Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  The first in a string of coffee-houses in Leipzig opened in 1694 in Schlaffs Haus, a property next to the Elector’s temporary residence in the Marktplatz, although some claim it was pipped to the post nine years earlier by a rival establishment known as Zum Kaffeebaum, which is still open for custom today. Over the entrance to Zum Kaffeebaum there is sculpture of a cupid handing a coffee cup to a languid recipient, a galant Leipzig burgher to the waist and below that something of a Turk. Inside at one time there was a painting of ‘an oriental figure with all imaginable accessories … said to have been a gift from August the Strong, who in 1694 had enjoyed the good coffee (or, as others would have it, the hostess)’.26 These exotic trappings and the brown beverage’s reputation as an aphrodisiac ensured that from then on the city’s consumption of coffee increased dramatically, explaining why several of its taverns were converted into coffee-houses. Identified as prime sites for prostitutes to ‘establish’ themselves, especially at the time of the fairs, the council twice (in 1697 and 1704) passed an ordinance banning all women from entering coffee-houses either for work or to consume coffee on the premises. Patently these had little effect, for a lexicon of the time mentions ‘coffee-trollops’ (Caffe-Menscher) among the regular clientele: ‘questionable and dissolute women who serve men in coffee-houses and render them all desired services’.27 No doubt this was the kind of thing Julio Bernhard von Rohr had in mind when advising his young cavaliers to be on their guard and only to frequent coffee-houses in large towns that stand ‘in guter Reputation’.28

  Despite the calls for close regulation and even an electoral ban on new establishments, by 1725 seven more coffee-houses had opened their doors.29 The frontispiece of a popular local treatise by Daniel Duncan, On the Misuse of Hot and Fiery Food and Drinks (1707), shows how upper-class women, in defiant solidarity, formed ‘coffee-circles’ in their own homes so as to ensure unimpeded enjoyment of the bever-age.30 Duncan then explains that since this sex ‘does not have as much to do, [coffee] serves in place of an activity, and women drown their cares in coffee just as we drown ours in wine.’31 To make sure everyone has got the message, Duncan then has his women say: ‘Even if we all drink ourselves into the grave, / it’ll still be the fashionable way to behave’ (Sauffen wir uns gleich zu Tode, / so geschiehts doch nach der Mode). In his Universal-Lexicon, Zedler claimed that coffee makes the mind subtler, increases (temporary) vigour and ‘can drive … the fog from [your head]’. Yet he too points to the potential dangers: it can over-stimulate the senses, weaken the body and create a jaundiced look. Taken to excess, it leads to impotence in men, miscarriage in women and diminished mutual sexual attraction. In London, the damage caused by excessive consumption of cakes and ale was harped upon by the intolerant and zealous high Puritans of Shakespeare’s day; so in Bach’s Leipzig, Pietist preachers considered overdosing on coffee just as reprehensible as the ‘misuse of music’ in church. The twin vices of coffee and church music fuelled the Pietists’ recoil from the overindulgence prevalent in the secular culture (see this page).

