On BBC Radio 3’s Breakfast show we have a daily feature called Bach Before 7. Every weekday morning, just before 7.00, we play a piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach – usually something requested by our listeners, who tune in from all over the globe. It’s inconceivable that another composer could take Bach’s place in that slot. Even Mozart or Beethoven wouldn’t cut it. And as for other giants of the musical canon, Monteverdi, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, Bartok: forget it. Over the course of my show, between 6.30am and 9.00am, I will of course play many of these and indeed dozens of other composers of all different periods and styles, from Adès to Zemlinsky. But it’s Bach, and Bach alone, who could warrant his own daily slot.

This is not to say that JS Bach is everybody’s favourite composer – of course not. But he is the ultimate composer. Trying to explain why is a fool’s game: it’s like the famous quote attributed to several that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. It’s hard to think of a more refined brain than Albert Einstein’s, and yet it was he who famously uttered, “This is what I have to say about Bach – listen, play, love, revere – and keep your trap shut.”

It’s good advice. I’m only ignoring it because so many people I meet, from all walks of life who are innately and immediately moved by Bach, ask me: just what is it about him? Why does his music do that – and how? How does it invade us, change us? So here are a few reasons why I think he is the godfather of classical music. All music.

Humanity and divinity

Bach’s instinctive understanding of human nature, his rhetorical skills and his innate skill as a dramatist are second to none. Living from 1685 to 1750, he had no choice but to write music to the glory of God – and yet everything that it is to be human – to love, to lose, to laugh, to be betrayed, to betray, to be torn into little pieces or to feel so whole you could fly, is here. Conflict, friendship, despair, joy, his music encompasses what I can only describe as “the everything-ness of everything”. Even Shakespeare cannot compare.

John Eliot Gardiner, a peerless Bach conductor and author of the superb recent biography Music In The Castle of Heaven, jokes that Bach is like snorkelling. “Being in Bach’s music has that sense of otherness: it’s another world we enter, as performers or listeners,” he told me in a recent interview. “You put your mask on, and you go down to a psychedelic world of myriad colours.”