Johann Sebastian Bach

The name usually comes up in conversations about disciplined work: the composer whose manuscripts are covered in revisions, who copied out other people's music to learn from it, and who produced cantatas on a weekly schedule tied to the readings of the church calendar. That routine — craft and piety running together — is much of why his output is held up as an example of what sustained, unglamorous effort produces.

He came from a family of musicians in Eisenach, in the Duchy of Saxe-Eisenach, born in 1685, and learned organ, clavier and composition inside that environment, taking in the European styles around him and reworking them. His posts at court and church required range: dance suites at one end, large-scale passions at the other. The Brandenburg Concertos turned attention to instrumental colour; the St Matthew Passion built contemplation out of chorale and recitative; The Well-Tempered Clavier worked systematically through the keys. The preludes and fugues made counterpoint into something clear rather than merely clever. He taught by example and by exercise, and treated instruments as partners in the writing rather than as equipment.

Much of what he did was conservative in form and new in substance — old shapes made to say something they had not said before. He died in 1750. Admirers, Mendelssohn among them, later revived and canonised the music, and it has stayed under examination since: analysts still find structural ingenuity in it, and performers still argue over tempo, tuning and articulation as open questions rather than settled ones. For listeners, the appeal tends to be that the order in it sounds human rather than mechanical — complexity that can be heard as grace, if you give it the patience.