title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: By early 1945, Nazi Germany was on the verge of total military collapse. Poland had fallen to the advancing Soviet Red Army, which was preparing to cross the Oder between Küstrin and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder with the objective of capturing Berlin to the west. German forces had recently lost to the Allies in the Ardennes Offensive, with British and Canadian forces crossing the Rhine into the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr. U.S. forces in the south had captured Lorraine and were advancing towards Mainz, Mannheim, and the Rhine. German forces in Italy were withdrawing north, as they were pressed by the U.S. and Commonwealth forces as part of the Spring Offensive to advance across the Po and into the foothills of the Alps.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler retreated to his "Führerbunker" in Berlin on 16 January 1945. It was clear to the Nazi leadership that the battle for Berlin would be the final battle of the war in Europe. Some 325,000 soldiers of Germany's Army Group B were surrounded and captured in the Ruhr Pocket on 18 April, leaving the path open for U.S. forces to reach Berlin. By 11 April, the Americans crossed the Elbe, to the west of the city. On 16 April, Soviet forces to the east crossed the Oder and commenced the battle for the Seelow Heights, the last major defensive line protecting Berlin on that side. By 19 April, the Germans were in full retreat from Seelow Heights, leaving no front line. Berlin was bombarded by Soviet artillery for the first time on 20 April, Hitler's birthday. By the evening of 21 April, Red Army tanks reached the outskirts of the city.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: On 21 April, Hitler ordered a special detachment commanded by SS-General Felix Steiner to counterattack the Soviets. At the next day's afternoon situation conference, Hitler suffered a nervous collapse when he was informed that these orders had not been obeyed. He launched into a tirade against his generals, calling them treacherous and incompetent, culminating in a declarationfor the first timethat the war was lost. Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. Later that day, he asked SS physician Werner Haase about the most reliable method of suicide. Haase suggested the "pistol-and-poison method" of combining a dose of cyanide with a gunshot to the head. "Luftwaffe" chief Hermann Göring learned about Hitler's admission of defeat and declaration of his intended suicide and sent a telegram to Hitler, asking for permission to take over the leadership of the Reich in accordance with Hitler's 1941 decree naming him as his successor. Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann convinced Hitler that the letter from Göring was an attempt to overthrow the dictator. In response, Hitler informed Göring that he would be executed unless he resigned all of his posts. Later that day, he sacked Göring from all of his offices and ordered his arrest. Hitler also ordered his chief aide and adjutant, Julius Schaub, to destroy safeguarded documents and his personal train.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: By 27 April, Berlin's communication had been all but cut off from the rest of Germany. Secure radio contact with defending units had been lost; the command staff in the had to depend on telephone lines for passing instructions and orders, and on public radio for news and information. On 28 April, Hitler received a BBC report originating from Reuters: it stated that Heinrich Himmler had offered to surrender to the Western Allies. The offer was declined. Himmler had implied to the Allies that he had the authority to negotiate a surrender, which Hitler considered to be treason. That afternoon, Hitler's anger and bitterness escalated into a rage against Himmler. He ordered Himmler's arrest and had Hermann Fegelein (Himmler's SS representative at Hitler's headquarters) shot for desertion.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: By this time, the Red Army had advanced to the Potsdamer Platz, and all indications were that they were preparing to storm the Reich Chancellery. This report and Himmler's treachery prompted Hitler to make the last decisions of his life. Shortly after midnight on 29 April, he married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in a map room within the . The two then hosted a modest wedding breakfast, after which Hitler took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. It left instructions to be carried out immediately following his death, with Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and Joseph Goebbels assuming Hitler's roles as head of state and chancellor, respectively. Hitler signed these documents at 04:00 and then went to bed. Some sources say that he dictated the last will and testament immediately before the wedding, but all agree on the timing of the signing.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: On the afternoon of 29 April, Hitler learned that his ally, Benito Mussolini, had been executed by Italian partisans. The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been strung up by their heels. The corpses were later cut down and thrown into the gutter, where they were mocked by Italian dissidents. These events may have strengthened Hitler's resolve not to allow himself or his wife to be made a "spectacle" of, as he had earlier recorded in his testament. Hitler had been given some capsules of prussic acid by Himmler through SS physician Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, and initially had intended to use them for his suicide. But when he received the news that Himmler had contacted the Allies through a Swedish diplomat to arrange for an end to the war, Hitler was outraged. With this betrayal in his mind, Hitler began to doubt whether the ampoules would be effective. He ordered Haase to test one on his dog Blondi. The capsule workedthe dog died instantly.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: Hitler and Braun lived together as husband and wife in the bunker for less than 40 hours. By 01:00 on 30 April, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had reported that all of the forces on which Hitler had been depending to rescue Berlin had either been encircled or forced onto the defensive. At around 02:30, Hitler appeared in the corridor where about twenty people, mostly women, were assembled to give their farewells. He went down the line, shaking hands and speaking with each of them, before retiring to his quarters. Late in the morning, with the Soviets less than from the "Führerbunker", Hitler had a meeting with General Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area. Weidling told Hitler that the garrison would probably run out of ammunition that night, and that the fighting in Berlin would inevitably come to an end within the next 24 hours. Weidling asked for permission for a break-out; this was a request he had unsuccessfully made before. Hitler did not answer, and Weidling went back to his headquarters in the Bendlerblock. At about 13:00, he received Hitler's permission to attempt a break-out that night. Hitler, two secretaries, and his personal cook then had lunch, after which Hitler and Braun said goodbye to members of the bunker staff and fellow occupants, including Bormann, Goebbels, the secretaries, and several military officers. At around 14:30 Adolf and Eva Hitler went into his personal study. Hitler's adjutant SS-"Sturmbannführer" Otto Günsche stood guard outside the study door.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: After some time, Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge, entered the antechamber to Hitler's quarters, where he discovered the door closed and could smell gunpowder smoke. Linge went back out to the corridor where Bormann was standing, and the two then entered the study together. Linge later stated that while in the room he immediately noted a scent of burnt almonds, which is a common observation in the presence of hydrogen cyanide. Linge saw the bodies of Hitler and Braun sitting upright on the sofa, with Hitler to Braun's right. His head was canted to his right. Günsche entered the study shortly afterwards. He described Braun's corpse as being on Hitler's left, with her legs drawn up and slumped away from him. Günsche stated that Hitler "sat ... sunken over, with blood dripping out of his right temple. He had shot himself with his own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65." The gun lay at his feet. Hitler's dripping blood had made a large stain on the right arm of the sofa and was pooling on the rug. According to Linge, Braun's body had no visible wounds, and her face showed how she had diedfrom cyanide poisoning. Günsche and SS- Wilhelm Mohnke stated "unequivocally" that all outsiders and those performing duties and work in the bunker "did not have any access" to Hitler's private living quarters during the time of death (between 15:00 and 16:00).


