Compared to most other major composers, Johann Sebastian Bach's life and career
were confined to a very limited geographical space. Born and raised in
Thuringia,
he never went farther north than Hamburg and Lübeck, or farther south than
Carlsbad. In a similarly confined way, his east-west range stretched from
Dresden (east) to Kassel (west). His complete geographical space can be found
on a map derived from Christoph Wolff's great scholarly Bach study (Chr. Wolff,
Bach, Essays on His Life and Music. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1991).
The little map on the current page (derived from a Dutch book on Bach: J. Rubinstein, L. Van Hasselt, and T. Koopman, Bach. Terra, Zutphen, 1985) shows the places where Bach actually lived and worked. It is a clickable map, which means thay you can follow the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life by clicking the towns on the map with the mouse of your computer. If you want to follow Johann Sebastian's complete Werdegang, just start with his birthpace Eisenach (bottom left), follow the arrows, and end in Leipzig, where he died in 1750. Thus, the right order is as follows:
Go to the J.S. Bach Home Page
Go to the J.S. Bach Bibliography
Go back to the introductory page
