After barely a year at Mühlhausen, Bach left to become the court organist and concertmaster at the ducal court in Weimar, a far cry from his earlier position there as 'lackey'. The munificent salary on offer at the court and the prospect of working entirely with a large, well-funded contingent of professional musicians may have prompted the move. The family moved into an apartment just five minutes' walk from the ducal palace. In the following year, their first child was born and they were joined by Maria Barbara's elder, unmarried sister, who remained with them to assist in the running of the household until her death in 1729. It was in Weimar that the two musically significant sons were born—Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Bach's position in Weimar marked the start of a sustained period of composing keyboard and orchestral works, in which he had attained the technical proficiency and confidence to extend the prevailing large-scale structures and to synthesise influences from abroad. From the music of Italians such as Vivaldi, Corelli and Torelli, he learnt how to write dramatic openings and adopted their sunny dispositions, dynamic motorrhythms
and decisive harmonic schemes. Bach inducted himself into these stylistic aspects largely by transcribing for harpsichord and organ the ensemble concertos of Vivaldi; these works are still concert favourites. He may have picked up the idea of transcribing the latest fashionable Italian music from Prince Johann Ernst, one of his employers, who was a musician of professional calibre. In 1713, the Duke returned from a tour of the Low Countries with a large collection of scores, some of them possibly transcriptions of the latest fashionable Italian music by the blind organist Jan Jacob de Graaf. Bach was particularly attracted to the Italian solo-tutti structure, in which one or more solo instruments alternate section-by-section with the full orchestra throughout a movement.
In Weimar, he had the opportunity to play and compose for the organ, and to perform a varied repertoire of concert music with the duke's ensemble. A master of contrapuntal technique, Bach's steady output of fugues began in Weimar. The largest single body of his fugal writing is Das wohltemperierte Clavier ("The well-tempered keyboard"—Clavier meaning keyboard instrument). It consists of two collections compiled in 1722 and 1744, each containing a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key. This is a monumental work for its masterful use of counterpoint and its exploration, for the first time, of the full range of keys–and the Friedemann; this contains traditional Lutheran chorales (hymn tunes), set in complex textures to assist the training of organists. The book illustrates two major themes in Bach's life: his dedication to teaching and his love of the chorale as a musical form. Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and was, according to the court secretary's report, jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed:
“On November 6, [1717], the quondam 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 fmeans of expression made possible by their slight differences from each other—available to keyboardists when their instruments are tuned according to systems such as that of Andreas Werckmeister. During his tenure at Weimar, Bach started work on The little organ book for his eldest son, Wilhelm reed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge.[5]"
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