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: Günsche left the study and announced that Hitler was dead to a group in the briefing room, which included Goebbels, Krebs, and General Wilhelm Burgdorf. These three, in addition to others including Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, viewed the bodies. Linge and another man rolled up Hitler's body in a rug, and then, in accordance with Hitler's prior written and verbal instructions, his and Braun's bodies were carried up the stairs and through the bunker's emergency exit to the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were to be burned with petrol. Although Hitler's corpse was partially covered by the rug, numerous witnesses testified to recognising him, as the top of his head was not covered, nor were his lower legs and feet.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: The bunker telephone operator SS- Rochus Misch reported Hitler's death to (Führer Escort Command) chief Franz Schädle and returned to the switchboard, later recalling someone shouting that Hitler's body was being burned. After the first attempts to ignite the petrol did not work, Linge went back inside the bunker and returned with a thick roll of papers. Bormann lit the papers and threw them onto the bodies. As the two corpses caught fire, a group including Bormann, Günsche, Linge, Goebbels, Erich Kempka, Peter Högl, Ewald Lindloff, and Hans Reisser raised their arms in salute as they stood just inside the bunker doorway.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: At around 16:15, Linge ordered SS- Heinz Krüger and SS- Werner Schwiedel to roll up the rug in Hitler's study to burn it. Schwiedel later stated that upon entering the study, he saw a pool of blood the size of a "large dinner plate" by the arm-rest of the sofa. Noticing a spent cartridge case, he bent down and picked it up from where it lay on the rug about 1 mm from a 7.65 pistol. The two men removed the blood-stained rug and carried it up the stairs and outside to the Chancellery garden, where it was placed on the ground and burned.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: The Red Army shelled the area in and around the Reich Chancellery on and off during the afternoon. SS guards brought over additional cans of petrol to further burn the corpses. Although the corpses were being burned in the open, where the distribution of heat varies (as opposed to in a crematorium), according to eyewitnesses, the copious amount of fuel applied from about 16:00 to 18:30 reduced the remains to something between charred bones and piles of ashes which fell apart to the touch. At approximately 18:30, Lindloff (and perhaps Reisser) covered up the ashen remains in a shallow bomb crater. The shelling and a fire from napalm incendiary bombs continued until 2 May. During this period it was difficult to spend any time in the garden because of the continuous shelling.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: General Hans Krebs met Soviet General Vasily Chuikov just prior to 04:00 on 1 May, giving him the news of Hitler's death, while attempting to negotiate a ceasefire and open "peace negotiations". Joseph Stalin was informed of Hitler's suicide around 04:05 Berlin time, thirteen hours after the event. He demanded unconditional surrender, which Krebs lacked authorisation to give. Stalin wanted confirmation that Hitler was dead and ordered the Red Army's counterespionage unit, SMERSH, to find his corpse.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: The first inkling to the outside world that Hitler was dead came from the Germans themselves. On the night of 1 May, the radio station interrupted their normal program to announce that Hitler had died that afternoon, and introduced his successor, President Karl Dönitz. Dönitz called upon the German people to mourn their Führer, whom he stated had died a hero defending the capital of the Reich. Hoping to save the army and the nation by negotiating a partial surrender to the British and Americans, Dönitz authorised a fighting withdrawal to the west. His tactic was somewhat successful: it enabled about 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid capture by the Soviets, but came at a high cost in bloodshed, as troops continued to fight until 8 May.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: In the early morning hours of 2 May, the Soviets captured the Reich Chancellery. Inside the , Generals Krebs and Burgdorf shot themselves in the head. In early May, Hitler's and Braun's dental remains were extracted from the soil. Stalin was wary of believing Hitler was dead and restricted the release of information to the public. By 11 May, dental assistant Käthe Heusermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann, both of whom had worked for Hitler's dentist Hugo Blaschke, identified the dental remains of Hitler and Braun. Both would spend years in Soviet prisons. An alleged Soviet autopsy of Hitler made public in 1968 was used by forensic odontologists Reidar F. Sognnaes and Ferdinand Strøm to confirm the authenticity of Hitler's dental remains in 1972. In 2017, French forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier also found the dental remains in the Soviet archives, including teeth on part of a jawbone, to be in "perfect agreement" with X-rays taken of Hitler in 1944. Charlier used electron microscopy to examine the tartar, which contained only plant fibres, a detail consistent with Hitler's vegetarianism. A 2018 paper co-authored by Charlier concludes that these remains "cannot be a fake", citing their significant wear. No gunpowder residue was detected, indicating that Hitler did not die by a gunshot wound through the mouth.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: In early June 1945, SMERSH moved the remains of several individuals, including the Goebbels family (Joseph, Magda, and their children), from Buch to Finow. Hitler and Braun's remains were alleged to have been moved as well, but this is most likely Soviet disinformation. There is no evidence that any bodily remains of Hitler or Braunwith the exception of the dental remainswere found by the Soviets. The remains of the Goebbels family and others were buried in a forest in Brandenburg on 3 June 1945, then exhumed and moved to SMERSH's new facility in Magdeburg, where they were in February 1946. By 1970, the facility was under KGB control and scheduled to be relinquished to East Germany. Concerned that a known Nazi burial site might become a neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to exhume and destroy the decaying remains. On 4 April 1970, a KGB team thoroughly cremated them and cast the ashes into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: For politically motivated reasons, the Soviet Union presented various versions of Hitler's fate. On 5 June, the Soviets claimed that his body had been examined and that he had died by cyanide poisoning. At a press conference on 9 June, the Soviets said they had not actually identified the body and that Hitler had likely escaped. When asked in July 1945 how Hitler had died, Stalin said he was living "in Spain or Argentina". In November 1945, Dick White, the head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, had their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate. His report was expanded and published in 1947 as "The Last Days of Hitler". In the years immediately after the war, the Soviets maintained that Hitler was not dead, but had escaped and was either being shielded by the former Western Allies, was in Francoist Spain, or was somewhere in South America.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: Until the mid-1950s, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency received many leads claiming that Hitler might still be alive, while giving none of them credence. The documents remained classified until the early 2010s, as authorised by the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. The secrecy in which the investigation was shrouded helped fuel conspiracy theories asserting Hitler's survival. Presiding judge at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg Michael Musmanno considered all such claims contrary to the evidence.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: Between 1948 and 1952, amid denazification proceedings in West Germany, legal disputes over Hitler's former property (including "The Art of Painting" by Johannes Vermeer) were hindered by the lack of an official death declaration. Beginning in 1952, a federal court in Berchtesgaden interviewed 42 witnesses about Hitler's suicidebehind closed doors to avoid testimonies influencing one another. After four years of extensive review, Judge Heinrich Stephanus concluded: "There can no longer be the slightest doubt that on 30 April 1945 Adolf Hitler put an end to his life in the Chancellery by his own hand, by means of a shot into his right temple." A death certificate was issued on 25 February 1956, with an attached report of more than 1,500 pages. An 80-page expert criminological report was prepared in mid-1956, focusing on the "substantial discrepancies" between eyewitness testimonies and serving as a springboard for photographic reconstructions. Ballistic experiments were arranged to determine which interpretation of the fatal gunshot was most likely. The declaration became public and legally binding by the year's end. Hitler's demise was entered as an assumption of death on the basis that none of the witnesses had seen his body, which German historian Anton Joachimsthalerwho cites some of the testimonies in his book on the dictator's deathpoints out is incorrect. The federal court went on to publish a summary of its findings of fact in a 1958 press release.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: On 11 December 1945, the Soviets allowed a limited investigation of the bunker complex grounds by the other Allied powers (Britain, France, and the U.S.). Two representatives from each nation watched several Germans dig up soil down to the concrete roof of the bunker; the excavation included the bomb crater where Hitler's burnt remains had been buried. Found during the dig were two hats identified as Hitler's, an undergarment with Braun's initials, and some reports to Hitler from Goebbels. The Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) barred further excavation on the accusation that the representatives had removed documents from the Reich Chancellery.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: At the end of 1945, Stalin ordered the NKVD to form a second commission to investigate Hitler's death. On 30 May 1946, agents of the NKVD's successor, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), found part of a skull in the crater where Hitler's remains had been exhumed. The remnant consists of part of the occipital bone and part of both parietal bones. The nearly complete left parietal bone has a bullet hole, apparently an exit wound. This remained uncatalogued until 1975, and was rediscovered in the Russian State Archives in 1993. In 2009, University of Connecticut archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni examined the skull fragment, which Soviet officials believed to be Hitler's. According to Bellantoni, "The bone seemed very thin" for a male, and "the sutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40". A small piece detached from the skull was DNA-tested, as was blood from Hitler's sofa. The skull was determined to be that of a woman, while the blood was confirmed to belong to a male.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: On 29 December 1949, a secret dossier on Hitler was presented to Stalin, which was based upon the interrogation of Nazis who had been present in the , including Günsche and Linge. Western historians were allowed into the archives of the former Soviet Union beginning in 1991, but the dossier remained undiscovered for twelve years; in 2005, it was published as "The Hitler Book".


