Leopold

Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, born in Bologna to an old patrician family, had been educated in accordance with his rank, supplementing his training by studying mathematics, anatomy, and natural history with the best teachers and by personal observations.

After a course of scientific studies in his native city, he had traveled through the Ottoman Empire collecting data on its military organization, as well as on its natural history.

On his return, he had in 1682 entered the service of the Emperor Leopold and fought with distinction against the Turks, by whom he had been wounded and captured in an action on the river Rába, and sold to a pasha whom he had accompanied to the battle of Vienna.

After his release was purchased in 1684, he had returned to the imperial army and served as a talented military engineer.

Marsigli had contributed to the successful siege of Buda in 1696 and in the following years in the military operations of the liberation war against the Turks.

After the Treaty of Karlowitz, he had been commissioned to lead the Habsburg border demarcation commission.

Marsigli had mapped the eight hundred and fifty kilometer-long Habsburg-Ottoman border in the former Kingdom of Hungary (today Croatia, Serbia, Romania).

During the twenty years he spent in Hungary, he has collected scientific information, specimens, antiques, took measurements and observations for his work on the Danube.

He was assisted by Johann Christoph Müller of Nuremberg, who prepared the manuscript for printing and commissioned the engravers in Nuremberg.

The sample of the work, Prodromus, had been published in 1700 and the large work was expected by 1704.

He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in November 1691.

During the War of the Spanish Succession, Marsigli had been second in command under Count d'Arco at the fortress of Breisach, which had surrendered in 1703.

Count d'Arco was beheaded because he was found guilty of capitulating before it was necessary, while Marsigli had been stripped of all honors and commissions, and his sword was broken over him.

His appeals to the emperor were in vain.

Public opinion, however, has acquitted him later of the charge of neglect or ignorance.

After he had to leave the Habsburg army, he had made journeys to Switzerland and then France, spending a considerable time at Marseilles to study the nature of the sea.

He has drawn plans, made astronomical observations, measured the speed and size of rivers, studied the products, the mines, the birds, fishes, and fossils of every land he visited, and also collected specimens of every kind, instruments, models, antiquities, etc.

He had shown in 1711 that coral is an animal rather than a plant as previously thought.

Finally he had returned to Bologna and presented his entire collection to the Senate of Bologna in 1712.

Here he founds his "Institute of Sciences and Arts", which is formally opened in 1715.

Six professors are put in charge of the different divisions of the institute.

The prolific Johann Sebastian Bach composes his six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin in 1720, while employed as a Kapellmeister at Köthen. (The actual manuscript will nearly be destroyed but someone had saved it from being used as butcher paper).

Here, Bach composes more secular/chamber music than sacred or choral music; the Brandenburg Concertos, Double Concerto, and Cello Suites are all composed about this time.

His patron, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, himself a musician, appreciates Bach’s talents, pays him well, and gives him considerable latitude in composing and performing.

The prince is Calvinist, however, and does not use elaborate music in his worship; thus, most of Bach’s work from this period is secular.

The Sonatas each consist of four movements, in a slow-fast-slow-fast tempi format, with the second movement as a fugue.

The Partitas are collections of dances, making use of the baroque format of allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, but none following it to the letter: the first substitutes a bourrée for the gigue; the second includes a chaconne as a fifth movement; and the third's resemblance to the format is only in its final gigue.

The Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, renowned for their intimacy, contain a great variety of technical devices, a wide range of emotional content, and some of Bach's most compelling voice interactions and conversations.

While Bach is abroad with Prince Leopold on July 7, 1720, tragedy strikes: his wife, Maria Barbara, dies suddenly at thirty-six, having borne him seven children, three of whom had died at an early age.

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of six instrumental works presented by him to Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721, had probably been composed earlier.

Most likely they had been written over a number of years during Bach's tenure as Kapellmeister at Anhalt-Cöthen and possibly even extending back to the period of his employment at Weimar (1708-17).

The concertos, revered, like many of Bach’s works, for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, are often regarded as some of the best ever written.

Because King Frederick William I of Prussia patronizes the military over the arts, Christian Ludwig lacks enough musicians in his Berlin ensemble to perform the concertos.