Surely the same could be said of the clan-like Bachs? The opening line of the Nekrolog reads ‘Johann Sebastian Bach belongs to a family which seems to have received a love and aptitude for music as a gift of Nature to all its members in common’ (my italics). If this were true, why is every single one of the fifty-three ‘musical Bachs’ listed by Johann Sebastian in the genealogical notes he compiled in 1735 a male? Mothers, wives and daughters are nowhere to be found, despite the fact that his mother Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt came from a well-to-do family in Erfurt with marital connections to at least three composers; that both his first and second wives were trained singers; and that there were musical daughters among his progeny included in his claim that his children ‘are all born musici’. (Lutheran Germany was evidently more prone to male chauvinism than even the France of the ancien régime, although Louis XIV’s establishment of a boarding school for girls in 1684 at the prompting of Madame de Maintenon marked a significant change in the social attitude to women.) While they selected female partners with well-attested musical pedigrees (what in farming circles is known as ‘breeding up’), the Bachs were unwilling to countenance anything beyond biological and domestic roles for their womenfolk. Regardless of any musical chromosomes passed by the various Bach wives on to their offspring, and leaving aside the support, encouragement, burden-sharing and even inspiration that they may have given to their husbands, the degree of egalitarian, cooperative job-sharing characteristic of Armand-Louis Couperin would have been unthinkable within the Bach family.
The truth is that any endeavour to reconstruct the origins and development of the Bach dynasty cannot wholly escape this male bias and selectivity, one that was shared and solidified by Sebastian himself, who, at the age of fifty, had the idea of preparing and annotating the first draft of the Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie (Origin of the Musical Bach Family). Corrected and added to by Emanuel and Johann Lorenz Bach in the 1770s, this document is still the best source we have of his family’s history, itself the product of (male) family lore and hearsay evidence, as well as snippets of chronicled fact, and the main reason why in the history books the Bachs continue to eclipse all other musical dynasties.2 Successive scholars have tried to find more reliable source material but with limited success. As a result, it seems impossible to sidestep the sense of inexorable progress over six generations in 200 years, set out in an almost apostolic succession that culminates with the emergence of J. S. Bach and his sons, then drops off into a steep decline with the generation of his grandchildren. Up to that point each male member of the Bach clan was virtually preordained to become a trained musician, with the church (or in some cases the court) and the municipality as the main sphere of his activity. Council minutes for Erfurt in 1716 refer to the ‘local privileged band of town musicians or so-called Bachs’.3 From the outset the family set a premium on craftsmanship and self-reliance. Inevitably, there was a distinctly religious aspect and purpose to the way they made music.
The single most important book of Sebastian Bach’s musical upbringing was a hymnal – the Neues vollständiges Eisenachisches Gesangbuch (The New Complete Eisenach Songbook), compiled by Johann Günther Rörer in 1673. Between the ages of four and ten Bach must have sung from it every single day in church or in school. Within the thousand pages of this fascinating compendium are to be found several of the chorale tunes that would resurface in Bach’s church cantatas. His earliest experiences of music were thus indivisible from its role in acts of worship: these hymns that he sang and heard – either a cappella, with organ or concerted with instruments as sanctioned by Luther – reflected the changing seasons and fitted tidily into the liturgical celebrations of the turning year. Twelve copper-engraved illustrations added by Johann David Herlicius to the hymnal served to reinforce these connections between music and Scripture and to evoke the physical landscape of Bach’s childhood. The town of Eisenach features on the title page; and a biblical superscription shows King Solomon kneeling at the altar while ‘all the Levites who were singers, namely Asaph, Heman and Jeduthun and their sons and brothers … stood to the east of the altar with cymbals, psalteries and harps, and next to them 120 priests who blew trumpets’ (II Chronicles 5:12). (See Plates 2a and b.) Did anyone point out to him the similarity to his own extended family of versatile musicians participating in liturgical music-making? This was the very bedrock of Bach’s understanding of his future role as a church musician. Here, too, were the seeds of that preoccupation later in life with family trees and musical archives – his pride in the Bach genealogy and that ‘thirst for legitimacy of foundation, for empowering ancestry’ which, George Steiner tells us, inspires so much German thought and politics.4c
In celebrating his fiftieth year as a jubilee year, Sebastian Bach was following a biblical injunction (Leviticus 25:10–13) and cementing the parallels between his own family and those of the divinely ordained Levite musicians who served under David and Solomon led by Asaph as royal Capellmeister. Patriarchal values were traditionally held by the Bachs to be essential to their survival. This is the way the authors of the Nekrolog referred to the family’s respect for roots and locality: ‘It would be something to wonder at that such fine men should be so little known outside their fatherland if one did not bear in mind that these honourable Thuringians were so content with their fatherland and their standing that they would not venture far from it at all, even to go after their fortune.’5 We will find that this turns out to be an important point of difference between Sebastian Bach and his peer group (particularly Handel), who tended to measure status and success in terms of foreign travel leading to fruitful employment in a prestigious city or a royal court. In contrast, Bach’s pronounced sense of his roots and the idea of belonging to a distinct group (made up both of family and of broader cultural elements) linked by ‘some impalpable common gestalt’6 appears to anticipate the theories of Herder by some forty years.
