Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the great composers of all time. What stands out is not only how great his music is, but how much of it he wrote. On this episode we look at his story as well as his habits, strategies, and tactics to see how he left such a lasting impact. 00:00 The Impact of Bach's Music 01:30 Introduction to Johann Sebastian Bach 03:30 Bach's Universal Appeal and Religious Devotion 07:45 Bach's Early Life and Musical Dynasty 09:30 Bach's Mischievous Youth and Early Career 18:00 Bach's Passion for Music and Conflict with Authority 35:45 Bach's Move and Pursuit of Greatness 41:00 Bach's Idyllic Time in Weimar 49:115 Bach's Final Years in Leipzig 55:20 The Famous Encounter with Frederick the Great 01:09:00 Bach's Death and Enduring Legacy 01:10:00 Key Takeaways from Bach's Life ---- Sponsors: TakeoverPod.Supercast.com - All premium content for just $7/month AustinLab.AI - Provides advanced AI tools for businesses of any size GainsInBulk.com/ben - Use code Ben for 20% off instantized creatine and more Speechify.com/ben - Use code Ben for 15% off Speechify premium Founders Podcast
Chapter 1: What is the impact of Bach's music?
I want you to imagine yourself as a German peasant in the early 1700s bear with me for a second Your life is mostly silent. Yes, you hear the sound of the wind brushing up against your wooden shutters. You hear birds singing in the morning. You hear the crack of the axe as it bites into cold timber, the quiet patter of livestock.
Chapter 2: Who was Johann Sebastian Bach?
Thank you.
The music isn't just outside of you, it's within you. The organ pipes seem to shake the entire church and everything in it. You're listening to the music of your local organist, Johann Sebastian Bach. I find it just amazing to think that some of the greatest, most universal music in history was created for church services in a little town in the middle of Germany of less than 10,000 people.
Chapter 3: What is Bach's universal appeal and religious devotion?
johann sebastian bach isn't just one of the great classical composers he's one of the great artists of all time in any medium up there with da vinci and shakespeare so today we're talking about a man whose music has reached farther than any empire lasted longer than most religions and inspired a kind of devotion typically reserved for saints or prophets we're going to see how he was able to compose not only such great and transcendent music but so much of it
We're also going to be taking a look at what his music meant to him and what it means for us. Welcome to How to Take Over the World. I'm going to show you how great I am. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody. Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson.
Many people remember that when in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft was launched, opinions were canvassed as to what artifacts would be most appropriate to leave in outer space as a signal of man's cultural achievements on Earth. The American astronomer Carl Sagan proposed that if we are to convey something of what humans are about, then music has to be a part of it.
To Sagan's request for suggestions, the eminent biologist and author Lewis Thomas answered, I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach. After a pause, he added, but that would be boasting. That is from the excellent biography Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven by renowned conductor and author John Eliot Gardner. I'm excited to talk to you about Johann Sebastian Bach.
Chapter 4: What was Bach's early life and musical dynasty?
I know some of you will probably roll your eyes. He is the boring old composer whose music is just an unrelenting succession of 16th notes, right? Late Baroque music, not the easiest to enjoy for many people. But I think even if you don't like classical music, it's just a lesson in how to produce unbelievable volumes of great art. And hopefully I can teach you to enjoy Bach if you don't already.
I think one of the great testaments to the power of Bach comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. If you don't know, Nietzsche, who was a philosopher, came to truly hate and loathe Christianity. And Bach is the most Christian of all composers. He was an extremely religious Lutheran who viewed his music as an extension of his duty to serve and worship God. It is really very deeply Christian music.
Chapter 5: How did Bach's mischievous youth shape him?
And Nietzsche, in his book called The Antichrist, which should tell you a little bit about what it's all about, he ends it by declaring war to the death against Christianity.
And he proposes complete ostracization of Christians and even proposes, quote, the excreble location where Christianity brooded over its basilisk eggs should be razed to the ground and being the most depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity. Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it.
