry, Robert Holl, and Peter Schreier sing with distinction in the Coffee Cantata. The Surround Sound makes clear that they revel in the acoustics of the visually magnificent Baroque library of Wiblingen Monastery.
Obscene: The Case of Peter Herzl
Music
A West German man, mistaken by the police for a left wing terrorist, hides in Vienna with a prostitute and her incestuous teen daughter. They become both a threesome and a happy surrogate family, but nothing lasts forever.
Katso ihmistä
Music
The Encounter
Music
An engineer falls in love with a girl from a village. A battle between progress and tradition.
Lemmings, Part 2: Injuries
Music
This two-part drama examines the fate of Haneke’s own generation which came of age after World War II. The first part depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents while the second shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to be dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Haneke’s early works, Lemmings contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.
Tale of Tales
Music
Skazka Skazok (Tale of Tales) is a 27-minute animated short film, considered the masterpiece of influential Russian animator Yuri Norstein. Told in a non-narrative style by free association, the film employs various techniques including puppets, cut-outs, and traditional cell animation. Using classical music and '30s jazz tunes instead of dialogue.
The Left-Handed Woman
Music
Mourning for a lost relationship can be every bit as devastating as mourning for someone who has died. In this drama based on the director's own novel, a couple with an unhappy marriage agree to a trial separation. They try to patch things up, and at the same time other relationships begin to develop for them.
Fraude matrimonial
Music
To Die... To Sleep... Perchance to Dream
Music
Given the proximity of death, the experiences of the past come to the memory of Juan. In a fragmented, sometimes confused way, Juan relives the crucial moments of his life, always linked to the names of women. Moments that remind him of having missed numerous opportunities to be happy.
Convicted
Music
A man is tried in court for failing to help his brother to avoid suicide.
Temptation of Eros
Music
Tane, a female clerk of a rubber company in a corner of an industrial area facing Tokyo Bay is a quirky woman, also living on the second floor of the company warehouse.
Dear Janice
Original Music Composer
Beckett cycles through a limited number of drawings, but adds new information to each drawing every time we see it, giving the sense of a world that is infinitely rich and also obviously contained tightly within the edges of the paper.
Eros Schedule Book: Female Artist
Music
The wife of a struggling artist is raped and begins painting a series of erotic images in an attempt to exorcise her demons. However the men in her paintings all have the same face as her rapist, and as her work becomes more popular the man begins to take on folk-hero status...
Adelheid
Music
In the aftermath of World War II, a soldier takes charge of a manor formerly owned by a German family and falls in love with the daughter, now a maid. Their relationship forces him to confront the tension between his love and his conscience.
Umano Non Umano
Original Music Composer
Artists and poets meet in a dreamlike space between walks and performances.
A Random Bomb
Music
A stranger enters a town that has been evacuated because of an unexploded bomb. Meanwhile the inhabitants are watching through telescopes and are getting restless at the stranger’s antics.
Spheres
Original Music Composer
This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.
The Dependent
Music
Fernandez is a lonely man leading a lonely life. All he does is work for an old man in a hardware store. But all that changes, when he meets the girl of his dreams... and her family.
Sabath
Music
Short experimental 16mm film.
A Long Silence
Music
Short documentary about "life" in Buenos Aires' Borda Hospital.
Tales for Grown Ups
Music
This anthology film consists of three parts: "Story One: The story of the brave man", "Story Two: Angels Rhythm" and "Story Three: The false office of supernumerary". The first story tells of a man desperate to get money to cure the illness of his daughter. The second story tells the adventures of a gang of youths; and finally, the third story tells of corruption in Congress.
Los 4 Golpes
Original Music Composer
In 1962, François Truffaut visited the Mar del Plata Film Festival to present his competition in the brand-new Jules and Jim. At that stage of the Festival, from 1954 to 1970, names that today sound mythical were common figures among the guests. Truffaut, along with his colleagues from the Cahiers du Cinéma, would take French films by storm with Les 400 Coups (1959) and the Nouvelle Vague would become a key movement in the history of cinema. A few years after his debut and accompanied by the success of Jules and Jim, Truffaut was already well on his way to becoming a legend. In his visit to the Festival, in 16 mm titled Los 4 Golpes (this, in Castilian), even exhibiting in that look a playful look on his work. This short film, for different reasons, was rarely shown and remains a rarity in the director's film.
Accattone
Music
A pimp with no other means to provide for himself finds his life spiralling out of control when his prostitute is sent to prison.
Passion
Music
The passion for high speed can nowadays almost be seen in the new-born. The film shows that such passion, if not controlled, is self-destructing and even suicidal. At least this is the way Trnka presents it in this satiric story. —kratkyfilm.cz
Eine Melodie - vier Maler
Music
Short by Herbert Seggelke.
Henri Matisse
Music
Documentary film about artist Henri Matisse
Fantasia
Music
Walt Disney's timeless masterpiece is an extravaganza of sight and sound! See the music come to life, hear the pictures burst into song and experience the excitement that is Fantasia over and over again.
Escape
Original Music Composer
To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.
Bach: Orchestral Suites No. 1, 2 & 3 / Tripelkonzert
Compositor
Un
Music
In Solitude
Sound
a short film about a lonely writer trying to adapt Shakespeare's Julius Caeser, but things go differently as he comes to terms with his solitude
Metamorphosis: La vie misérable
Sound
an artistic exploration of a woman's life through poetry
Hombres de barro
Music
JS Bach: St Matthew Passion
Music
The renowned St. Thomas Boys Choir of Leipzig, which boasts J. S. Bach as a former cantor, celebrates its 800th anniversary with an extraordinary interpretation of the St. Matthew Passion. The Guardian praised how “the harmonic lines interwove with a transcendence that can only be achieved through living, eating and working together”.