Composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach

On 21 March 1685, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, a town in Thuringia, in central Germany. (By the modern Gregorian calendar, later adopted in Protestant Germany, the date converts to 31 March; the 21 March Old Style date is the one recorded at his birth and the one Bach himself observed.)

He entered a sprawling dynasty of musicians: the Bachs had served as organists, cantors, and town players across Thuringia for generations. In Eisenach the young Bach received his first music lessons and sang in the choir of the Church of St. George. Orphaned by about age ten, he went to live with an older brother who taught him the keyboard.

From those provincial beginnings came the Brandenburg Concertos, the Mass in B minor, and the towering body of fugues and chorales that anchor Western music.

Largely overlooked for decades after his death in 1750, Bach’s reputation was revived in the nineteenth century and never faded again.