Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on 31 March 1685 (Gregorian; 21 March on the Julian calendar then used in Eisenach), in what is now Germany, into a family of church and town musicians. Orphaned at ten, he lived with an older brother in Ohrdruf, then studied in Lüneburg. He held posts in Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar — where he became court organist — and Cöthen before becoming cantor at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig in 1723, a job he kept until his death. In Leipzig he wrote weekly church music, taught Latin-school boys, and directed collegium concerts.

His surviving works include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, the St. Matthew Passion, the Mass in B minor, and hundreds of cantatas. After his death on 28 July 1750 his reputation faded among the wider public, then returned in the nineteenth century, especially after Mendelssohn’s 1829 revival of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. He is now treated as a central figure of Baroque music. The site’s 12-year cycle and Western table read 31 March 1685 as Ox/Aries.

The 1746 Haussmann oil used here is a public-domain painting. His birthday is older than the site’s 1924–2030 calculator window, so the signs come from getChineseSign and getWesternSign on the same cycle.