Who composed the Brandenburg Concertos?

Bach, who sent them in 1721 to the Margrave of Brandenburg with a job application in florid French - and appears never to have received a reply. The manuscript went into the Margrave's library, was valued at almost nothing when he died, and sat essentially unread for over a century.

That is the pattern of Bach's whole reputation. He was known in his lifetime as an organist rather than a composer, considered old-fashioned by the end of it, and much of his music was unpublished and scattered among his sons after his death - some of it reportedly used as wrapping paper. The revival began with Mendelssohn's performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829, eighty years after Bach died.

The concertos are also a catalogue of what a court orchestra could do, each written for a different combination - the fifth gives the harpsichord a long solo passage that is arguably the first keyboard concerto cadenza anyone wrote, at a moment when the instrument was supposed to be accompaniment. The manuscript survived the Second World War because a librarian evacuating it by train was caught in a bombing raid and hid in a ditch with the scores under his coat.