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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Kate Molleson

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Composer of the Week: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Episode 1: Closer to Heaven Than Earth

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Episode 1

Episode 1: Closer to Heaven Than Earth

Closer to Heaven Than Earth

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Closer to Heaven Than Earth

Focusing on how Bach began to retreat from his church duties to focus on his own projects.

Donald Macleod explores the music of Bach's final years in Leipzig, focusing on how Bach began to retreat from his church duties to focus on his own projects.

We have a frustratingly cloudy picture of JS Bach in his final years (1735-1750), but this week Donald Macleod looks at the composer's preoccupations during this period, when it seems that he was contemplating past, present and future. One biographer suggests that towards the end of his life, as he sat at his composing desk at St Thomas's School in Leipzig, he would have been surrounded by the 'Old Bach Archive' - the music of his ancestors - on bookshelves. He had recently drawn up a family tree, and was proudly watching his sons begin to make their mark in the musical world. From the late 1730s onwards Bach began to retreat from his church duties in Leipzig, possibly in protest against his employers, and started to devote himself to his own large and ambitious projects. One of these was the Mass in B Minor, a monumental work which seems to have been written without a commission or any intended performance, and which will be heard in its entirety through the course of this week's programmes.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod explores the music of Bach's final years in Leipzig

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Composer of the Week

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Episode 1: Closer to Heaven Than Earth

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