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: In 1968, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski published his book, "The Death of Adolf Hitler", which includes previously unreleased photographs of the dental remains. The book transcribes a purported Soviet forensic examination led by Faust Shkaravsky, which concluded that Hitler died by cyanide poisoning. Bezymenski further theorised that Hitler requested a to ensure his quick death, but later admitted that his work included "deliberate lies", such as the manner of Hitler's death. The book and alleged autopsy have been widely derided by Western historians. Joachimsthaler, in his extensive analysis of the circumstances surrounding Hitler's death, quotes a German pathologist as saying about the purported autopsy: "Bezemensky's report is ridiculous. ... Any one of my assistants would have done better ... the whole thing is a farce ... it is intolerably bad work ... the transcript of the post-mortem section of 8 [May] 1945 describes anything but Hitler." Journalist James P. O'Donnell corrects the book's claim that cyanide acts instantaneously, saying Hitler could have taken poison and still had enough time to shoot himself.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: After Hitler's death and the subsequent end of World War II in Europe, Germany was divided into four zones by the victorious Allies, who occupied the country. This led to the start of the Cold War between the Western Bloc, supported by the US, and the Eastern Bloc, supported by the Soviet Union. The divide was for a time physically represented by the Berlin Wall, and was eventually followed by Germany's reunification in 1990 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991.


title: Death of Adolf Hitler

text: Following Hitler's death, war veteran and future American president John F. Kennedy wrote in his diary that the dictator "had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him". Historian Joachim Fest opines that the almost "traceless" death of Hitler allowed him to stay in the public eye, granting him a "bizarre afterlife"; conspiracy theoriesrooted in Soviet disinformation alleging his survivalbolstered continued doubts and speculation, including outlandish tabloid and journalistic reports published into the late 20th century. Conspiracy theories about Hitler's death and about the Nazi era as a whole still attract interest, with books, TV shows, and films continuing to be produced on the topic. Historian Luke Daly-Groves wrote that Hitler's death is not about the death of one man, but carries a greater significance as to the end of the regime and the ideological impact it left behind.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace ("née" Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron. All of Byron's other children were born out of wedlock to other women. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever. Four months later, he commemorated the parting in a poem that begins, "Is thy face like thy mother's my fair child! ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart?" He died in Greece when Ada was eight. Her mother remained bitter and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Ada remained interested in him, naming her two sons Byron and Gordon. Upon her death, she was buried next to him at her request. Although often ill in her childhood, Ada pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Her educational and social exploits brought her into contact with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday, and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her education. Ada described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: When she was eighteen, her mathematical talents led her to a long working relationship and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, who is known as "the father of computers". She was in particular interested in Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine. Lovelace first met him in June 1833, through their mutual friend, and her private tutor, Mary Somerville.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Between 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an article by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea about the Analytical Engine, supplementing it with an elaborate set of notes, simply called "Notes". Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers, containing what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Other historians reject this perspective and point out that Babbage's personal notes from the years 1836/1837 contain the first programs for the engine. She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities. Her mindset of "poetical science" led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine (as shown in her notes) examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lord Byron expected his child to be a "glorious boy" and was disappointed when Lady Byron gave birth to a girl. The child was named after Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and was called "Ada" by Byron himself. On 16 January 1816, at Lord Byron's command, Lady Byron left for her parents' home at Kirkby Mallory, taking their five-week-old daughter with her. Although English law at the time granted full custody of children to the father in cases of separation, Lord Byron made no attempt to claim his parental rights, but did request that his sister keep him informed of Ada's welfare.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: On 21 April, Lord Byron signed the deed of separation, although very reluctantly, and left England for good a few days later. Aside from an acrimonious separation, Lady Byron continued throughout her life to make allegations about her husband's immoral behaviour. This set of events made Lovelace infamous in Victorian society. Ada did not have a relationship with her father. He died in 1824 when she was eight years old. Her mother was the only significant parental figure in her life. Lovelace was not shown the family portrait of her father until her 20th birthday.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace did not have a close relationship with her mother. She was often left in the care of her maternal grandmother Judith, Hon. Lady Milbanke, who doted on her. However, because of societal attitudes of the time—which favoured the husband in any separation, with the welfare of any child acting as mitigation—Lady Byron had to present herself as a loving mother to the rest of society. This included writing anxious letters to Lady Milbanke about her daughter's welfare, with a cover note saying to retain the letters in case she had to use them to show maternal concern. In one letter to Lady Milbanke, she referred to her daughter as "it": "I talk to it for your satisfaction, not my own, and shall be very glad when you have it under your own." Lady Byron had her teenage daughter watched by close friends for any sign of moral deviation. Lovelace dubbed these observers the "Furies" and later complained they exaggerated and invented stories about her.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace was often ill, beginning in early childhood. At the age of eight, she experienced headaches that obscured her vision. In June 1829, she was paralyzed after a bout of measles. She was subjected to continuous bed rest for nearly a year, something which may have extended her period of disability. By 1831, she was able to walk with crutches. Despite the illnesses, she developed her mathematical and technological skills.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Ada Byron had an affair with a tutor in early 1833. She tried to elope with him after she was caught, but the tutor's relatives recognised her and contacted her mother. Lady Byron and her friends covered the incident up to prevent a public scandal. Lovelace never met her younger half-sister, Allegra, the daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont. Allegra died in 1822 at the age of five. Lovelace did have some contact with Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh, who purposely avoided Lovelace as much as possible when introduced at court.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace became close friends with her tutor Mary Somerville, who introduced her to Charles Babbage in 1833. She had a strong respect and affection for Somerville, and they corresponded for many years. Other acquaintances included the scientists Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the author Charles Dickens. She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind". By 1834 Ada was a regular at Court and started attending various events. She danced often and was able to charm many people, and was described by most people as being dainty, although John Hobhouse, Byron's friend, described her as "a large, coarse-skinned young woman but with something of my friend's features, particularly the mouth". This description followed their meeting on 24 February 1834 in which Ada made it clear to Hobhouse that she did not like him, probably due to her mother's influence, which led her to dislike all of her father's friends. This first impression was not to last, and they later became friends.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: On 8 July 1835, she married William, 8th Baron King, becoming Lady King. They had three homes: Ockham Park, Surrey; a Scottish estate on Loch Torridon in Ross-shire; and a house in London. They spent their honeymoon at Worthy Manor in Ashley Combe near Porlock Weir, Somerset. The Manor had been built as a hunting lodge in 1799 and was improved by King in preparation for their honeymoon. It later became their summer retreat and was further improved during this time. From 1845, the family's main house was Horsley Towers, built in the Tudorbethan fashion by the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry, and later greatly enlarged to Lovelace's own designs.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: They had three children: Byron (born 1836); Anne Isabella (called Annabella, born 1837); and Ralph Gordon (born 1839). Immediately after the birth of Annabella, Lady King experienced "a tedious and suffering illness, which took months to cure". Ada was a descendant of the extinct Barons Lovelace and in 1838, her husband was made Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham, meaning Ada became the Countess of Lovelace. In 1843–44, Ada's mother assigned William Benjamin Carpenter to teach Ada's children and to act as a "moral" instructor for Ada. He quickly fell for her and encouraged her to express any frustrated affections, claiming that his marriage meant he would never act in an "unbecoming" manner. When it became clear that Carpenter was trying to start an affair, Ada cut it off.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In 1841, Lovelace and Medora Leigh (the daughter of Lord Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh) were told by Ada's mother that Ada's father was also Medora's father. On 27 February 1841, Ada wrote to her mother: "I am not in the least "astonished". In fact, you merely "confirm" what I have for "years and years" felt scarcely a doubt about, but should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I in any way suspected." She did not blame the incestuous relationship on Byron, but instead blamed Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is more inherently wicked than he ever was." In the 1840s, Ada flirted with scandals: firstly, from a relaxed approach to extra-marital relationships with men, leading to rumours of affairs; and secondly, from her love of gambling. She apparently lost more than £3,000 on the horses during the later 1840s. The gambling led to her forming a syndicate with male friends, and an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. This went disastrously wrong, leaving her thousands of pounds in debt to the syndicate, forcing her to admit it all to her husband. She had a shadowy relationship with Andrew Crosse's son John from 1844 onwards. John Crosse destroyed most of their correspondence after her death as part of a legal agreement. She bequeathed him the only heirlooms her father had personally left to her. During her final illness, she would panic at the idea of the younger Crosse being kept from visiting her.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: From 1832, when she was seventeen, her mathematical abilities began to emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated the majority of her adult life. Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Byron was one of the reasons that Ada was taught mathematics from an early age. She was privately educated in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, the noted 19th-century researcher and scientific author. In the 1840s, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan extended her "much help in her mathematical studies" including study of advanced calculus topics including the "numbers of Bernoulli" (that formed her celebrated algorithm for Babbage's Analytical Engine). In a letter to Lady Byron, De Morgan suggested that Ada's skill in mathematics might lead her to become "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace often questioned basic assumptions through integrating poetry and science. Whilst studying differential calculus, she wrote to De Morgan:


