THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSICIANS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7

Köthen, Bach was concerned chiefly with chamber and
orchestral music, and it was there that the sonatas for
violin and clavier and for viola da gamba and clavier and
the works for unaccompanied violin and cello were put
into something like their present form. The Brandenburg
Concertos were finished by March 24, 1721. Bach also found
time to complete several cantatas as well as compile
pedagogical keyboard works, including the Clavierbüchlein
for W.F. Bach (begun Jan. 22, 1720), some of the French
Suites, the Inventions (1720), and the first book (1722) of
Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier),
a work that eventually consisted of two books, each of
24 preludes and fugues in all keys. The remarkable col-
lection of “well-tempered” compositions systematically
explores both the potentials of a newly established tuning
procedure—which, for the first time in the history of
keyboard music, made all the keys equally usable—and
the possibilities for musical organization afforded by the
system of “functional tonality,” a kind of musical syntax
consolidated in the music of the Italian concerto com-
posers of the preceding generation and a system that was
to prevail for the next 200 years. At the same time, The
Well-Tempered Clavier is a compendium of the most pop-
ular forms and styles of the era: dance types, arias,
motets, concerti, etc., presented within the unified aspect
of a single compositional technique—the rigorously logical
and venerable fugue.
Maria Barbara Bach died unexpectedly in 1720, and
Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, daughter of a
trumpeter at Weissenfels, on Dec. 3, 1721. Apart from his
first wife’s death, Bach’s first few years at Köthen were
probably the happiest of his life, and he was on the best
terms with the prince. But after the prince got married—to
an apparently antimusical and demanding woman—Bach