Death of Johann Sebastian Bach

July 28, 1750

Blind from botched eye surgery, the old Leipzig cantor dictated his final chorale and died. Europe barely noticed. For a generation his fugues would be thought stiff and churchy - until Mendelssohn, eighty years later, dusted off the St. Matthew Passion and heard a universe inside it. Today he is considered the supreme architect of Western musical form, his work a cathedral built entirely of sound.