Two recently found works of J.S. Bach presented in Leipzig [video]
Mood
informative
Sentiment
positive
Category
news
Key topics
Classical_music
J_s_bach
Music_discovery
Baroque_music
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
9h
Peak period
56
Day 4
Avg / period
17
Based on 85 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 17, 2025 at 3:13 PM EST
6d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 17, 2025 at 11:57 PM EST
9h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
56 comments in Day 4
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 23, 2025 at 11:36 AM EST
15h ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Bach is impressive, no doubt, but to each their own perhaps. I acknowledge that I have not received the appropriate training to fully appreciate the complexity in his works, so I wish I could hear what you do. To my ear, (and this isn't a novel opinion in the slightest), I think the Baroque era was more limited in expression due to the inherent limitations in the instruments and consequent styles at the time. Within those constraints, calling Bach an absolute titan of composition would be an understatement. But one wonders what he could have made without those constraints.
Brahms said of it: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."
https://inv.nadeko.net/playlist?list=PLor_18TcpRrxQmne5_SKRy... (YouTube proxy)
Other pieces I love are the 3rd and 5th Brandenburg concertos, as well as “Wachet Auf”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgXL_wrSPF0
No shade if he still doesn’t click with you. I’m just particularly ardent on the subject of Bach and baroque music!
Then, they burnt to ashes in 1945. The only extant copies were caught in the bombing of Dresden. We tend to think of "lost works" as something that happened in Antiquity. Nope.
Karl Richter’s version is my personal favorite but there’s lots of different recordings. IMO Bach’s St Matthew Passion is the best piece of musical art, maybe art in general too idk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EKanXXMkz8
Amazing musicality, but the cellist never made it big cause she was a woman
But also, I think there are two camps of fans of "classical music" (by which I mean music in the styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, etc). There are those who listen to the music, and those who play it.
For the most part, those who only listen to music often prefer Romantic and Impressionist styles. From the moody and dramatic to the gentle and contemplative, these styles are very approachable to the untrained ear.
But those who play an instrument (or sing in a choir) spend lots of time practicing and rehearsing and interpreting the music as it's written on the page. This extra time makes all of the little nuances of Baroque music truly come to life. The classic example is Bach's Crab Canon, which is a fine little piece of music... but once you realize that the whole thing is a palindrome, and you can actively appreciate how the same parts work in a forward and backward context, it becomes really interesting and pleasant.
So if Bach doesn't do it for you, and you play an instrument, try diving into playing it yourself.
Interesting interpretation of "he was orphaned at 10 and left with nothing and had to go and live with his brother".
(Who gets married and dies 3 months later?)
It's all in his music - the manic passion of trying to master a craft against that background, a burning faith in a better future, against constant reminders of the horrors of the present.
It's not just four part counterpoint. There's a lot more going on.
> He was a nepo baby with a big purse. His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society. However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it.
This interpretation is not particularly historically accurate. Let's investigate:
> He was a nepo baby with a big purse.
Musicians of the baroque era weren't particularly wealthy or notable. Musical fame wouldn't come until the Classical era. And yes, music was his family trade, but that's how most trades went in that time. His parents both died before he turned ten, so he was mostly raised by his older brother. By all accounts they were not wealthy. So I think the term "nepo baby" is misleading, and "and "with a big purse" is simply incorrect.
> His brothers, his family, all musicians of note for prominent figures of society.
This is highly overexaggerated. JS Bach had two brothers who survived childhood, and neither was particularly "prominent." Most of his "notable family" were his children, especially CPE Bach.
> However, his leaning on his long history of music within the family helped polish his work as structured which helped sell it.
Bach's career was one of slow and steady growth. It doesn't appear that he leaned on his connections or family name much.
Bach did get some widespread acclaim by the end of his life, but mostly as an organist, not as a composer. His compositions were mostly discarded and ignored for a whole century until Felix Mendelssohn revived interest in his compositions. The cello suites, for example, were lost for nearly two hundred years, and only re-discovered in the 1920's.