title: Ada Lovelace

text: I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in "one" shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace believed that intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical and scientific concepts. She valued metaphysics as much as mathematics, viewing both as tools for exploring "the unseen worlds around us".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852, from uterine cancer. The illness lasted several months, in which time Annabella took command over whom Ada saw, and excluded all of her friends and confidants. Under her mother's influence, Ada had a religious transformation and was coaxed into repenting of her previous conduct and making Annabella her executor. She lost contact with her husband after confessing something to him on 30 August which caused him to abandon her bedside. It is not known what she told him. She was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. A memorial plaque, written in Latin, to her and her father is in the chapel attached to Horsley Towers.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Throughout her life, Lovelace was strongly interested in scientific developments and fads of the day, including phrenology and mesmerism. After her work with Babbage, Lovelace continued to work on other projects. In 1844, she commented to a friend Woronzow Greig about her desire to create a mathematical model for how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves to feelings ("a calculus of the nervous system"). She never achieved this, however. In part, her interest in the brain came from a long-running pre-occupation, inherited from her mother, about her "potential" madness. As part of her research into this project, she visited the electrical engineer Andrew Crosse in 1844 to learn how to carry out electrical experiments. In the same year, she wrote a review of a paper by Baron Karl von Reichenbach, "Researches on Magnetism", but this was not published and does not appear to have progressed past the first draft. In 1851, the year before her cancer struck, she wrote to her mother mentioning "certain productions" she was working on regarding the relation of maths and music.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace first met Charles Babbage in June 1833, through their mutual friend Mary Somerville. Later that month, Babbage invited Lovelace to see the prototype for his difference engine. She became fascinated with the machine and used her relationship with Somerville to visit Babbage as often as she could. Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and analytic skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Number". In 1843, he wrote to her:


title: Ada Lovelace

text: During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace translated the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's article on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. Explaining the Analytical Engine's function was a difficult task; many other scientists did not grasp the concept and the British establishment had shown little interest in it. Lovelace's notes even had to explain how the Analytical Engine differed from the original Difference Engine. Her work was well received at the time; the scientist Michael Faraday described himself as a supporter of her writing.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The notes are around three times longer than the article itself and include (in "Note G"), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine, which might have run correctly had it ever been built (only Babbage's Difference Engine has been built, completed in London in 2002). Based on this work, Lovelace is now considered by many to be the first computer programmer and her method has been called the world's first computer program. Others dispute this because some of Charles Babbage's earlier writings could be considered computer programs.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: "Note G" also contains Lovelace's dismissal of artificial intelligence. She wrote that "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to "originate" anything. It can do "whatever we know how to order it" to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths." This objection has been the subject of much debate and rebuttal, for example by Alan Turing in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Most modern computer scientists argue that this view is outdated and that computer software can develop in ways that cannot necessarily be anticipated by programmers.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace and Babbage had a minor falling out when the papers were published, when he tried to leave his own statement (criticising the government's treatment of his Engine) as an unsigned preface, which could have been mistakenly interpreted as a joint declaration. When Taylor's "Scientific Memoirs" ruled that the statement should be signed, Babbage wrote to Lovelace asking her to withdraw the paper. This was the first that she knew he was leaving it unsigned, and she wrote back refusing to withdraw the paper. The historian Benjamin Woolley theorised that "His actions suggested he had so enthusiastically sought Ada's involvement, and so happily indulged her ... because of her 'celebrated name'." Their friendship recovered, and they continued to correspond. On 12 August 1851, when she was dying of cancer, Lovelace wrote to him asking him to be her executor, though this letter did not give him the necessary legal authority. Part of the terrace at Worthy Manor was known as "Philosopher's Walk;" it was there that Lovelace and Babbage were reputed to have walked while discussing mathematical principles.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer and the future Prime Minister of Italy, transcribed Babbage's lecture into French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the "Bibliothèque universelle de Genève" in October 1842.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation. Ada Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in the September 1843 edition of Taylor's "Scientific Memoirs" under the initialism "AAL".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered to be the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason. The engine was never completed and so her program was never tested.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In 1953, more than a century after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished as an appendix to B. V. Bowden's "Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines". The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a description of a computer and software.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In her notes, Ada Lovelace emphasised the difference between the Analytical Engine and previous calculating machines, particularly its ability to be programmed to solve problems of any complexity. She realised the potential of the device extended far beyond mere number crunching. In her notes, she wrote:


title: Ada Lovelace

text: This analysis was an important development from previous ideas about the capabilities of computing devices and anticipated the implications of modern computing one hundred years before they were realised. Walter Isaacson ascribes Ada's insight regarding the application of computing to "any" process based on logical symbols to an observation about textiles: "When she saw some mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded her of how Babbage's engine used punched cards to make calculations." This insight is seen as significant by writers such as Betty Toole and Benjamin Woolley, as well as the programmer John Graham-Cumming, whose project Plan 28 has the aim of constructing the first complete Analytical Engine.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number...What Lovelace saw...was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation—to general-purpose computation—and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace recognized the difference between the details of the computing mechanism, as covered in a 1934 article on the Difference Engine,


title: Ada Lovelace

text: and the logical structure of the Analytical Engine, on which the article she was reviewing dwelt. She noted that different specialists might be required in each area.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The [1934 article] chiefly treats it under its mechanical aspect, entering but slightly into the mathematical principles of which that engine is the representative, but giving, in considerable length, many details of the mechanism and contrivances by means of which it tabulates the various orders of differences. M. Menabrea, on the contrary, exclusively developes the analytical view; taking it for granted that mechanism is able to perform certain processes, but without attempting to explain how; and devoting his whole attention to explanations and illustrations of the manner in which analytical laws can be so arranged and combined as to bring every branch of that vast subject within the grasp of the assumed powers of mechanism. It is obvious that, in the invention of a calculating engine, these two branches of the subject are equally essential fields of investigation... They are indissolubly connected, though so different in their intrinsic nature, that perhaps the same mind might not be likely to prove equally profound or successful in both.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Though Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, some biographers, computer scientists and historians of computing claim otherwise.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Bruce Collier, who later wrote a biography of Babbage, wrote in his 1970 Harvard University PhD thesis that Lovelace "made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that she advanced the design or theory of it in any way".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole consider it "incorrect" to regard Lovelace as the first computer programmer, as Babbage wrote the initial programs for his Analytical Engine, although the majority were never published. Bromley notes several dozen sample programs prepared by Babbage between 1837 and 1840, all substantially predating Lovelace's notes. Dorothy K. Stein regards Lovelace's notes as "more a reflection of the mathematical uncertainty of the author, the political purposes of the inventor, and, above all, of the social and cultural context in which it was written, than a blueprint for a scientific development".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Doron Swade, a specialist on history of computing known for his work on Babbage, discussed Lovelace during a lecture on Babbage's analytical engine. He explained that Ada was only a "promising beginner" instead of genius in mathematics, that she began studying basic concepts of mathematics five years after Babbage conceived the analytical engine so she could not have made important contributions to it, and that she only published the first computer program instead of actually writing it. But he agrees that Ada was the only person to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In his book, "Idea Makers", Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. While acknowledging that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that "there's nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it." Wolfram then suggests that Lovelace's main achievement was to distill from Babbage's correspondence "a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine—something which Babbage never did".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lord Byron wrote the poem "Fare Thee Well" to his wife Lady Byron in 1816, following their separation after the birth of Ada Lovelace. In the poem he writes:


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In the 1990 steampunk novel "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Lovelace delivers a lecture on the "punched cards" programme which proves Gödel's incompleteness theorems decades before their actual discovery.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In the 1997 film "Conceiving Ada," a computer scientist obsessed with Ada finds a way of communicating with her in the past by means of "undying information waves".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia", the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly—a character "apparently based" on Ada Lovelace (the play also involves Lord Byron)—comes to understand chaos theory, and theorises the second law of thermodynamics, before either is officially recognised.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace features in John Crowley's 2005 novel, "Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land", as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The 2015 play "Ada and the Engine" by Lauren Gunderson portrays Lovelace and Charles Babbage in unrequited love, and it imagines a post-death meeting between Lovelace and her father.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace and Babbage are the main characters in Sydney Padua's webcomic and graphic novel "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage". The comic features extensive footnotes on the history of Ada Lovelace, and many lines of dialogue are drawn from actual correspondence.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace and Mary Shelley as teenagers are the central characters in Jordan Stratford's steampunk series, "The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace, identified as Ada Augusta Byron, is portrayed by Lily Lesser in the second season of "The Frankenstein Chronicles". She is employed as an "analyst" to provide the workings of a life-sized humanoid automaton. The brass workings of the machine are reminiscent of Babbage's analytical engine. Her employment is described as keeping her occupied until she returns to her studies in advanced mathematics.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace and Babbage appear as characters in the second season of the ITV series "Victoria" (2017). Emerald Fennell portrays Lovelace in the episode, "The Green-Eyed Monster."