In other words, he advocates nuking Jerusalem and breeding it with poisonous snakes so that no one will ever go there again just because that is where Christianity was born. That is how much Nietzsche hates, loathes Christianity. And yet... This is what Nietzsche says of Bach, quote, This week I heard the St.
Matthew Passion three times, and each time I had the same feeling of immeasurable admiration. One who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as gospel. Okay. Wow. Like what a testament to Bach that someone who loathes Christianity so much when he hears Bach can hear the gospel and hear it as gospel.
And it's funny, I have heard two different people, both of them Jewish, claim that Bach almost makes them want to become a Lutheran. So I think when you understand his music, it has a way to
of reaching through barriers and speaking to anyone and everyone it is simultaneously very grounded in a certain place in tradition it is very german very christian very lutheran and also at the same time somehow very universal and that is one of the paradoxes of bach i think his life is one of the best case studies i've seen of what happens when a person fuses talent with genuine fanatical religious devotion plus iron discipline plus a kind of playfulness and sense of fun so
Let's get into it. My main sources for this episode were Bach Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Elliot Gardner and Johann Sebastian Bach by Christoph Wolff. So with all that said, this is The Life of Johann Sebastian Bach. First, I want to take a second to shout out today's sponsor, the Austin AI Lab. They create AI agents tailored to your business's needs.
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Chapter 6: What conflicts did Bach face regarding his music?
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Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a very small town in the province of Thuringia in central Germany. And the first thing you need to understand is that Bach was born into a musical dynasty like no other. The Bach name was basically shorthand for musician across central Germany.
So, for example, when there's a vacancy in the city of Arnstadt, the Count of Arnstadt asks his servant if he can urgently acquire a Bach instrument. That's literally what he says in the letter. Hey, can you find a Bach? Like it's something you could grab from the grocery store. That's how well known they were as musicians.
They were known both as artists, you know, composers, fine artists, great creatives, as well as craftsmen. They could fix your organ, acquire all the instruments that you needed. They could redo the strings on a violin if you needed. They also tended to be excellent musicians and singers, and they composed new works. They're kind of like an all-in-one bundle.
If you got a Bach, you can be able to take care of all your musical needs in town. Actually, the most gifted musician of the previous generation of Bach's was not Johann Sebastian Bach's father, but his uncle, Christoph. He was a very innovative composer. And by the time Sebastian comes along, he was the eighth generation musician in the family of Bach's. So music was in his blood.
And by the way, they also tended to marry other musicians. So most of the good musicians in Thuringia, if they weren't a Bach, were probably related to the Bachs in some way. So for Bach, there is no moment of discovering music. You can't even pinpoint a moment when his instruction begins. His mother was probably singing lullabies within minutes of his birth. Like he is just steeped in music.
from the moment of his conception, frankly, like he never knows a moment where he isn't receiving some sort of musical education. Bach is involved in one of the most heartwarming stories of child labor you'll ever hear about. When he is young, he acts as an assistant for organ repairs and installations, crawling in between the pipes to inspect and fix things.
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Chapter 7: What led to Bach's pursuit of greatness?
In later life, he would have an excellent library of religious texts. He would spend months worth of salary on a rare volume of Luther. But what's more interesting is that This isn't just for external purposes, right? He's not just outwardly pious. Bach really believed it. This wasn't just a family tradition or a cultural script.
Bach believed that he, as a composer, was carrying on the work of the Old Testament, of offering up sacred sound in divine services. So in his Bible, you can go and you can find a note he has written. He writes, this chapter is the foundation of all church music pleasing to God. And this is next to 1 Chronicles chapter 25.
The start of this chapter reads, David, together with the commanders of the army, set apart some of the sons of Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun for the ministry of prophesying accompanied by harps, lyres, and cymbals. Here's the list of the men who performed this service. And it goes on. Okay.
