Johann Sebastian Bach

For twenty-seven years Bach was cantor at St Thomas's, writing a new cantata most weeks, teaching Latin to schoolboys and quarrelling with the town council. He was known in his lifetime chiefly as an organist; his music was largely forgotten for eighty years after his death.

It returned in 1829, when the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin. Bach's grave was lost and rediscovered in 1894; since 1950 he has lain in the chancel of the church where he worked.