I most enjoy playing music as a social affair rather than in isolation though. That may have a fair amount to do with my impression of composers from each era (Baroque is fine in a group, Classical can be unforgiving, Romantic is a lot of fun, etc.).
Looking at many of the responses here though (which have been wonderful), there are quite a few pieces from Bach that I was not aware of, or had forgotten about. He really was incredible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsxP-YjDWlQ (arioso from the cantata 156, here for oboe)
which I think stands up just fine against pretty much any other classical piece baroque or not.
Personally I have a very big soft spot for his organ works, as I play (badly) some organ myself, and among those I don't see the trio sonatas recommended nearly often enough (here is a live recital of all of them, which is super impressive)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK9irE8LMAU
among those I probably enjoy the most the vivace of BWV 530. Other favorite pieces are the passacaglia and fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVoFLM_BDgs the toccata adagio and fugue in C major https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klh9GiWMc9U (the adagio especially is super nice), but there's so many. Among organists I often come back to Helmut Walcha, and am always amazed at how he was able to learn everything just by listening, him being blind.
Put on a good set of headphones and go sit in the corner.
Also obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah392lnFHxM&list=RDAh392lnFH...
The thing I appericiate most about bach is:
you can play it fast.
you can play it slow.
you can play it with an ensemble of random instruments.
you can play a single voicing all by itself.
all of it screams "musical". which, if you do play say, Tuba, or one of the larger instruments, is a godsend, as most of your lines in other pieces will bore you to death.
I had a friend that said if Mozart/Bach/et al had access to modern music production equipment, they'd all write psytrance. But it is just another example of "take great talent from long ago and put them in modern day" comparisons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWoI8vmE8bI
This piece is still deeply moving despite centuries of tastes changing. This is only barely scratching the surface of Bach. As a musician, when I listen to other great musicians speak, they all speak about Bach as the best. Of course that's subjective, and there are no 'wrong' answers on who is your favorite, but when the feeling is so nearly unanimous amount people who are often, frankly, contrarian and counter culture it says something.
That melody will repeat itself again and again, if you listen closely. It will harmonize with itself as more voices are added. It will be modulated into different keys and durations.
In a way, you can kind of think of Bach as the first electronic musician, in the sense that his works consist of "discrete tracks" that get layered on to each other. I'm sure there are youtube videos out there that demonstrate this visually.
He's aight. Obviously you enjoy his music and that's fine. But have you experienced all the art from all cultures through all human history to make such authorative statements on such subjective matters?
IMO too, Bach is the greatest. There's really no-one who can so seamlessly merge content and form and achieve intellectually, musically and emotionally fulfilling results.
Unless they are an active scholar in pre-Baroque era music I'd question that. There are just too many cultural cues for common practice music (i.e., from Bach to Mahler) and too few for everything before. It's almost a certainty that the commenter will prefer the music with forms and harmony baked into them that hold the most cultural significance.
E.g., if an action filmscore has Berlioz-style brass and a big field drum, everyone is instantly on board. What about if you play the L'homme armé tune that Renaissance composers went gaga over?
Those composers would take that tune, stretched it out into really long held pitches, and then write entire sections of the mass around it with faster moving melodies. Was it just a trend like the vocoder? Did monks get psyched when they heard it embedded in the mass? I know a lot of those masses, but I honestly have no idea.
Personally I lack the physiological or cultural understanding of the significance of Tuvan Throat Singing [1] and why "Kongurei" (Konggurei / 60 Horses) is often described as the most beautiful and heartbreaking song in the Tuvan Throat Singing (Khoomei) repertoire.
I also get that the Javanese gamelan orchestral masterpiece "Ketawang Puspawarna" [2] is widely cited as the candidate for the "most important, beautiful, and pivotal" global composition. So much so, that NASA included it on the Voyager spacecraft Golden Record in 1977 (side 2 track 2, together with 3 compositions of J.S. Bach). But I probably lack the aesthetic fabric to fully comprehend or appreciate its significance.
[1] Tuvan Throat Singing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx8hrhBZJ98
[2] Ketawang Puspawarna, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irt2AsxYYnI
Aquarium was my sons childhood theme song
(Said as a huge fan of his work. I spent a year playing essentially nothing but one of his fugues.)