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The Cardano cryptocurrency platform, which was launched in 2017, uses Ada as the name for their cryptocurrency and Lovelace as the smallest sub-unit of an Ada.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: "Lovelace" is the name given to the operating system designed by the character Cameron Howe in "Halt and Catch Fire".


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace is a primary character in the 2019 Big Finish Doctor Who audio play "The Enchantress of Numbers," starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Jane Slavin as his current companion, WPC Ann Kelso. Lovelace is played by Finty Williams.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In 2019, Lovelace is a featured character in the play STEM FEMMES by Philadelphia theater company Applied Mechanics.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Lovelace features as a character in "Spyfall, Part 2", the second episode of "Doctor Who", series 12, which first aired on BBC One on 5 January 2020. The character was portrayed by Sylvie Briggs, alongside characterisations of Charles Babbage and Noor Inayat Khan. In 2021, Nvidia named its GPU architecture featured in the RTX 4000 Series, "Ada Lovelace", after her. It is also the first Nvidia architecture to feature both a first and last name.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980 and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, "MIL-STD-1815", was given the number of the year of her birth.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In 1981, the Association for Women in Computing inaugurated its Ada Lovelace Award. Since 1998, the British Computer Society (BCS) has awarded the Lovelace Medal, and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students. BCSWomen sponsors the Lovelace Colloquium, an annual conference for women undergraduates. Ada College is a further-education college in Tottenham Hale, London, focused on digital skills.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated on the second Tuesday of October, which began in 2009. Its goal is to "... raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths," and to "create new role models for girls and women" in these fields. Events have included Wikipedia edit-a-thons with the aim of improving the representation of women on Wikipedia in terms of articles and editors to reduce unintended gender bias on Wikipedia.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: The Engineering in Computer Science and Telecommunications College building in Zaragoza University is called the Ada Byron Building. The computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived, is named after her. Ada Lovelace House is a council-owned building in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, near where Lovelace spent her infancy.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In 2013, Ada Developers Academy was founded and named after her. The mission of Ada Developers Academy is to diversify tech by providing women and gender diverse people the skills, experience, and community support to become professional software developers to change the face of tech.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: On 17 September 2013, the BBC Radio 4 biography programme "Great Lives" devoted an episode to Ada Lovelace; she was sponsored by TV presenter Konnie Huq


title: Ada Lovelace

text: As of November 2015, all new British passports have included an illustration of Lovelace and Babbage.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: On 2 February 2018, Satellogic, a high-resolution Earth observation imaging and analytics company, launched a ÑuSat type micro-satellite named in honour of Ada Lovelace.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: On 27 July 2018, Senator Ron Wyden submitted, in the United States Senate, the designation of 9 October 2018 as National Ada Lovelace Day: "To honor the life and contributions of Ada Lovelace as a leading woman in science and mathematics". The resolution (S.Res.592) was considered, and agreed to without amendment and with a preamble by unanimous consent.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In November 2020 it was announced that Trinity College Dublin whose library had previously held forty busts, all of them of men, was commissioning four new busts of women, one of whom was to be Lovelace.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In March 2022, a statue of Ada Lovelace was installed at the site of the former Ergon House in the City of Westminster, London, honoring its scientific history. (The redevelopment was part of a complex wtith Imperial Chemical House.) The statue was sculpted by Etienne and Mary Millner and based on the portrait by Margaret Sarah Carpenter. The sculpture was unveiled on International Women's Day, 2022. It stands on the 7th floor of Millbank Quarter overlooking the junction of Dean Bradley Street and Horseferry Road.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In September 2022, Nvidia announced the Ada Lovelace graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Special exhibitions were displayed by the Science Museum in London, England and the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Library) in Oxford, England.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: Six copies of the 1843 first edition of "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" with Ada Lovelace's "Notes" have been located. Three are held at Harvard University, one at the University of Oklahoma, and one at the United States Air Force Academy. On 20 July 2018, the sixth copy was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for £95,000. A digital facsimile of one of the copies in the Harvard University Library is available online.


title: Ada Lovelace

text: In December 2016, a letter written by Ada Lovelace was forfeited by Martin Shkreli to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance for unpaid taxes owed by Shkreli.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the "Brandenburg Concertos"; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the "Goldberg Variations" and "The Well-Tempered Clavier"; organ works such as the "Schubler Chorales" and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the "St Matthew Passion" and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at the age of 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical education in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St Thomas's) in Leipzig. There he composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university's student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened during some of his earlier positions, he had difficult relations with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by his sovereign, Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic, and motivic organisation, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular. He composed Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, and motets. He often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works, but for instance also in his four-part chorales and his sacred songs. He wrote extensively for organ and for other keyboard instruments. He composed concertos, for instance for violin and for harpsichord, and suites, as chamber music as well as for orchestra. Many of his works employ the genres of canon and fugue.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Throughout the 18th century, Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as "The Well-Tempered Clavier", was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some major Bach biographies, and by the end of that century all of his known music had been printed. Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals (and later also websites) exclusively devoted to him, and other publications such as the "Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis" (BWV, a numbered catalogue of his works) and new critical editions of his compositions. His music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including the "Air on the G String" and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", and of recordings, such as three different box sets with complete performances of the composer's oeuvre marking the 250th anniversary of his death.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Eisenach, in present-day Germany, on 21 March 1685 O.S. (31 March 1685 N.S.). He was the eighth and youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach, the director of the town musicians, and Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt. His father likely taught him violin and basic music theory. His uncles were all professional musicians, whose posts included church organists, court chamber musicians, and composers. One uncle, Johann Christoph Bach, introduced him to the organ, and an older second cousin, Johann Ludwig Bach, was a well-known composer and violinist.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's mother died in 1694, and his father died eight months later. The 10-year-old Bach moved in with his eldest brother, Johann Christoph Bach, the organist at St. Michael's Church in Ohrdruf, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. There he studied, performed, and copied music, including his own brother's, despite being forbidden to do so because scores were so valuable and private, and blank ledger paper of that type was costly. He received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord. Johann Christoph exposed him to the works of great composers of the day, including South Germans such as Johann Caspar Kerll, Johann Jakob Froberger and Johann Pachelbel (under whom Johann Christoph had studied); North Germans; Frenchmen such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis Marchand and Marin Marais; and even the Italian Girolamo Frescobaldi. During this time, he was also taught theology, Latin and Greek at the local gymnasium.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: By 3 April 1700, Bach and his schoolfriend Georg Erdmannwho was two years Bach's elderwere enrolled in the prestigious St. Michael's School in Lüneburg, some two weeks' travel north of Ohrdruf. Their journey was probably undertaken mostly on foot. His two years there were critical in exposing Bach to a wider range of European culture. In addition to singing in the choir, he played the school's three-manual organ and harpsichords. He also came into contact with sons of aristocrats from northern Germany who had been sent to the nearby "Ritter-Academie" to prepare for careers in other disciplines.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In January 1703, shortly after graduating from St. Michael's and being turned down for the post of organist at Sangerhausen, Bach was appointed court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst III in Weimar. His role there is unclear, but it probably included menial, non-musical duties. During his seven-month tenure at Weimar, his reputation as a keyboardist spread so much that he was invited to inspect the new organ and give the inaugural recital at the New Church (now Bach Church) in Arnstadt, located about southwest of Weimar. On 14 August 1703, he became the organist at the New Church, with light duties, a relatively generous salary, and a new organ tuned in a temperament that allowed music written in a wider range of keys to be played.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Despite strong family connections and a musically enthusiastic employer, tension built up between Bach and the authorities after several years in the post. Bach was dissatisfied with the standard of singers in the choir. He called one of them a "Zippel Fagottist" (weenie bassoon player). Late one evening this student, named Geyersbach, went after Bach with a stick. Bach filed a complaint against Geyersbach with the authorities. They acquitted Geyersbach with a minor reprimand and ordered Bach to be more moderate regarding the musical qualities he expected from his students. Some months later Bach upset his employer by a prolonged absence from Arnstadt: after obtaining leave for four weeks, he was absent for around four months in 1705–1706 to visit the organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude in the northern city of Lübeck. The visit to Buxtehude involved a journey each way, reportedly on foot.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1706, Bach applied for a post as organist at the Blasius Church in Mühlhausen. As part of his application, he had a cantata performed on Easter, 24 April 1707, likely an early version of his . A month later Bach's application was accepted and he took up the post in July. The position included significantly higher remuneration, improved conditions, and a better choir. Four months after arriving at Mühlhausen, Bach married Maria Barbara Bach, his second cousin. Bach was able to convince the church and town government at Mühlhausen to fund an expensive renovation of the organ at the Blasius Church. In 1708 Bach wrote , a festive cantata for the inauguration of the new council, which was published at the council's expense.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach left Mühlhausen in 1708, returning to Weimar this time as organist and from 1714 (director of music) at the ducal court, where he had an opportunity to work with a large, well-funded contingent of professional musicians. Bach and his wife moved into a house close to the ducal palace. Later the same year, their first child, Catharina Dorothea, was born, and Maria Barbara's elder, unmarried sister joined them. She remained to help run the household until her death in 1729. Three sons were also born in Weimar: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard. Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara had three more children, who however did not live to their first birthday, including twins born in 1713.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's time in Weimar was the start of a sustained period of composing keyboard and orchestral works. He attained the proficiency and confidence to extend the prevailing structures and include influences from abroad. He learned to write dramatic openings and employ the dynamic rhythms and harmonic schemes found in the music of Italians such as Vivaldi, Corelli, and Torelli. Bach absorbed these stylistic aspects in part by transcribing Vivaldi's string and wind concertos for harpsichord and organ; many of these transcribed works are still regularly performed. Bach was particularly attracted to the Italian style, in which one or more solo instruments alternate section-by-section with the full orchestra throughout a movement.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In Weimar, Bach continued to play and compose for the organ and perform concert music with the duke's ensemble. He also began to write the preludes and fugues which were later assembled into his monumental work "The Well-Tempered Clavier" ("clavier" meaning clavichord or harpsichord), consisting of two books, each containing 24 preludes and fugues in every major and minor key. Bach also started work on the "Little Organ Book" in Weimar, containing traditional Lutheran chorale tunes set in complex textures. In 1713, Bach was offered a post in Halle when he advised the authorities during a renovation by Christoph Cuntzius of the main organ in the west gallery of the Market Church of Our Dear Lady.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In the spring of 1714, Bach was promoted to , an honour that entailed performing a church cantata monthly in the castle church. The first three cantatas in the new series Bach composed in Weimar were , for Palm Sunday, which coincided with the Annunciation that year; , for Jubilate Sunday; and for Pentecost. Bach's first Christmas cantata, , was premiered in 1714 or 1715.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1717, Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and, according to a translation of the court secretary's report, was jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed: "On November 6, [1717], the quondam [former] concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge."