  Leipzigers’ taste for coffee – now at least as old as Bach himself and threatening to become one of the most talked about foibles of its high society – was a theme ripe for satirical treatment. Bach’s so-called Coffee Cantata (BWV 211) dates from 1734 – just a few months after a professor of botany at the university had submitted a dissertation on the dangers of excessive coffee-drinking and been promoted as a result. Bach’s chosen librettist was Picander, who had provided him with the text of the Matthew Passion (see Chapter 11) and countless church cantatas; he was on hand with a ready-made text already set to music by at least two other composers. One of Picander’s spoken comedies, Die Weiberprobe, published in 1726 and ‘designed to uplift and entertain the spirit’, introduces two women: Frau Nillhornin (‘Mrs Hippo’) declares she would rather cut off her finger than miss her coffee; and Frau Ohnesafftin (‘Mrs Dried-Old-Prune’) warns, ‘If I must pass a day without coffee, you shall have a corpse on your hands by evening.’32 Here are the models for young Liesgen (or perhaps her aunts), intent in the Coffee Cantata on defying the empty threats of her grumpy old codger of a father, Schlendrian (literally ‘lazy bones’). It was an ideal piece for Bach to perform with his collegium musicum at their usual concert venue, and for Herr Zimmermann it was obviously excellent publicity. No need for gods dressed up as Baroque royalty or cardboard cut-outs of shepherds and shepherdesses: the domestic peccadilloes and irritations of those around him could provide Bach with all the material he needed. First, get the audience to pay attention – not via an overture but by a direct appeal in recitative: ‘Be quiet, stop chattering, and listen to what’s about to happen.’ As a harassed parent there was nothing he did not know about the vexations of living (and of having to compose) in a house full of querulous children and with a rowdy boys’ dormitory overhead or in the next room: the chains of rotating semi-quavers that introduce Schlendrian’s bear-like grumbling could almost be the germs of his own musical ideas locked in enforced routine and desperate to break free. Even the cadences on Hudelei – an onomatopoeic word that combines ‘annoyance’ with ‘work badly done’ (or, in slang, ‘masturbation’) – spin off in random directions.

  For a composer practised at sliding barbed references and covert satirical pen-portraits of his clerical tormentors into his church cantatas, this was a singularly good-humoured portrayal. The father’s other aria, ‘Mädchen, die von harten Sinnen’ (‘Stubborn girls aren’t easily won over’), shows how well Bach could bridge the worlds of church and café: with its twists and turns, the angular ostinato bass line is remarkably similar to the one he had composed in BWV 3/iii that paints ‘Hell’s anguish and torment’. It gains a comic edge as a result of its sexual innuendo – a temptation to a girl even stronger than her weakness for coffee. But then, from the pretty and disarming music he allots to Liesgen, you feel Bach to be on her side. In the first of her two arias he contrives an ambivalence of verbal stress and metre wavering between and , as though she and her accompanying flute, with their heads high in the clouds, are hankering (like Jonathan Swift and his Vanessa) after the sweetness of something beyond mere coffee. It seems that in some way Bach was recalling the rich subtext and multiple double entendres of his cousin Johann Christoph’s wedding cantata, Meine Freundin, du bist schön, discussed in Chapter 3.

  We fully expect the cantata to end once the father Schlendrian has finally trapped his daughter into giving up her addiction by threatening to forbid her to marry. And that is indeed where Picander’s published text (1732) finishes – so far, so typical of the male view of women of the time. But that is not what Bach had in mind. He begins composing the ninth strophe on two separate bifolios, as though pointing it in another, rather more interesting direction: in place of a banal truce between father and daughter in a final duet, we have instead the return of the narrator – an invention of Bach’s, not Picander’s. It is possible that Bach initially planned to set just Picander’s dialogue for Liesgen and Schlendrian, and only later decided that an opening recitative was necessary to establish the scene and quell the coffee-drinkers. But from that point on he was pretty well also committed to a final recitative and a tutti for all three voices telling the audience that, while old Schlendrian is on the prowl looking for a suitable son-in-law, Liesgen has put it about in town that she will insist on a ‘pre-nup’ – one that guarantees her the right to drink coffee whenever she wants. The original satire is thus turned on its head. The tenth stanza brings about a sort of reconciliation – a compromise between a conventional outcome and a more radical one for this domestic comedy. In chorus, all three voices (father, daughter and narrator) agree: ‘The cat will not leave off chasing mice, maidens will remain coffee-sisters.’ They recall that both the mother and grandmother have been coffee addicts – so why should they worry about the daughter? This chimes with the proverb of the day: ‘A good coffee must be as hot as the kisses of a girl on the first day, as sweet as her love on the third day, and as black
as her mother’s curses when she finds out about it.’i