So, like, yeah, he's got this intense belief in this fusion of these two ideas that he's looking through the Bible and finding justifications for what he does and why this is not just okay, but necessary to true religious worship. So he doesn't really just think of himself as a musician. In some ways, Bach thinks of himself as a sort of divinely appointed priest who is...
Like, commanded by God to bring this religious music to people. And I think you can hear that religious devotion in his music. I think that is what people miss about Bach. People sometimes call his music mathematical. And in a way, I know what they're saying. It is, right? It's very regular. Its proportions are very mathematical.
Leibniz famously said, music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating. And I think Leibniz is correct. Right? There is this incredible connection between math and music. I can't remember who said this, but one of the Manhattan Project physicists, speaking of Oppenheimer, said he was the only physicist he ever knew who wasn't musical.
Okay, every other physicist he knew, and he knew all of them, right? He's in the Manhattan Project. Every other physicist he knew was very musical. And by the way, Oppenheimer's weakness as a physicist is that he wasn't a terribly gifted mathematician. So that's interesting, right? There's this connection between math and music. And why is that? Well, It is a mathematical language.
So if you think about an octave, Okay. What is an octave? I'll do a little right now in front of my computer, but I'll play on the piano a little bit later so you can hear what I'm talking about. Okay. So if you think about an octave, it's the same note, but one register higher. Okay. So if you look at like a piano, it goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Okay.
So what does it mean that notes are repeating? What does it mean that you have C and then C? Okay. Two Cs. So I'll play an octave for you now. C, C. Okay? And you can hear they sound the same. You play them together and they blend perfectly. And we speak of them as being the same note. They're both Cs. But what do we mean by that they're the same note? Obviously they're not actually the same note.
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Chapter 8: What were Bach's final years in Leipzig?
Okay, so, but anyway, my point of all that is even despite all that, even despite all the rigor and the mathematical relationships and that Bach clearly understood those and played with those, okay, setting all that aside, It is not correct to view Bach as some enlightenment expression of abstract ideas. Okay? In fact, it's closer to the opposite. Bach was a religious fanatic.
I don't necessarily mean that negatively. It's just... It's like he was an ecstatic, right? His music was an expression, I think, yeah, of religious ecstasy. So I think... The way to understand Bach is to understand him as someone who is in the throes of religious passion, right? He's like the Appalachian, what do you call those guys? Pentecostal. He's rolling on the floor, handling snakes.
And this is the music of this kind of frenzied mind who is in this sort of religious ecstasy. And it is the combination of that religious ecstasy with that great mathematical and scientific rigor that Bach had that fusion is what creates the greatest music of all time. Okay, so takeaway number one.
My first lesson learned is that all great leaders, whether they're generals or entrepreneurs or musicians, have some version of extreme belief. For some of them, that is religious belief, like Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc. For Napoleon, it was destiny. He believed in destiny the way that Bach believed in the Bible and Martin Luther.
For entrepreneurs, they believe in innovation or in their products. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, has a great quote about why he was horrible at selling encyclopedias but great at selling Nike shoes. And he writes, driving back to Portland, I'd puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I'd been unable to sell encyclopedias and I despised it to boot.
I'd been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I'd felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because I realized it wasn't selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place. And I believed these shoes were better to run in. People sensing my belief wanted some of that belief for themselves.
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Chapter 9: What was the significance of Bach's encounter with Frederick the Great?
Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. I love that quote. Belief is irresistible. Irresistible. When you find something that gives you that fire in your bones, when you really believe you're unstoppable, people find that, yeah, again, irresistible. And Bach had that belief. He was very intensely religious, not necessarily in a very showy or pious way.
He didn't broadcast his religiosity other than through his music. But that was the outlet for his personal devotion.
In his biography, Gardner writes, Bach's working library, estimated to have contained at least 112 different theological and homiletic works, was less like a typical church musician's and more what one might expect to find in the church of a respectably sized town, or that many a pastor in Bach's day would have been proud to have owned.
