I was made to work; if you are equally industrious you will be equally successful.
What it means
When people asked Bach the secret of his mastery, he said it was work: he had been made to work hard, and anyone who worked as hard would do as well.
It’s a modest answer, and his biographer thought it too modest. But it puts the weight where anyone can reach it: on effort, not on gifts you either have or don’t.
The context
Johann Nikolaus Forkel wrote the first biography of Bach in 1802, and was able to correspond with Bach’s sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann. In the chapter on Bach’s character, he says that “as an artist Bach was exceptionally modest” and “never gave himself airs.”
“If he was asked the secret of his mastership,” Forkel writes, he would give this answer, “a remark which made no allowance for his own exceptional genius.” Forkel adds that Bach’s opinion of other composers “was invariably fair and generous.”
Why it matters
Talent is real, but it’s not something you can choose. Work is. Bach’s answer, modest or not, points to the part of mastery that’s in your hands.
It also works as a way to talk about success with children: not “you’re gifted,” but “you worked at it,” which is something they can do again.
About Johann Sebastian Bach
German composer and musician, 1685–1750
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685, the youngest child of the city musician Johann Ambrosius Bach, into a family that had already produced several composers. Orphaned at ten, he lived for five years with his eldest brother before continuing his musical training.
From 1723 he was Thomaskantor in Leipzig, responsible for the music of four Lutheran churches and the St. Thomas School. His works include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, and he is acclaimed as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. He died on 28 July 1750.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from Reported by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work (translated by Charles Sanford Terry), 1802.
We matched the words against the Project Gutenberg text of Charles Sanford Terry's translation of Forkel's biography, chapter VIII, "Personal Characteristics". Forkel didn't hear it himself: he wrote the first biography of Bach in 1802, more than fifty years after Bach's death, drawing on Bach's sons. Forkel wrote in German. We last checked this on 11 November 2026.