Episode
Bach's Birthday is Today, Not March 31st.
- Podcast
- WTF Bach
- Published
- Mar 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 389
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://wtfbach.substack.com/p/bachs-birthday-is-today-not-march
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Summary
Happy Birthday Johann. Today, March 21st, not March 31st. Let me repeat that for those of you feeling clever or citing google without thinking: Happy Birthday Johann. Today, March 21st, not March 31st. Why are people confused about this? How did this become a thing? And what extremely boring person got so frustrated with a toccata they started tampering with Bach’s wikipedia page? There were two main calendars in Europe at the time: the Julian and the Gregorian. We are currently on the Gregorian, but it took a while to get everyone on board. Greece held out until 1923 even, and Protestant Germany was holding back in 1685, when Bach was born. But you know, you gotta get with the times, man! Gotta catch up to the modern world! It’s gonna be 1700 pretty soon! We’re gonna have mercury thermometers and calculus… You’re living in the past! …ten days in the past! So in 1700, Germany did indeed make the jump from Julian to Gregorian. In the year 1700, they jumped from February 18, to March 1. No one died, no one was born between Feb 18th and March 1st, 1700 in protestant Germany. (No one even used the toilet.) Germany joined the Gregorian calendar when Bach was 15 years old, with the legal stipulation that all prior dates would remain valid. A legal stipulation, in fact, protecting the old dates from being overridden, and converted to the new calendar. So, come on people, let’s not try to override this actual legal stipulation. (Here’s my gentle reminder that saying Bach was born on March 31st is illegal .) We can’t go about dismissing ecclesiastical records in favor of our modern abstractions just because we’re feeling smug about hybrid cars and vegan smoothies. It’s not like the Gregorian calendar represents some objective truth that the Julian calendar was failing to captur…