in 1720, where he won the admiration of the aged Reinken. In 1720, while he was at Carlsbad, his wife died so abruptly that he did not know the fact till his return three weeks after. In 1721 he married Anna Wülken of Weissenfels, fifteen years his junior, a beautiful singer, and so deeply interested in music that she engaged in detailed study, served much as his copyist and shared fully in his ideals. In 1723, partly to enlarge his artistic field, partly to get better schooling for his children, he secured appointment as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipsic, where he remained till his death. He continued, however, to be honorary choirmaster at Cöthen and also at Weissenfels.
Technically, his new position at Leipsic was not a promotion, though its traditions were honorable (see sec. 95). Its duties were laborious and complicated. The school was administered as the choir-school for the four town-churches, and the cantor was responsible to both the Town Council and the Church Consistory. Besides living at the school and sharing in its discipline, he was expected to teach Latin as well as music. While Ernesti was rector (till 1729), the pupils were few and poor, the equipment and discipline neglected, and the interest of the Council in the musical work narrow. Bach asserted his authority as supervisor of music in the two leading churches, besides composing much for them and attending to all occasional music (processions, weddings, funerals), and also claimed his legal rights as musician to the university which his predecessor, Kuhnau, had allowed to lapse. This latter contention he carried up to the Elector of Saxony himself, and was sustained. Yet the situation was trying, for the drift of popular interest was toward the opera and even the school pupils were continually being drafted as operatic singers. It is pathetic to realize what inefficient resources he had for his public work—organists that disliked his ideas, a body of immature singers and players, seldom more than twenty in number, and a popular hostility to all serious styles. In 1730-4, however, under the new rector, Gesner, a fine scholar and disciplinarian, matters were better, but lapsed again under his successor. In spite of Bach's increasing renown, circumstances combined to make the later part of his life unhappy on its public side and to drive him into seclusion. His delights lay in his home-life, in his many pupils, in his visitors from abroad, and in incessant composition of the most ambitious sort. The Leipsic period is marked by the writing of an enormous number of cantatas and several oratorios, usually devised with reference to the Lutheran liturgy and calendar. He also diligently revised many of his earlier works. He made many trips, especially to Dresden, where Hasse was in high honor, to Weimar and Cöthen, and to the various gathering-places of the Bachs in Thuringia. In 1747 he was invited to Potsdam by Frederick the Great, in whose band was Bach's son Emanuel, and was received with the greatest favor. Late in 1749 he underwent an operation upon his eyes which resulted in total blindness. In 1750 he died of apoplexy. His grave in the yard of the Johanniskirche was later obliterated in municipal improvements, but his supposed remains were discovered in 1894 and reinterred in the church on the 150th anniversary of his death. His wife and his three unmarried daughters struggled on in poverty, part of the time as dependents upon the town; Anna Bach died in 1760. The surviving sons, with one exception, attained renown and importance. Of seven children by his first