Okay, so that's how much he believes and is interested in religion and theology. He has a theological library to match most pastors, most people who do this professionally. He took his faith very seriously and believed very strongly. So that's my first takeaway. Bach had belief. Okay, so back to the story. I already told you he grows up very religious in a very musical family. He goes to school.
When first as a child, he doesn't perform remarkably well. And part of that is because he misses so much school. Now, the classic interpretation of this fact is that he was apprenticing to his father and was needed back at the family business. So his parents were pulling him out of school so that he could go apprentice.
But later scholarship dug up some interesting facts about the school at the time. Basically, the headmaster had completely lost control, and this school was like a den for brigands and bullies to beat up on each other and commit petty crimes.
So the second interpretation is that he was being victimized or bullied, or at the very least distracted, so his parents might have pulled him out of school for long stretches to get him away from this sort of dangerous environment. So that's kind of the second interpretation. However, John Elliott Gardner has a very interesting take on the second hypothesis.
And he basically says, well, how do we know that Bach was a victim in all this bullying? And he brings up, you know, facts. Bach was quite large, quite tall. He ended up about 5'11", which was very tall for the age. He was very spirited. He frequently quarreled in later years. He got into a fist fight at least once. He was thrown in jail once.
He was once reprimanded for bringing an unknown single lady into the choir loft and teaching her about music. So this is someone who was...
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Chapter 10: What is Bach's enduring legacy?
For whatever reason, there's that connection there. And so maybe these were innocent pranks. Maybe he was bullying other kids. Either way, I think this image serves as a much-needed corrective image to that of Bach as, you know, what we think of as Bach. Anyways, so Bach has this childhood. It all changes when he's eight years old.
Tragically, both his mother and father die within nine months of each other. Of course, for a family as large and close-knit as the Bachs, there was no chance that he was going to experience, like, real hardship. He was going to go to an orphanage. But still, it takes a heavy toll on him emotionally to see his parents go when he's only eight.
He's very close with his uncle, Christoph, that is sort of the great musician of the family. And in part, probably because, you know, he connected with...
with that aspect of his personality and was interested in it knew he wanted to do that however christoph can't take him so he actually ends up going with his much older brother who he barely knows also named christoph ironically christoph bach his brother is also like all box a successful musician and he does quite a bit to teach young sebastian the basics of composition and theory he
He's a little heavy-handed and sometimes a stickler for the rules. One of the famous stories is that Kristoff has this book of difficult music from the likes of Vivaldi and Pachelbel and all these other great composers. And young Sebastian Bach really wants to try to take it on, even at this very young age. He's like nine or ten. And Kristoff won't let him. You know, he says, not your time yet.
Stick to the basics, line by line. That's how you learn. And so Sebastian Bach is sneaking into the attic and reading this sheet music by Moonlight until he is eventually caught and reprimanded by his brother. So, you know, Bach is relentless. He's very high agency. When someone puts up obstacles to what he wants to learn, he just goes ahead anyway. He finds a way.
So Bach is living with his brother and now he's at a very different school because he's got to move towns to be with his brother. And this school is apparently not as rambunctious. He doesn't get pulled out as much for whatever reason he was being pulled out. And so he doesn't have the same issues. And in fact, he starts to get very good grades.
So as a teenager, he finishes number four in his class, despite being one of the youngest students. And then the next year he finishes first in his class. And as soon as he is able to leave and escape his brother's tutelage, he does and heads north to Lundberg to continue his musical studies. So this is when he is 15 years old.
He was the first Bach to complete the upper classes at the gymnasium and qualify for university studies, although he never does actually attend college, attend a university. So at 15 years old, he travels the 200 miles to Lundberg. I believe this would be close to the longest journey he makes in his life. And it's actually interesting. Bach never left Germany during his lifetime.
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