Bach’s size seven-and-a-half feet ‘almost ideal’ for playing the organ

Nearly three centuries after Bach set the words to music, medical researchers have studied the composer’s feet and concluded that they were a size seven-and-a-half - ‘almost ideal’ for playing the organ.

German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

“I stand with one foot in the grave,” sings the soprano in one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most famous cantatas, “soon my sick body will fall in.”

Nearly three centuries after Bach set the words to music, medical researchers have studied the composer’s feet and concluded that they were a size seven-and-a-half - “almost ideal” for playing the organ.

Bach, who was introduced to the instrument as a young boy, was modest about his abilities. “There’s nothing remarkable about it,” he said. “All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”

Yet it was his innovative mastery of the organ that first made his name in 18th-century Germany, prompting one contemporary to exclaim: “I had thought this art was dead, but I see that it lives in you.”

Andreas Otte, a professor of nuclear medicine at Offenburg University, has been pursuing a theory that Bach’s body may have been peculiarly suited to the instrument, based on another organist’s account of the composer’s “gigantic” and “tireless” hands.

Unable to retrieve Bach’s remains from their resting place in St Thomas Church, Leipzig, Otte instead studied detailed photographs that an anatomy professor had taken of the skeleton when it was exhumed from an unmarked grave in 1894. In 2018 Otte published an analysis suggesting that Bach’s hands had an unusually broad span of about 10in, allowing him easily to cover 12-key intervals on a keyboard.

Now Otte and Marcel Verhoff, a forensic pathologist at Frankfurt University Hospital, have turned their attention to the composer’s feet.

One of Bach’s contemporaries had written: “He could execute movements on the pedals such as some keyboardists would find it hard enough to make with five fingers.”

Using the same photographs and modern technology to estimate the size of Bach’s toes, the researchers concluded that the feet had been more or less perfectly adapted. The paper was published in Archiv fur Kriminologie.

THE TIMES