  Stepping back for a moment, we can begin to assess what kind of authority was conferred on Bach as a performer–composer by where he and his performers were physically placed at successive junctures in his working life. How might he have presented himself – as organist, harpsichordist and conductor – to his listeners across his vast repertory? All through his career the physical location for his liturgical and public music-making varied considerably. It was one thing for him to play harpsichord while directing hand-picked colleagues in the intimate secular drawing-room setting of the Spiegelsaal at the Cöthen Court, and quite another to perform in a church setting, either as organist or as cantor. Visibility had a considerable bearing on how his music was received. The layout of churches might vary from the barn-like Neukirche in Arnstadt, where in his first post as organist he was in full view and had the whole packed church gazing up at him, to the cramped musicians’ gallery high up in the private chapel of the dukes of Weimar cut in the ceiling, where he and his small ensemble were out of sight to the Duke and his guests. This created a vertical sound perspective in which the music floated downwards as though from celestial spheres – a metaphor for the unfathomable perfection of God-directed music and an explanation of the chapel’s name, Weg zur Himmelsburg (‘the path to the heavenly citadel’).j (See Plate 8.)

  At the opposite extreme, watching at close quarters from up in the organ loft as Bach performed, the twelve-year-old Landgrave of Kassel was so transfixed by the miraculous way ‘he ran over the pedals … as if his feet had wings, making the organ resound with such fullness, and so penetrate the ears of those present like a thunderbolt … that he drew a ring with a precious stone from his finger and gave it to Bach as soon as the sound had died away’.33 Public response to Bach’s organ-playing in cities such as Dresden, Hamburg, Halle and Potsdam and at all stages in his career seems to have been almost as enthusiastic. In Bach’s Feet, David Yearsley suggests that Bach was fully aware of the powerful visual spectacle of his extravagant mastery as organist and the impact his playing had on bystanders – the wonderful machinery up there, with him busy doing fiendishly difficult and intricate manoeuvres: ‘The feeling of power beyond human scale, enjoyed by all organists at the controls of these giant constructions, is magnified by the visual impression of these stolen, neck-straining views: playing with feet and hands was an often aerobic activity that required a good deal of stretching, swivelling, and balancing … a physical feat unparalleled in other modes of music-making.’34 Indeed, it became the stuff of legend. Ernst Ludwig Gerber, whose father had studied with Bach in Leipzig, marvelled at his superhuman technique:

  On the pedals his feet had to imitate with perfect accuracy every theme, every passage that his hands had played. No appoggiatura, no mordent, no short trill was suffered to be lacking or even to meet the ear in less clean and rounded form. He used to make long double trills with both feet, while his hands were anything but idle.35

  None of this was on regular display to music-lovers in Leipzig, where Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life and where such authority might have given him a boost when he was locked in dispute with his employers. It may have been his reputation as an organ virtuoso that qualified him for the post there as cantor, but it was somebody else’s job to play and impress with the organ in church. Leipzig rarely heard Bach, the supreme organist of the day, or saw him rule over ‘the most responsive, all-encompassing, powerful, and advanced musical technology … [the way] he could impress distant listeners with both his fantastical playing and his polyphonic brilliance’.36 Directing a choir and orchestra from the west galleries of the two main churches in Leipzig, out of sight of three quarters of the congregation unless they strained their necks, was quite a different proposition. Bach as conductor may have exerted a complete and hyperactive command of his performing ensembles (as witnessed by headmaster Gesner in the last chapter (this page) as well as by those wealthy citizens and council members with their reserved pews and boxes close to the choir gallery); but it is small wonder that in terms of public perception less authority (and far less glamour) was conferred on Bach in his roles of choir-master and conductor than on Bach the virtuoso organist.

