Excerpt from The Life of John Sebastian Bach in Relation to His Work as a Church Musician and Composer: A Lecture

After his apprenticeship was out, Hans returned to his native village as a skilled violin player, married the daughter of the local innkeeper and earned his livelihood partly by music and partly by carpet-weaving. The more divine of these two arts was, however, evidently his real profession, as the description "Spielmann" - player - attached to his name in the parish register sufficiently shows. He was frequently summoned to the neighbouring towns, Gotha, Arnstadt, Erfurt, Eisenach, to assist the local musicians, and must have attained no small general popularity, as appears by his portrait having been twice taken. A couplet attached to one of these pictures in which he was represented playing on the violin testifies to his having had an humorous vein in his character which came out perceptibly in his music. He died of the plague in 1626.

Up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War the condition of Thuringian peasants was a fairly prosperous one, but, as Spitta writes, "The death of Hans Bach in 1626 brings us to the commencement of the time during which Thuringia had to suffer and bleed under the fearful war scourge.

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