All things considered, the most remarkable figure of this period was that of the great John Sebastian Bach, who was born at Eisenach, in Prussia, in 1685, and died at Leipsic in 1750. It is scarcely too much to say that this great man has exercised more influence upon the development of music than any other composer who has ever lived. In his own day he led a quiet, uneventful life, at first as student, then as court musician at Weimar, where he played the violin; later as organist at Arnstadt, a small village near Weimar, and still later as director of music in the St. Thomas church and school at Leipsic. In the sixty-five years of his life, Bach produced an enormous number of compositions, of which about half were in fugue form, a form which was at its prime at the beginning of this century and which Bach carried to the farthest point in the direction of freedom and spontaneity which it ever reached. [Illustration: Fig. 51. JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH.] It is the remarkable glory of Bach to have rendered his compositions indispensable to thorough mastery in three different provinces of musical effort. The modern art of violin playing rests upon two works, the six sonatas of Bach for violin solo, and the Caprices of Paganini. The former contain everything that belongs to the classical, the latter everything that belongs to the sensational. In organ playing the foundation is Bach, and Bach alone. Nine-tenths of organ playing is comprised in the Bach works. Upon the piano his influence has been little less. While it is true that at least four works are necessary for making a pianist of the modern school, viz., the "Well Tempered Clavier," of Bach; the "_Gradus ad Parnassum_," of Clementi; the "Studies," of Chopin, and the Rhapsodies, of Liszt, the works of Bach form, on the whole, considerably more than one-third of this preparation. Nor has the influence of Bach been confined to the province of technical instruction alone. On the contrary, all composers since his time have felt the stimulus of his great tone poems, and Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin and Wagner found him the most productive of great masters.