  The church in Bach’s day was still the focal point of Leipzig society. For its citizens it was a meeting place: with God, but also with their neighbour, week in, week out. The three decades following the Thirty Years War had seen a sharp increase in church attendance. Leipzig’s two main churches, the Thomaskirche and the Nikolaikirche, had become steadily more crowded on Sundays, and in 1694 the town council authorised the renovation of two dilapidated churches. The deconsecrated Franciscan Barfüsserkirche was reopened for Lutheran use as the Neukirche in 1699 and soon became the centre for avant garde church music, followed a decade later by the re-modelling of the Paulinerkirche. The Georgenkirche was built around the same time, and finally the fifteenth-century Petrikirche was extended in 1712. By now Leipzig, as a church ordinance put it, had become a ‘city of churches’37 in which there were twenty-two Lutheran services with sermons to choose from every week, with new midweek Communion services and even more prayer services. Doctrinal teaching each Sunday was given from ‘six pulpits in six separate houses of God’,38 with plenty of variety in the fare on offer in the two largest churches and the smaller more peripheral ones; the university church occupied yet another niche and provided services slanted towards different sectors of society.39 There was protracted power play between the consistory and the council over pretty well everything: disputes arose about major building works, the precise shape and content of the different liturgies, the nature of the congregation whom they were supposed to be addressing, right down to the choice of hymns and how best to conduct catechism sessions. To this already complicated situation, periodic interventions by the electoral authorities in Dresden added a further layer of conflict – a sign that secular categories of status, gender and property had already spilt over into the religious arena.

  The main service, or Hauptgottesdienst, which alternated Sunday by Sunday between the Thomaskirche (the church favoured by the court party) and the Nikolaikirche (the Estates Party’s preferred church), constituted the principal religious and social event of the week, beginning at 7 a.m. and lasting up to four hours. Even today the phenomenon of around 9,000 of the urban community (from a total population of circa 30,000) convening on a Sunday at the Hauptgottesdienst in one of the two main city churches – and, once full, spilling over into the minor churches or obliged to attend later services – would have the power to impress us. Throughout the year (except during Lent and Advent) it provided Bach with the largest audiences he was ever to address – up to 2,500 congregants seated in pews with additional seats and standing room for a further 500, and ‘common women’ seated on the stairways that led up to the balconies or galleries.k Yet how many people were actually present in church when the moment came for the cantata to be performed? As we shall soon see, this was the moment for which many worshippers timed their entrance with theatrical panache.

  The two main churches in Leipzig were laid out like opera-theatres, according to social rank. The more prestigious seats (individual Stühle or Stände, equipped with locks and keys) were arranged in rectangular blocks, as opposed to the simpler benches (Bänke). Right up to the 1760s they were handed down as debenture seats to successive generations of a family by the rules of secular inheritance (just as they do today in the major Italian opera houses, in London’s Royal Albert Hall and at Wimbledon), and could be rented out or sold for considerable sums of money. There was separation by class, profession and gender – with women on the ground floor, the most coveted seats being closest to the preacher in his pulpit, and the men mostly in the balconies (exactly the opposite to synagogues). In this way the leading citizens and polite families were split up and scattered around the church; for hoi polloi there was standing room only at the back.

  Though technically the property of t
he church, pews were valued as status symbols – home ownership was a prerequisite to ‘holding’ a pew, and there were elaborate regulations surrounding the passing of title from one holder to the next. From the 1660s areas traditionally kept for the unpropertied classes were gradually appropriated by newly powerful city councillors, who enclosed groups of already existing pews and constructed their own private Capellen, often with separate entrances, so that they and their families could sit together without having to interact with ordinary parishioners – in violation of the Lutheran injunction to worship God in the company of one’s neighbour. Far from constituting a single meeting of the faithful, a priesthood of all believers in which everybody is spiritually equal before God, the interior design of the two main churches and the social stratification of the seating arrangements operated directly against the notion of a united Lutheran congregation brought together for the sole purpose of communal worship. Over thirty Capellen were built in each of the main churches, some furnished with their private libraries and stoves and acting almost as second homes to members of the social elite. Adam Bernd describes how prominent citizens could disrupt a sermon by talking at the tops of their voices or even laughing out loud from their secluded positions in their Capellen. Presumably they did the same during the performance of the cantata. One female character in Gottsched’s Die vernünfftigen Tadlerinnen (The Reasonable Tatleresses) (1725) cattily comments about another, ‘I doubt whether she would even go to church if she did not have her own Capelle in which she could take shelter from the vulgar odours of the common people by closing the windows.’40