Napoleon and Beethoven were contemporaries, and the times were as
revolutionary for music as they were for the nations of Europe.In fact, the
Napoleonic wars undermined the economic foundations of music, forcing
composers to play a new role in society and to find new sources of income.

Johann Sebastian Bach had a career typical of the prerevolutionary
composer.He was a salaried employee of either a church or a member of
the nobility. His responsibilities included training the singers and musicians
who performed for the church or court, performing himself whenever required,
and composing all the music that might be needed for any occasion, birthdays,
funerals, or whatever his patron desired.

Kapellmeisters, as church composers were called, served as organists and
had to provide compositions for every church service.Bach even had to teach
Latin and give music training to the choir boys.While working for his employer,
whether court or church, the composer wrote very little on his own initiative.

In the early eighteenth century music was laboriously copied by hand
and, for the most part, stayed where it was written, so that court and church
alike had music libraries consisting mainly of works their own composers
had provided over the years. When Bach was born, there were some 340
composers working at the courts and churches of the German-speaking states.
The music-publishing industry was rudimentary in his day, and most of Bach's
music was not published until many years after his death.Bach was known
to other musicians, but his audience was local and he was never a celebrity.

Some of the court composers like Haydn were constantly busy, for they
had to prepare some kind of performance, ranging from small chamber music

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