Veit Bach

• Name — Veit Bach • Other Names — Veit Bach • Birth Name — Vitus Bach • Born — c. 1550 or 1555 • Birthplace — Possibly Pozsony, Kingdom of Hungary (modern Bratislava, Slovakia) • Died — 8 March 1619 • Place of death — Wechmar, Saxe-Coburg (in modern Thuringia, Germany) • Children — Johannes Bach I • Relatives — * Bach family • Johann Ambrosius Bach (great-grandson) • Johann Sebastian Bach (great-great-grandson) • Illustration — The Veit Bach Mill, at Wechmar.

Veit's son, Johannes Bach I (ca. 1580–1626), was the grandfather of Johann Ambrosius Bach, J.S. Bach's father, Veit therefore being Johann Sebastian's great-great-grandfather. Other theories hold that a different Veit Bach who died before 1578 in Erfurt was the father of Johann(es)/Hans, so was Johann Sebastian's great-great-grandfather. Evading religious persecution in the Kingdom of Hungary, then under the control of the staunchly Roman Catholic Habsburgs, Bach, being a Protestant, settled in Wechmar, a village in the German state of Thuringia. His descendants continued to live there until Christoph Bach, grandfather of J. S. Bach, moved to Erfurt to take up a position as municipal musician or Stadtpfeifer (town piper). Bach's son Johannes Bach studied music with the town's head piper.

In The Ursprung - Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie (1735) - J.S. Bach placed Veit at the head of the Wechmar line of Bachs, and the earliest member of the family to show any musical proclivities. His hobby was playing the 'cythringen' (a small cittern). Bach adds an additional sentence: "this was, as it were, the beginning of music in his descendants", implying that none of his ancestors was a professional musician.