J.S. Bach Bombed
Johann Sebastian Bach was elected "cantor" of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig Germany April 22, 1723. He was hired to teach the boys in the city's four churches Latin and music. It was there that Bach wrote many of his best compositions, including the famous St. Matthew Passion.
But, like many artists, his music was poorly received in his lifetime. He wrote a friend, "The authorities are odd and little interested in music, so that I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution." After he died in 1750 a Leipzig burgomaster remarked during the search for a replacement, “We must not forget that we want a schoolmaster, not a musician.” Most of Bach's works were shelved upon his death for three quarters of a century, and some reported that his manuscripts were used to wrap fish and groceries. Scholars tell us that many of the cantatas he wrote at Leipzig were permanently lost.
Johann was a devout Christian, a convinced Lutheran, who dedicated his religious manuscripts to the Lord with the abbreviation “I. N. J.” (In Nomine Jesu, “In the Name of Jesus”). Theologian and Historian Jaroslav Pelikan said of his music that it is an "expression of a unitary world view, in which all beauty...was sacred because God is one, both Creator and Redeemer." Bach's example of following truth and beauty for their own reward is an encouragement to every musician, poet and novelist who's "rejection file" is thick, every school teacher who cares well for her students while embarrassingly underpaid, every mother whose child does not go to the Olympics or to an Ivy League school, every preacher criticized for preaching "too much grace," and every artist who perseveres in painting paintings that never sell (Van Gogh sold one of 800 paintings he painted in his lifetime!).
German Philosopher, Josef Pieper, gave a short talk (“Thoughts About Music,” Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation) during the intermission at a Bach concert in 1952 in which he reflected about humanity’s perennial puzzlement of the power of music:
“Not only is music one of the most amazing and mysterious phenomena of all the world’s miranda, the things that make us wonder (and, therefore, the formal subject of any philosopher…) [but] music may be nothing but a secret philosophizing of the soul… yet, with the soul entirely oblivious, that philosophy, in fact, is happening here… Beyond that, and above all, music prompts the philosopher’s continued interest because it is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence.”