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, hired Bach to serve as his (director of music) in 1717. Prince Leopold, himself a musician, appreciated Bach's talents, paid him well and gave him considerable latitude in composing and performing. The prince was a Calvinist and did not use elaborate music in his worship; accordingly, most of Bach's work from this period was secular, including the orchestral suites, cello suites, sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and "Brandenburg Concertos". Bach also composed secular cantatas for the court, such as .


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Despite being born in the same year and only about apart, Bach and Handel never met. In 1719, Bach made the journey from Köthen to Halle with the intention of meeting Handel; however, Handel had left the town. In 1730, Bach's oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, travelled to Halle to invite Handel to visit the Bach family in Leipzig, but the visit did not take place.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: On 7 July 1720, while Bach was away in Carlsbad with Prince Leopold, Bach's wife suddenly died. The following year, he met Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a young, highly gifted soprano 16 years his junior, who performed at the court in Köthen; they married on 3 December 1721. Together they had 13 children, six of whom survived into adulthood: Gottfried Heinrich; Elisabeth Juliane Friederica (1726–1781); Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, who both, especially Johann Christian, became significant musicians; Johanna Carolina (1737–1781); and Regina Susanna (1742–1809).


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1723, Bach was appointed "Thomaskantor", Cantor of the St. Thomas School at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, which provided music for four churches in the city: the St. Thomas Church and St. Nicholas Church and to a lesser extent the New Church and St. Peter's Church. This was "the leading cantorate in Protestant Germany", located in the mercantile city in the Electorate of Saxony, which he held for 27 years until his death. During that time he gained further prestige through honorary appointments at the courts of Köthen and Weissenfels, as well as that of the Elector Frederick Augustus (who was also King of Poland) in Dresden. Bach frequently disagreed with his employer, Leipzig's city council, which he regarded as "penny-pinching".


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Johann Kuhnau had been Thomaskantor in Leipzig from 1701 until his death on 5 June 1722. Bach had visited Leipzig during Kuhnau's tenure: in 1714 he attended the service at the St. Thomas Church on the first Sunday of Advent, and in 1717 he had tested the organ of the St. Paul's Church. In 1716 Bach and Kuhnau had met on the occasion of the testing and inauguration of an organ in Halle.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: After being offered the position, Bach was invited to Leipzig only after Georg Philipp Telemann indicated that he would not be interested in relocating to Leipzig. Telemann went to Hamburg, where he "had his own struggles with the city's senate".


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach was required to instruct the students of the in singing and provide church music for the main churches in Leipzig. He was also assigned to teach Latin but was allowed to employ four "prefects" (deputies) to do this instead. The prefects also aided with musical instruction. A cantata was required for the church services on Sundays and additional church holidays during the liturgical year.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach usually led performances of his cantatas, most of which were composed within three years of his relocation to Leipzig. The first was , performed in the St. Nicholas Church on 30 May 1723, the first Sunday after Trinity. Bach collected his cantatas in annual cycles. Five are mentioned in obituaries, three are extant. Of the more than 300 cantatas which Bach composed in Leipzig, over 100 have been lost to posterity. Most of these works expound on the Gospel readings prescribed for every Sunday and feast day in the Lutheran year. Bach started a second annual cycle the first Sunday after Trinity of 1724 and composed only chorale cantatas, each based on a single church hymn. These include , , , and .


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach drew the soprano and alto choristers from the school and the tenors and basses from the school and elsewhere in Leipzig. Performing at weddings and funerals provided extra income for these groups; it was probably for this purpose, and for in-school training, that he wrote at least six motets. As part of his regular church work, he performed other composers' motets, which served as formal models for his own.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's predecessor as cantor, Johann Kuhnau, had also been music director for the St. Paul's Church, the church of Leipzig University. But when Bach was installed as cantor in 1723, he was put in charge only of music for festal (church holiday) services at the St. Paul's Church; his petition to also provide music for regular Sunday services there (for a corresponding salary increase) went all the way to the Elector but was denied. After this, in 1725, Bach "lost interest" in working even for festal services at the St. Paul's Church and appeared there only on "special occasions". The St. Paul's Church had a much better and newer (1716) organ than did the St. Thomas Church or the St. Nicholas Church. Bach was not required to play any organ in his official duties, but it is believed he liked to play on the St. Paul's Church organ "for his own pleasure".


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach broadened his composing and performing beyond the liturgy by taking over, in March 1729, the directorship of the Collegium Musicum, a secular performance ensemble started by Telemann. This was one of the dozens of private societies in the major German-speaking cities that were established by musically active university students; these societies had become increasingly important in public musical life and were typically led by the most prominent professionals in a city. In the words of Christoph Wolff, assuming the directorship was a shrewd move that "consolidated Bach's firm grip on Leipzig's principal musical institutions". Every week the "Collegium Musicum" would give two-hour performances in winter at the Café Zimmermann, a coffeehouse on Catherine Street off the main market square; and during the summer months in the proprietor's outdoor coffee garden just outside the town walls, near the East Gate. The concerts, all free of charge, ended with Gottfried Zimmermann's death in 1741. Apart from showcasing his earlier orchestral repertoire such as the Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites, many of Bach's newly composed or reworked pieces were performed for these venues, including parts of his ("Keyboard Practice"), his violin and keyboard concertos and of course the eponymous Coffee Cantata.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1733, Bach composed a Kyrie–Gloria Mass in B minor which he later incorporated in his Mass in B minor. He presented the manuscript to the Elector in an eventually successful bid to persuade the prince to give him the title of Court Composer. He later extended this work into a full mass by adding a , , and , the music for which was partly based on his own cantatas and partly original. Bach's appointment as Court Composer was an element of his long-term struggle to achieve greater bargaining power with the Leipzig council. Between 1737 and 1739, Bach's former pupil Carl Gotthelf Gerlach held the directorship of the "Collegium Musicum".