It is in the light of this connection that the choice in the Ursprung of Veit (or Vitus) Bach as the family patriarch acquires its special significance. It is not as though this miller-baker from Wechmar (patron saint St Vitus) was the sole candidate, the only one to show musical talent; nor was he anything approaching the earliest of the identifiable Bachs. Parish records reveal a prolific colony of Bachs spread across Thuringia, beginning with a Günther Bache mentioned in 1372, many with the popular Christian name Johannes, or its diminutives Hans and Johann, and popping up frequently throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Were they disqualified from the honour of being the first of the apostolic line because they were mostly peasants or miners? And exactly which Veit are we talking about? Vitus was the patron saint of Wechmar in an area where several of the family branches were concentrated. There was one Veit Bach documented in 1519 as living near by in Presswitz; a second (1535–1610) left Thuringia for Frankfurt (Oder) and, later, Berlin; a third was born in Oberkatz in 1579; a fourth married Margareta Volstein in 1600, the same year another Vitus Bach departed for Mellrichstadt; while a sixth (profession unknown and for a long time assumed to be the original Veit Bach of the Ursprung) died in Wechmar in 1619. But none of these quite fitted the bill as the man described in the Ursprung:
Veit Bach, a white-bread baker in Hungary, was compelled to escape from Hungary in the sixteenth century because of his Lutheran faith. Hence, after converting his property into cash, as far as this could be done, he moved to Germany, and finding adequate security for his Lutheran religion in Thuringia, settled at Wechmar near Gotha, and continued his trade there. What gave him most delight was his little cithrinchend which he used to take with him to work and play while the mill was grinding [his flour]. A pretty noise the pair of them must have made! However, it taught him to keep time, and that is apparently how music first came into our family.7
This Veit stands out first (like Albrecht Dürer’s father) as a religious refugee during the violent Counter-Reformation backlash that led to the expulsion of Lutherans and Anabaptists from the Ho
ly Roman Empire in the mid sixteenth century. Secondly, he decides to move to Thuringia – Bach country par excellence – even if (as seems likely) he came from there in the first place and was merely repatriating himself and his immediate family as a Herkomling. Thirdly, though not yet a full-time professional, Veit’s passion for music is there for all to see. Taken together, these were compelling reasons for Sebastian Bach to nominate his great-great-grandfather as founder of the dynasty and as the exemplary family patriarch.
After Veit come three Johanns, all familiarised as Hans. The eldest, possibly Veit’s brother or cousin, is recorded as a city guardian in Wechmar in 1561; another, perhaps a nephew, starts as a carpenter and moves on to Würtemberg as a Spielmann (a minstrel-fiddler) and court jester of a certain respectability (judging by his two rather impressive portraits, one an etching, the other a copperplate engraving); while the third – Veit’s son – trains as a baker but is drawn to music, and he too becomes a Spielmann. The first of the Bachs to receive a basic grounding in music, he moves off the bottom rung of the professional ladder: as Stadtpfeifer (town piper, or a city wait) he is much in demand to deputise for town musicians all over Thuringia, before being obliged to take charge of his father’s mill for the last seven years of his life. This Hans and Veit’s other son – Lips, a carpet-maker – both appear as householders on the Wechmar register in 1577, after the death of their father. The first Bach to graduate to full-time musician is Caspar (born c. 1578), probably a nephew of Veit. As one of a trio of full-time town pipers, he lives as a Türmer, or ‘castle-pigeon’, first in Gotha and then, two years after the Thirty Years War broke out, in Arnstadt, ready to ‘strike the hours, look out day and night for riders and carriages, watch closely all roads on which more than two riders were approaching, and also report whenever he observed a fire nearby or in the distance’.8 Said to be the oldest town in Thuringia, Arnstadt was where the Bach family were most active for the next eighty years.