This didn't really get noticed in his own day, as they were busy dumbing things down into the classical period, but he was hugely influencial through rediscovery.
Except for Italian humanists rediscovering Greek and Roman writings, I'm having a hard time thinking of an earlier instance of a chiefly posthumous legacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmsNH8t25ck - This guy is like 95 and still shredding on youtube
Truth is, they were ALL Justin Bieber. It’s all pop music of the time.
https://youtu.be/_1xJoVzoIQg?list=RD_1xJoVzoIQg
Also they were not all justin beiber. Bach was a working church musician when mozart was out touring europe getting drunk and shitting on women. Only one of them was in it for the fame. In fact you could say that mozart and liszt were 2 of the first "pop stars" because that archetype didn't exist before them. There was basically no "beatlesmania" over bach. He had a steady job, but he didn't die wealthy or famous.
Bach died 6 years before Mozart was born.
Mozart was the quintessential "Dark Forest" composer, hiding musical sentience in plain sight of light classical period textures.
Here he is with 2 measures of a simple major key "Justin Bieber" clarinet sequence interleaved with 2 measures from the strings that keep modulating to minor keys:
https://youtu.be/xdVo0MsJMOc?t=1074
Keep listening to the section marked "Tutti" in the score for a re-orchestration and reharmonization of that same clarinet sequence, but now in a surprisingly lush, chromatic style similar to Wagner or Brahms. It quickly disappears, too.
Similarly, Bach's own output is encoded inside Mozart's. E.g., the coda of the Rondo in A Minor doubles as a two-part invention, complete with invertible counterpoint between left- and right-hand.
He also built a nifty hash table that could be used to efficiently generate and stream music over the internet. (Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to patent and sell it to Yahoo for 6 billion dollars.)
By a ridiculous stroke of luck I got to perform that piece as soloist once. Unforgettable.
Bach's complexity, incidentally, is seldom "for its own sake" - the pieces all fit together beautifully and without extraneous movement. Contrast that with some lesser works by later composers like Liszt, where you often get the sense that a given passage could be reduced or removed without harming the work.
My latest favorite: Oh God, Hear My Sighs: https://soundcloud.com/nick66/oh-god-hear-my-sighs-bach
Just to add to that-- the complexity of Bach is something like going half-way around the circle of fifths in the middle of a long fugue in G#-minor. And he does this not just for kicks, but because this is one in a 24-part polemic to push other composers/musicians to use his favored equal temperament tuning system. "Using my system, you too can visit foreign keys with confidence and ease! Never sound out of tune again!" That's the whole point of Book II of his Well-Tempered Clavier.[1]
Similarly, Mozart's complexity was taking a social issue-- like egalitarianism-- and sneaking it into an opera by quickly composing 3 dances of different classes (and meters!) to be performed concurrently on the stage. Apparently he cued the on-stage musicians for each dance when he conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni.
I mention the latter because Bach's favored textures were thick and busy, and Mozart's tended toward light and effervescent. There's a tendency to confuse texture with deeper musical complexity, and that can lead people to overlook Mozart's contributions and/or give Bach credit for the wrong things.
1: Lazy theory-- Bach wrote Book I so the keyboardist could tune first using equal temperament, then choose any key and sound in tune. But most collections of pieces (e.g., dance suites) were all in the same key anyway, so this wasn't much of a practical advantage. However, if he modulated to various keys in a single piece, then those keys would sound poor in just intonation. Then the musician would be forced to use equal temperament to play the piece! Unfortunately, not all of the fugues in Book II are as harmonically adventuresome as the G#-minor fugue, so a lazy theory it remains.
def main(): """Main function of the script."""
args = parse_arguments()
setup_logging(args.debug)
logging.info(f"Script started with arguments: {args}")
sys.exit(0) # Indicate successful exit codeA system for buying arrangements of the Well-Tempered Clavier for any combination of instruments:
welltemperedconsort.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA&list=RDNnuq9PXby...
50 more comments available on Hacker News
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.