George Bem biography

Germany is the main predecessor of Bach among the predecessors of the brilliant Bach who had a noticeable influence - mostly in absentia - on his creative formation, only one knew him personally and talked with him. Bach in his gigantic in scale of creativity covered and summarized a huge way of developing European music, numbering for several centuries. But he also had direct predecessors who prepared his conquests, primarily in the field of organ art, extremely common in Protestant Germany.

This is a Froberger, Palbel, Buysteuhus, Raninen. However, communication between them and they were usually unilateral. Bach either listened to their game at concerts and in the church, for which sometimes he overcame enormous distances on foot, or studied their scores, which he usually rewritten at night. The reward for this was brief fleeting with them after their performances in Lubeck, Hamburg and other cities where he could get.

But only with Boom he was lucky enough to live for 3 years in Luneburg, where he could not only communicate with him personally and attend his performances, but, possibly, even take lessons from him. And in the future, their contacts were not interrupted until the death of Boom. Alas, there is very little about the life and personality of Beham, although his music, fortunately, came to us in sufficient quantities.

These are dozens of works for the organ and clavier, mainly chorales, partites, suits, preludes, fugues. But in his biography there are many gaps, or rather “black holes”. So, we don’t even know how he really looked: there is not a single reliable image of the composer, and those that appear on the Internet and other sources belong to completely different people. There are also very few facts about his childhood and youth, when his creative formation was just.

And only the second half of the life of a mature musician is known in more or less detail. He is from the same German Thuringia as Bach, so they are also fellow countrymen. The distance between their native cities of Hohenkirhen and Eisenah is only about 40 kilometers. It is not surprising that their paths nevertheless crossed in the same place, albeit for a short while.

This happened in the year when the summer bang comes to study at one of the church schools of Luneburg, and Bem, who had served an organist in Hamburg, has also moved there two years earlier.

There he is already known as a wonderful performer and composer, which gives him the opportunity to take the same position in the Luneburg Church of St. John, who had a magnificent organ, and they take the musician there without a competition, which was then considered the highest recognition. But where he was before and how he achieved such success remains a mystery.

The son of a school teacher and musician Bem is engaged in childhood under the leadership of his father, and after the death of the parent he continues to study in neighboring Thuringian cities - Goth, Ordruf, Goldbach, and among his musical mentors there are members of the large Bakhov family, who at that time worked throughout Thuringia, where even the word “bang” was associated only with music.

After many years, Bem will repay the debt to this family, becoming an example and one of the idols for its most important representative. Having completed the initial training, the young man receives the highest, which indicates his certain material prosperity. The same thing happened with Bach’s eldest sons, to whom the hardworking father provided the opportunity to enter the University of Leipzig.

Boy is studying in the famous Jensky, who will subsequently glorify such great graduates as Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer and Schiller. But what Bem did in the following years after Ina is unknown. Most likely, just then he began his musical ascent, which soon brought him the glory of one of the largest organists in Germany, whose style of play based on improvisation and spectacular concert, contemporaries called "fantastic" and which his spiritual heir later brought to the ultimate perfection.

The whole second half of his life, exactly 35 years, Bem lived in Luneburg, where he died at the age of 71. Many years after his death, one of the Bakho sons, Philip Emmanuel, admitted to the first biographer of his father Forkel that it was Boom's work that was an ideal and an example for Bach himself.