Next comes the first generation to experience genuine hardship as a result of the war. Caspar’s musically gifted son, Caspar junior, is sent to study abroad by Count Schwarzburg of Arnstadt, and then disappears from the records. Of his four brothers, three are full-time musicians and the fourth blind. They all die in the 1630s. Now comes a rallying point, a period in which all three of Veit’s grandsons – Johann, Christoph and Heinrich – manage to survive the trauma of the war years. Each goes on to found a significant dynastic branch. By mid century all of them have become full-time professional musicians, surviving on miserly salaries: Heinrich as organist, Johann and Christoph as heads of local town bands. In terms of the family history this is a critical generation, one that shows grit, frugality and adaptability when it comes to soaking up pressures of war, plague and near-starvation. Exceptionally determined, finding ingenious ways to collect fees due to them from private citizens to supplement their meagre salaries, they vary in their success at stifling the urge to complain. Even the long-suffering Heinrich is driven to point out to Count Schwarzburg (three years after his appointment as organist) that so far he has not received any remuneration for a whole year, having to ‘beg for it almost with tears’.9 Only after thirty-one years of service in Arnstadt does it occur to him to ask for his yearly entitlement to grain. One is reminded of the cri de cœur of an earlier composer, Michael Praetorius: ‘it is regrettable how very small are the salaries paid even in some illustrious cities to their masterly organists. These men can make but a wretched living and sometimes even curse their noble art and wish they had learnt how to be a cowherd or some humble artisan instead of an organist.’10 In fact this generation of Bachs does both: as smallholders they grow their own subsistence crops (though no potatoes as yet, as we saw in Chapter 2, this page), and as artisans they learn the skills to make the musical instruments that they play. Their choice of spouses is canny, Heinrich and Johann both marrying daughters of the town piper from Suhl. Heinrich’s six children and all three of Johann’s sons live to maturity, but it is not clear whether any of Christoph’s survive other than the ‘triple team of Bach brothers – George, Johann Christoph and Ambrosius’, all versatile musicians.
The family had now come through the most difficult times imaginable. Music to them was never a side issue – they clung to it for survival.e United in their commitment to music as a vocation, now was the time to consolidate their position – by versatility and tenacity. A more variegated pattern, in terms both of character and temperament and of career trajectory, begins to emerge with this fourth generation, all born towards the end of the war, in the 1640s. Of these, Johann’s three sons fared the worst. All three were town musicians in Erfurt, the eldest and youngest falling victims to the plague in 1682, while the middle son, Johann Aegidius, versatile like his father Johann, hung on to positions as organist and as a member of the town band. He survived until 1716, aged seventy-one. Consolidation, then, for the status-hungry Bachs but as yet no expansion in an area where there were probably more organists per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.
Christoph’s three sons survived the war but struggled to stay afloat, their lifespan similar to that of their father (who died aged forty-eight when they were in their teens). Georg supported himself initially as a schoolteacher before becoming a cantor – a significant step up the social ladder – in faraway Franconia. The identical twins, Ambrosius and Christoph, were only sixteen when both their parents died. A pathetic letter to Count Schwarzburg with a request to allow them and their handicapped sister to draw their father’s salary for the current quarter is the starting-point for a portrait of the twin brothers. Though granted, it was not enough to keep them in Arnstadt. Taken in by their uncle in Erfurt, the boys enrolled in the town band in which their father had once played. Even though they were so close and so alike (family legend insisted that their wives could not tell them apart), their paths soon diverged – Christoph gravitating back to Arnstadt (principally, it seems, as a violinist at court and as a town musician), Ambrosius moving on to Eisenach as head of the town-piper band and court trumpeter.
