While the Italian Renaissance had developed the opera, the dance and music that delighted the drawing-room, under the bright skies of Italy, in the colder North, under the influence of stern Martin Luther, the _Chorale_, or hymn-tune, had arisen to supply the needs of the new Lutheran religion. The _Chorale_ is austere and solemn, although melodious. It was largely owing to these chorales that the new Reformed religion made its way so rapidly among the people of Northern Germany. The sources of these Chorales were various: some came from old church-hymns; others, from folk-songs. A good example is the “_Old Hundredth Tune_” beginning “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” The custom of playing these _Chorales_ on the organ with elaborate accompaniments and treating them also as themes for fugues and counterpoint was a special fancy of the German organists. Germany had the finest organists in Europe in the Seventeenth Century; and there was no greater one among them than Johann Sebastian Bach. Moreover, no one understood the _Chorale_ better, or made more use of it, than Bach. Bach’s life was uneventful. He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, near the Wartburg (celebrated for the legend of Tannhäuser), was organist at Weimar and _Kapellmeister_ at Cothen for the Prince Leopold and Cantor of the Thomas School in Leipzig from 1723 until his death in 1750. He was also organist and director of the two chief churches in Leipzig. Bach wrote every form of music except the opera. His industry was prodigious. “In Bach’s hands the music of the period marked its climax of expression, the _Chorale_ was idealized to its highest pitch, the combination of Orchestra, chorus and solo voices in the Passions, the B-minor mass and the Church Cantatas became pillars of the house of musical art for all time, the principle of equal temperament[51] was fixed for good in Clavichord work, the _violin became a solo instrument which could speak unaided for itself_, and the organ came finally into its own. All this immense range of work was accomplished by an unobtrusive, unadvertising man of the highest moral force and of simple, deeply religious and deep-feeling character, a personality who would have considered it the highest possible tribute to be called the worthy father of a devoted family.”[52] When Bach and his son, Philipp Emmanuel, went to work to draw their family tree, they found they had fifty-three musicians to hang on the boughs. The whole Bach family played the organ and every other keyboard instrument. They were all marvellous players of the harpsichord. Bach’s contribution to the development of the Orchestra is that he treated each separate instrument lovingly and as if it were an individual, so that _he prepared the way for the occasional solos in orchestral compositions_. He wrote for a great many instruments that were rapidly going out of fashion, such as the _oboe d’amore_, the _oboe di caccia_, the _viola d’amore_ and the _viola da gamba_.