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1735 Bach started to prepare his first publication of organ music, which was printed as the third "Clavier-Übung" in 1739. From around that year he started to compile and compose the set of preludes and fugues for harpsichord that would become his second book of "The Well-Tempered Clavier". He received the title of "Royal Court Composer" from Augustus III in 1736.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: From 1740 to 1748 Bach copied, transcribed, expanded or programmed music in an older polyphonic style ("stile antico") by, among others, Palestrina (BNB I/P/2), Kerll (BWV 241), Torri (BWV Anh. 30), Bassani (BWV 1081), Gasparini ("Missa Canonica") and Caldara (BWV 1082). Bach's own style shifted in the last decade of his life, showing an increased integration of polyphonic structures and canons and other elements of the "stile antico". His fourth and last "Clavier-Übung" volume, the "Goldberg Variations", for two-manual harpsichord, contained nine canons and was published in 1741. Throughout this period, Bach also continued to adopt music of contemporaries such as Handel (BNB I/K/2) and Stölzel (BWV 200), and gave many of his own earlier compositions, such as the "St Matthew" and "St John" Passions and the "Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes", their final revisions. He also programmed and adapted music by composers of a younger generation, including Pergolesi (BWV 1083) and his own students such as Goldberg (BNB I/G/2).


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1746 Bach was preparing to enter Lorenz Christoph Mizler's . In order to be admitted Bach had to submit a composition, for which he chose his Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her", and a portrait, which was painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann and featured Bach's "Canon triplex á 6 Voc". In May 1747, Bach visited the court of King Frederick II of Prussia in Potsdam. The king played a theme for Bach and challenged him to improvise a fugue based on his theme. Bach obliged, playing a three-part fugue on one of Frederick's fortepianos by Gottfried Silbermann, which was a new type of instrument at the time. Upon his return to Leipzig he composed a set of fugues and canons, and a trio sonata, based on the "Thema Regium" (theme of the king). Within a few weeks this music was published as "The Musical Offering" and dedicated to Frederick. The "Schübler Chorales", a set of six chorale preludes transcribed from cantata movements Bach had composed some two decades earlier, were published within a year. Around the same time, the set of five canonic variations which Bach had submitted when entering Mizler's society in 1747 were also printed.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Two large-scale compositions occupied a central place in Bach's last years. From around 1742 he wrote and revised the various canons and fugues of "The Art of Fugue", which he continued to prepare for publication until shortly before his death. After extracting a cantata, BWV 191 from his 1733 Kyrie-Gloria Mass for the Dresden court in the mid-1740s, Bach expanded that setting into his Mass in B minor in the last years of his life. Although the complete mass was never performed during the composer's lifetime, it is considered to be among the greatest choral works in history.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In January 1749, Bach's daughter Elisabeth Juliane Friederica married his pupil Johann Christoph Altnickol. Bach's health was, however, declining. On 2 June, Heinrich von Brühl wrote to one of the Leipzig burgomasters to request that his music director, Johann Gottlob Harrer, fill the and posts "upon the eventual ... decease of Mr. Bach". Becoming blind, Bach underwent eye surgery, in March 1750 and again in April, by the British eye surgeon John Taylor, a man widely understood today as a charlatan and believed to have blinded hundreds of people. Bach died on 28 July 1750 from complications due to the unsuccessful treatment.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: An inventory drawn up a few months after Bach's death shows that his estate included five harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, three violins, three violas, two cellos, a viola da gamba, a lute and a spinet, along with 52 "sacred books", including works by Martin Luther and Josephus. The composer's son Carl Philipp Emanuel saw to it that "The Art of Fugue", although still unfinished, was published in 1751. Together with one of the composer's former students, Johann Friedrich Agricola, the son also wrote the obituary ("Nekrolog"), which was published in Mizler's , a periodical journal produced by the Society of Musical Sciences, in 1754.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: From an early age, Bach studied the works of his musical contemporaries of the Baroque period and those of prior generations, and those influences were reflected in his music. Like his contemporaries Handel, Telemann and Vivaldi, Bach composed concertos, suites, recitatives, da capo arias, and four-part choral music and employed basso continuo. Bach's music was harmonically more innovative than his peer composers, employing surprisingly dissonant chords and progressions, often with extensive exploration of harmonic possibilities within one piece.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The hundreds of sacred works Bach created are usually seen as manifesting not just his craft but also a truly devout relationship with God. He had taught Luther's Small Catechism as the in Leipzig, and some of his pieces represent it. The Lutheran chorale was the basis of much of his work. In elaborating these hymns into his chorale preludes, he wrote more cogent and tightly integrated works than most, even when they were massive and lengthy. The large-scale structure of every major Bach sacred vocal work is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning to create a religiously and musically powerful expression. For example, the "St Matthew Passion", like other works of its kind, illustrated the Passion with Bible text reflected in recitatives, arias, choruses, and chorales, but in crafting this work, Bach created an overall experience that has been found over the intervening centuries to be both musically thrilling and spiritually profound.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach published or carefully compiled in manuscript many collections of pieces that explored the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in almost every genre of his time except opera. For example, "The Well-Tempered Clavier" comprises two books, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, displaying a dizzying variety of structural, contrapuntal and fugal techniques.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Four-part harmonies predate Bach, but he lived during a time when modal music in Western tradition was largely supplanted in favour of the tonal system. In this system a piece of music progresses from one chord to the next according to certain rules, each chord being characterised by four notes. The principles of four-part harmony are found not only in Bach's four-part choral music: he also prescribes it for instance for the figured bass accompaniment. The new system was at the core of Bach's style, and his compositions are to a large extent considered as laying down the rules for the evolving scheme that would dominate musical expression in the next centuries. Some examples of this characteristic of Bach's style and its influence:


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's insistence on the tonal system and contribution to shaping it did not imply he was less at ease with the older modal system and the genres associated with it: more than his contemporaries (who had "moved on" to the tonal system without much exception), Bach often returned to the then-antiquated modi and genres. His "Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue", emulating the chromatic fantasia genre as used by earlier composers such as Dowland and Sweelinck in D dorian mode (comparable to D minor in the tonal system), is an example of this.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Modulation, or changing key in the course of a piece, is another style characteristic where Bach goes beyond what was usual in his time. Baroque instruments vastly limited modulation possibilities: keyboard instruments, prior to a workable system of temperament, limited the keys that could be modulated to, and wind instruments, especially brass instruments such as trumpets and horns, about a century before they were fitted with valves, were tied to the key of their tuning. Bach pushed the limits: he added "strange tones" in his organ playing, confusing the singing, according to an indictment he had to face in Arnstadt, and Louis Marchand, another early experimenter with modulation, seems to have avoided confrontation with Bach because the latter went further than anyone had done before. In the "Suscepit Israel" of his 1723 Magnificat, he had the trumpets in E-flat play a melody in the enharmonic scale of C minor.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The major development taking place in Bach's time, and to which he contributed in no small way, was a temperament for keyboard instruments that allowed their use in all available keys (12 major and 12 minor) and also modulation without retuning. His "Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother", a very early work, showed a gusto for modulation unlike any contemporary work this composition has been compared to, but the full expansion came with the "Well-Tempered Clavier", using all keys, which Bach apparently had been developing since around 1720, the "Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach" being one of its earliest examples.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The second page of the "Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach" is an ornament notation and performance guide that Bach wrote for his eldest son, who was nine years old at the time. Bach was generally quite specific on ornamentation in his compositions (where in his time much of the ornamentation was not written out by composers but rather considered a liberty of the performer), and his ornamentation was often quite elaborate. For instance, the "Aria" of the "Goldberg Variations" has rich ornamentation in nearly every measure. Bach's dealing with ornamentation can also be seen in a keyboard arrangement he made of Marcello's Oboe Concerto: he added explicit ornamentation, which some centuries later is played by oboists when performing the concerto.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Although Bach did not write any operas, he was not averse to the genre or its ornamented vocal style. In church music, Italian composers had imitated the operatic vocal style in genres such as the Neapolitan mass. In Protestant surroundings, there was more reluctance to adopt such a style for liturgical music. For instance, Kuhnau, Bach's predecessor in Leipzig, had notoriously shunned opera and Italian virtuoso vocal music. Bach was less moved. One of the comments after a performance of his "St Matthew Passion" was that it all sounded much like opera.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In concerted playing in Bach's time the basso continuo, consisting of instruments such as organ, viola da gamba or harpsichord, usually had the role of accompaniment, providing the harmonic and rhythmic foundation of a piece. From the late 1720s, Bach had the organ play concertante (i.e. as a soloist) with the orchestra in instrumental cantata movements, a decade before Handel published his first organ concertos. Apart from the 5th "Brandenburg Concerto" and the "Triple Concerto", which already had harpsichord soloists in the 1720s, Bach wrote and arranged his harpsichord concertos in the 1730s, and in his sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord neither instrument plays a continuo part: they are treated as equal soloists, far beyond the figured bass. In this sense, Bach played a key role in the development of genres such as the keyboard concerto.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach wrote virtuoso music for specific instruments as well as music independent of instrumentation. For instance, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin are considered the pinnacle of what has been written for this instrument, only within reach of accomplished players. The music fits the instrument, pushing it to the full scale of its possibilities and requiring virtuosity of the player but without bravura. Notwithstanding that the music and the instrument seem inseparable, Bach made transcriptions for other instruments of some pieces of this collection. Similarly, for the cello suites, the virtuoso music seems tailored for the instrument, the best of what is offered for it, yet Bach made an arrangement for lute of one of these suites. The same applies to much of his most virtuoso keyboard music. Bach exploited the capabilities of an instrument to the fullest while keeping the core of such music independent of the instrument on which it is performed.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In this sense, it is no surprise that Bach's music is easily and often performed on instruments it was not necessarily written for, that it is transcribed so often, and that his melodies turn up in unexpected places such as jazz music. Apart from this, Bach left a number of compositions without specified instrumentation: the canons BWV 1072–1078 fall in that category, as well as the bulk of the "Musical Offering" and the "Art of Fugue".


