At the end of 1736 Bach went to Dresden where he was given the title of composer to the Saxon Court. He had applied for a title three years before, in the hope that it would place him in a better position with regard to the Council and Consistory; but it was in vain that he hoped for this. Neither his works nor his titles were able to impress them.

We learn from a Dresden newspaper of that date that he played from two to four in the afternoon of December 1st on the new organ in the church of St Paul, in the presence of the Russian Ambassador, von Kayserling, and many artists and other persons who heard him with very great admiration. In the same year, 1736, was published a book of hymns with their melodies by Schemelli, as a second volume to the book of Freylingshausen, to which Bach had in his early days contributed some of the music. On the 14th of May, 1737, there appeared a severe criticism of the way in which Bach wrote out all his manieren or grace notes, instead of leaving them for the performer to add at his discretion. The music thereby loses all its charm of harmony, says the critic, and the melody becomes incomprehensible. He wonders that a man should give himself so much trouble to act against reason. The writer was J. A. Scheibe, a young man who had failed in a competition for an organistship in which Bach was one of the examiners. The attack was answered by Birnbaum, a friend of Bach’s, in an interesting critical analysis of Bach’s works. This was answered by Scheibe, and the dispute went on for some time, other writers joining in it, until, as Bitter remarks, “all their powder was exhausted.” Bach, however, worked away without troubling himself about the matter.

In 1738 Mizler,[50] a pupil of Bach’s, founded a society for raising the status of music. Though it was successful, the great musician was not induced to join it until 1747, nine years later, when he handed into the society a triple canon in six voices on the chorale “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her” as an “exercise.” It is to Mizler’s society that we owe the preservation of the portrait by Hausmann, now in the Thomas-schule, which is reproduced in this work: and still further have we to thank it for the account of his life, on which all later biographies are based.

A newspaper account of the visit to Frederick varies in several details from the above; but as the account of the son, who was with Bach, and perhaps an eye-witness, is the more trustworthy, we have not thought it necessary to trouble our reader with the second account.[53]

In the following year the enormous strain he had all his life put upon himself began to take its effect. Although of unusual strength, the work had worn out his body. First his eyes, which had been used day and night from the time he copied his brother’s book by moonlight, began to give way. The weakness gradually increased, and pains began to trouble him, yet he could not believe that he was near his end. Friends persuaded him to undergo an operation at the hands of an eminent English oculist, who was then in Leipsic. But the result of two operations was that he lost his sight altogether, and his health was so broken down by them that he never again left his house, while he was in constant pain till his death.

But he continued to work, even through his hours of greatest suffering. He set the chorale “When we are in the greatest need” in four parts, dictating them to Altnikol, his son-in-law. An extraordinary thing happened ten days before his death; one morning he was able to see well and to bear daylight; but a few hours after an apoplectic stroke, followed by a violent fever, completely overcame him. The attentions of the two best doctors in Leipsic could not avail against the illness, and at a quarter past eight o’clock in the evening of July 28, 1750, he breathed his last.

On his deathbed he had dictated to Altnikol the chorale “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiemit.” The Leipsic Chronicle notices his death as follows: “July 28, at eight in the evening the famous and learned musician Herr Joh. Sebastian Bach, composer to His Majesty the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony; Capellmeister to the Courts of CÖthen and Weissenfels, Director and Cantor of the school of St Thomas, died.” Here follows a sketch of his life. “The Bach family came from Hungary, and all, as far as is known, have been musicians, from which perhaps arises the fact that even the letters b, a, c, h, form a melodic succession of notes.”[54]

That is all; not one word of regret. Nor do we find that much notice anywhere was taken of the death of the great man. A meeting of the Council took place shortly afterwards in which, while no expressions of sympathy were heard, the remark was made, “Herr Bach was a great musician no doubt, but we want a schoolmaster, not a capellmeister”; and they proceeded at once to arrange for the instalment of Harrer.

The sons of the first marriage took possession of all music that was of value, and sold the rest of the property. GÖrner, Bach’s former rival, undertook the duties of guardian to his younger children, and seems to have fulfilled the task with propriety and reverence. Bach’s widow was allowed her husband’s salary for six months, after which, receiving no help from her stepsons, she supported her younger children as well as she could, and becoming gradually poorer, died in an almshouse and was buried in a pauper’s grave. The youngest daughter, Regina, lived till 1809, and was supported by charity in her old age.

The family of Joh. Sebastian Bach gradually died out, and is now extinct, the last representative, a farmer of Eisenach, having died in 1846.

Bach’s music fell more and more into oblivion, and for a time his name seems to have been forgotten. In 1883 a room in the Thomas-schule was used as the English Church, and on the first floor a smaller room was used as the vestry. In the latter was a cupboard in which the communion plate and surplices were kept. The writer was told that this cupboard had formerly been full of music MSS., and that during the years of oblivion, whenever a Thomas-schule boy wanted a piece of paper to wrap up his “Butterbrod” he was allowed to tear out a sheet of paper from one of Bach’s manuscripts.[55]

Thus after his death were treated the family and works of the man “to whom music owes as much as religion does to its founder.”