The story of Bach's tomb and afterlife in the Thomaskirche: a two and a half century saga.

 The story of Bach's tomb and afterlife in the Thomaskirche: a two and a half century saga

J.S. Bach died from a stroke on 28 July, 1750 in Leipzig, on what was likely a hot summer day, after years of battling diabetes, high blood pressure, increasingly poor eyesight and, at the last, blindness.

 He lived to be 65 – a long life by the standards of his time. In contrast, Schubert, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Chopin never made it to 40. 

Bach died a successful and accomplished man. He lived long enough to enjoy his sons’ successes – Carl Philipp Emanuel made it as a member of Frederick the Great’s royal orchestra in Berlin, his music admired and in demand across Europe, while Johann Christian Bach, 15 when his father died, had already shown himself to be a promising musician and would go on to influence Haydn and Mozart (as would C.P.E.). 

Wilhelm Friedemann, whom some have interpreted as the black sheep of the Bach family (he has sometimes been portrayed as a drunken womanizer of great but wasted talent living in his father’s shadow), at the time was organist at the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle, while Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach was appointed organist at Bückeburg around the time of his father’s death. 

Contrary to a common myth, Anna Magdalena did not die a beggar (see Wolff’s biography for more on this). 

She remained a respected member of the Leipzig community, receiving a regular pension from the Leipzig city council until her death on 22 February, 1760. 

The pension, however, was scant, and Anna Magdalena and her two youngest daughters had to rely on public charity to make ends meet.

 Anna Magdalena Bach remains an unacknowledged hero of the Bach family saga.

 without her unsung efforts both musical and extra-musical, it is doubtful that Bach's sons, and indeed Bach himself, could have achieved so much.

J.S. Bach was buried in the Old St. John’s Cemetery in Leipzig in an unmarked grave. 

According to oral tradition, the grave was “six paces away from the south portal”. 

This tradition was based on the oral testimony of a 75-year-old man (born in 1819), who had been told about the grave in 1834 by a 90-year-old gardener who was 6 at the time of Bach’s death.

The grave was unmarked until 1894, when his skeleton was moved to a vault in the Johanniskirche upon inspection by Wilhelm His, an anatomist who declared that the remains in the supposed grave were indeed Bach’s. 

Herr His based his conclusion on the size of the skeleton – Bach was a big man, and the unearthed skeleton was unusually large for an early/mid 18th century German man. 

The Johanniskirche was destroyed by Allied bombs during WWII, and Bach’s remains were moved to the sanctuary of the St. Thomas Church and dedicated on July 28, 1950, on the two hundredth anniversary of Bach’s death.

 This was an important event in the cultural life of East Germany.

 Walter Ulbricht had just become the General Secretary of the Central Committee, and he wanted to begin his rule with a powerful cultural statement. 

For the 200th anniversary celebrations, Stalin, who was an admirer of Bach’s music (Bach was regularly performed in the ‘30s and ‘40s in the Soviet Union), sent Shostakovich as a judge for the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. 

The celebrations coincided with the move of Bach’s remains to their present location in the Thomaskirche. 

With Stalin’s approval, Ulbricht and his communist colleagues had thus transformed Bach into a working-class hero and a symbol of East German greatness. 

Bach's tomb remains in the middle of the Thomaskirche’s sanctuary, flanked by portraits on nearby walls of the Stadtsuperintenden of Leipzig from 1614 onwards.

 It has become an important place of pilgrimage for Bach lovers from around the world and is among the most visited tombs in world, attracting 70,000+ visitors yearly during the summer Bachfests.

Whether or not the remains are indeed Bach's remains a mystery.