Johann Sebastian Bach spent his career writing music for one Lutheran church in Leipzig. He composed nearly 200 cantatas, the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and hundreds of other works. He was extraordinarily prolific. He was also, by the standards of his time, dated.

By the 1740s, fashion had moved on. The Baroque style — dense, contrapuntal, intellectually intricate — felt heavy compared to the lighter Classical style emerging from Vienna. When Bach died in 1750, only a handful of his sacred works were still being performed in the small German towns where he had lived. His sons, themselves successful composers, regarded him as old-fashioned. His manuscripts went into private collections and church archives.

For 79 years, Bach was virtually unperformed in public.

In 1829, a 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn organized a public performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. It was the first time the piece had been heard since 1750. The audience was stunned. The reaction was so strong that more performances followed. Schumann began championing Bach. Brahms studied him obsessively. By the 1850s, the Bach-Gesellschaft had been founded specifically to publish and preserve every surviving manuscript.

The reappraisal didn't just save Bach. It transformed Western music education, which centered on Bach's counterpoint as foundational. It influenced Beethoven's late works, Wagner's chromaticism, even Schoenberg's atonality. Modern conservatories begin students with Bach.

The most foundational figure in Western classical music spent 80 years almost entirely unheard.