A Virtuoso Organist First

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Bach's surviving output includes the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Mass in B Minor, two surviving Passion settings, and more than 190 surviving church cantatas of an original cycle that likely numbered near 300, a body of work assembled almost entirely within the working demands of his Thomaskantor post rather than as music written for its own sake outside any institutional obligation. The gap between what survives and what the post likely required him to produce, roughly two thirds of the cantata cycle surviving against the full original count, is itself part of how his historical reputation later had to be reconstructed from an incomplete record.

He was largely known in his own lifetime as a virtuoso organist rather than as a composer of the first rank, a reputation the nineteenth century Bach revival later reversed completely: the same body of liturgical and instrumental work that his own contemporaries treated as workmanlike church duty became, within a century of his death, the material later musicians and audiences would treat as among the highest achievements of Western composition.