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Another characteristic of Bach's style is his extensive use of counterpoint, as opposed to the homophony used in his four-part Chorale settings, for example. Bach's canons, and especially his fugues, are most characteristic of this style, which Bach did not invent but contributed to so fundamentally that he defined it to a large extent. Fugues are as characteristic to Bach's style as, for instance, the Sonata form is characteristic to the composers of the Classical period.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: These strictly contrapuntal compositions, and most of Bach's music in general, are characterised by distinct melodic lines for each of the voices, where the chords formed by the notes sounding at a given point follow the rules of four-part harmony. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach's first biographer, gives this description of this feature of Bach's music, which sets it apart from most other music:


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach devoted more attention than his contemporaries to the structure of compositions. This can be seen in minor adjustments he made when adapting someone else's composition, such as his earliest version of the "Keiser" "St Mark Passion", where he enhances scene transitions, and in the architecture of his own compositions such as his Magnificat and Leipzig "Passions". In the last years of his life, Bach revised several of his prior compositions. Often the recasting of such previously composed music in an enhanced structure was the most visible change, as in the Mass in B minor. Bach's known preoccupation with structure led (peaking around the 1970s) to various numerological analyses of his compositions, although many such over-interpretations were later rejected, especially when wandering off into symbolism-ridden hermeneutics.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The librettos, or lyrics, of his vocal compositions played an important role for Bach. He sought collaboration with various text authors for his cantatas and major vocal compositions, possibly writing or adapting such texts himself to make them fit the structure of the composition he was designing when he could not rely on the talents of other text authors. His collaboration with Picander for the "St Matthew Passion" libretto is best known, but there was a similar process in achieving a multi-layered structure for his "St John Passion" libretto a few years earlier.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1950, Wolfgang Schmieder published a thematic catalogue of Bach's compositions called the (Bach Works Catalogue). Schmieder largely followed the "", a comprehensive edition of the composer's works that was produced between 1850 and 1900. The first edition of the catalogue listed 1,080 surviving compositions indisputably composed by Bach.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: BWV 1081–1126 were added to the catalogue in the second half of the 20th century, and BWV 1127 and higher are 21st-century additions.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach composed Passions for Good Friday services and oratorios such as the "Christmas Oratorio", which is a set of six cantatas for use in the liturgical season of Christmas. Shorter oratorios are the "Easter Oratorio" and the "Ascension Oratorio".


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The "St John Passion" was the first Passion Bach composed during his tenure as Thomaskantor in Leipzig.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: According to his obituary, Bach would have composed five year-cycles of sacred cantatas, and additional church cantatas for weddings and funerals, for example. Approximately 200 of these sacred works are extant, an estimated two thirds of the total number of church cantatas he composed. The Bach Digital website lists 50 known secular cantatas by the composer, about half of which are extant or largely reconstructable.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's cantatas vary greatly in form and instrumentation. Many consist of a large opening chorus followed by one or more recitative-aria pairs for soloists (or duets) and a concluding chorale. The melody of the concluding chorale often appears as a cantus firmus in the opening movement.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's earliest cantatas date from his years in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen. The earliest surviving work in the genre is . As a whole, the extant early works all show remarkable mastery and skill. Many feature an instrumental opening which display effective use of the limited instrumental forces available to Bach, whether it be in the subdued combination of two recorders and two viola de gamba for BWV 106, or the independent bassoon in BWV 196. Bach's compositional skills are also manifested through his daring harmonies and advanced, unprecedented chord progressions. According to Christoph Wolff, Bach's early cantatas are impressive evidence of how the modest means at his disposal did not restrain the composer in the slightest, and they compare favourably with compositions by the most talented composers from the beginning of the 18th century, such as Krieger, Kuhnau or Zachow.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: After taking up his office as in late May 1723, Bach performed a cantata each Sunday and feast day, corresponding to the lectionary readings of the week. His first cantata cycle ran from the first Sunday after Trinity of 1723 to Trinity Sunday the next year. For instance, the Visitation cantata , containing the chorale that is known in English as "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", belongs to this first cycle. The cantata cycle of his second year in Leipzig is called the chorale cantata cycle as it consists mainly of works in the chorale cantata format. His third cantata cycle was developed over a period of several years, followed by the Picander cycle of 1728–29.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Later church cantatas include the chorale cantatas (final version) and . Only the first three Leipzig cycles are more or less completely extant. Apart from his own work, Bach also performed cantatas by Telemann and by his distant relative Johann Ludwig Bach.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach also wrote secular cantatas, for instance for members of the royal Polish and prince-electoral Saxonian families (e.g. "Trauer-Ode"), or other public or private occasions (e.g. "Hunting Cantata"). The text of these cantatas was occasionally in dialect (e.g. "Peasant Cantata") or Italian (e.g. "Amore traditore"). Many of the secular cantatas were lost, but for some of them the text and occasion are known, for instance when Picander later published their librettos (e.g. BWV Anh. 11–12).


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Some of the surviving secular cantatas have a plot involving mythological figures of Greek antiquity (e.g. "Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan"), and others were almost miniature "buffo" operas (e.g. "Coffee Cantata"). Although Bach never expressed any interest in opera, his secular cantatas, or "drammi per musica", would have allowed Leipzig audiences, deprived of opera since 1720, to experience musical performances comparable to the royal opera in Dresden. These were not at all "poor or makeshift substitutes for real opera" but spectacles displaying "full mastery of the dramatic genre and the proper pacing of the dialogues."


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's motets (BWV 225–231) are pieces on sacred themes for choir and continuo, with instruments playing colla parte. Several of them were composed for funerals. The six motets definitely composed by Bach are , , , , , and . The motet (BWV 231) is part of the composite motet (BWV Anh. 160), other parts of which may be based on work by Telemann.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach's church music in Latin includes the Magnificat, four Kyrie–Gloria Masses, and the Mass in B minor.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: The first version of Bach's Magnificat dates from 1723, but the work is best known in its D major version of 1733.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: In 1733 Bach composed a Kyrie–Gloria Mass for the Dresden court. Near the end of his life, around 1748–1749, he expanded this composition into the large-scale Mass in B minor. The work was never performed in full during Bach's lifetime.


title: Johann Sebastian Bach

text: Bach wrote for organ and for stringed keyboard instruments such as harpsichord, clavichord and lute-harpsichord.