Christoph junior’s situation in Arnstadt was anything but stable: first, his annual salary, even less than his father’s, amounted to just thirty gulden plus a certain amount of grain and firewood. Then he got himself betrothed to the ‘wrong’ girl, and had to plead to the higher court of the consistory in Weimar before he was able to extricate himself. His name is also associated with the first documented case of anti-Bach feeling. The elderly town musician Heinrich Gräser began a bitter campaign against Christoph, piqued beyond endurance by what he saw as the Count’s favouritism towards him and the extended Bach family whenever music was required at special functions. He resented the Count’s habit of summoning other Bachs from Erfurt when there were perfectly capable musicians on hand in Arnstadt. Gräser’s attacks gradually turned nastier and more personal, targeting Christoph’s arrogance, his habit of ‘guzzling tobacco’, and his flashy and superficial fiddle-playing (like ‘swatting at flies’), at which point all the Arnstadt Bachs closed ranks with their Erfurt cousins, demanding that Gräser be made to make a public apology. In the end the old Count dismissed both Gräser and Christoph Bach in 1681, but the latter was reinstated a year later by the Count’s son, while Gräser was left empty-handed.11 This went to the heart of the resentment struggling musicians in the region felt towards the nepotism of the Bachs. An Erfurt citizen by the name of Tobias Sebelisky was once threatened with a five-thaler fine if he hired any musician to play at his daughter’s wedding who was not a member of the town band, as ‘no others but the Bachs … were privileged to perform’.12
The twins needed tact and skill in handling people. But, looking at the oil painting of Ambrosius, that is not the first quality that strikes one. Dressed in some kind of loose oriental cloak, he gazes out of his portrait like a prosperous brass-player – fat-chinned, full-nosed, lazy-eyed, stubborn and evidently fond of drink. But, as so often in the Bach family, there are two sides to the coin of his personality. A
mbrosius seems to have had the knack of identifying friends when and where they mattered most, one being Duke Johann Georg I of Eisenach, who made him an affiliated member of his court Capelle in 1671. He also saw to it that the town councillors who had appointed him Hausmann (head town piper) in October 1671 granted him and his family full citizenship once he had found the means to buy his own house in April 1674. Evidently they were dazzled not by his creative flair (he was not known to be a composer) but by his virtuosity as a performer, and had come to rely on him as a resourceful musician. ‘He shows such outstanding qualifications in his profession,’ they noted, ‘that he can perform both vocaliter and instrumentaliter in church and in honourable gatherings in a manner we cannot remember ever to have witnessed in this place before.’13 They were also impressed by his modesty – the way he ‘conducted himself in a quiet and Christian way agreeable to everybody’. This is one trait he did not pass on to his youngest son.
Portrait of Johann Ambrosius Bach (1645–95) by Johann David Herlicius, commissioned by the Eisenach Court as a mark of his high standing. (illustration credit 28)
Once again there is no escaping the male exclusivity in matters of family lore and social interaction. No more than a year after being appointed to the Erfurt compagnie of musicians in 1667, Ambrosius Bach had married Elisabeth Lämmerhirt, the daughter of an Erfurt municipal councillor. To the disappointment of early-twentieth-century biographers searching for a potent admixture of plebeian and patrician blood in Sebastian Bach’s immediate ancestry to account for his startling gifts, the Lämmer-hirts were arrivistes, newly prosperous furriers in Erfurt – though originally they stemmed from the same Thuringian peasant stock as the Bachs, with whom their fortunes were now intertwined. Like them they were migrants during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, in their case to Silesia, returning to Erfurt at the outset of the Thirty Years War. Elisabeth’s older half-sister Hedwig had married Johann Bach (Sebastian’s paternal great-uncle and the first composer of note in the family), and her brother Tobias and his wife were in due course to leave significant legacies to their nephew Sebastian. Yet, for all their marital and godparental ties to the Bachs and other professional musicians, the Lämmerhirts had previously sired no musicians themselves, save for one: the celebrated composer and theorist Johann Gottfried Walther (1684–1748), who shared a maternal grandfather with Sebastian and was later to become a close colleague when they were both employed in Weimar.f
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 10
