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Springs of Musical Talent and Lifelong Influences
EISENACH, 1685–1695
AMBROSIUS BACH AND HIS FAMILY
By an auspicious coincidence, Sebastian Nagel, town piper of Gotha and friend of Johann Ambrosius Bach, happened to be in Eisenach on the third weekend in March 1685. Whatever brought him to the town at this time, he most likely joined his fellow town piper Bach for a performance, probably one in need of reinforcement by outside musicians. They were used to helping each other out—it made sense for the musicians from the two towns, eighteen miles apart and seats of neighboring ducal courts, to team up for special occasions. Nagel and Bach, each in his capacities as town piper, director of town music, and member of the ducal capelle, the court’s performing ensemble, were in charge of such events.
Thus it was that on the day following Oculi Sunday, four weeks before Easter, Sebastian Nagel and his colleague Ambrosius Bach, together with the ducal forester Johann Georg Koch, arrayed themselves around the ancient baptismal font inside St. George’s, Eisenach’s main church. Magister Johann Christoph Zerbst functioned as the officiating minister at the baptism of the child born to Ambrosius and Maria Elisabeth Bach on the previous Saturday, March 21. Nagel was given the honor of holding the baby over the baptismal font because he was the one of the two godfathers from whom the boy was to receive his middle name—Sebastian.1
The short ceremony took place on a historic site at the foot of the Wartburg, the medieval hilltop castle overlooking Eisenach. The Wartburg had formed the setting in 1207 for the famous Tourney of Song, a historic highpoint of German minstrelsy, and three centuries later provided refuge to Martin Luther while he translated the Greek New Testament into German. The venerable St. George’s Church, an ancient structure whose origins date back to 1182, had witnessed the wedding in 1221 of Landgrave Louis IV of Thuringia and Elizabeth, daughter of Hungarian King Andrew II (later canonized as Saint Elizabeth, she led a simple life and personally tended the sick and the poor). The church had been substantially rebuilt in 1515, and Luther had preached there in the spring of 1521 on his way both to and from the Diet in Worms. No stranger to Eisenach, the city of his mother’s birth, Luther spent the years 1498 to 1501 at the Eisenach Latin school, the same school that the child being baptized was later to attend.
Perhaps the older among the little boy’s siblings observed the short christening ceremony. His mother, however, was excluded, for according to the strict customs prescribed by the Hebrew Bible and upheld by Lutherans of the time, she was not permitted to enter church until she had undergone a religious purification rite six weeks after childbirth. She may have participated in choosing the child’s godfathers and thereby also in selecting his name. But both parents must have known that no other member of the extended Thuringian family of musicians bore the name Sebastian. Had they been interested in a name more readily found among family members, Johann Georg Koch, the ducal forester, could have served in Nagel’s place: after all, “Georg” was the name of Ambrosius’s elder brother, cantor in Schweinfurt on the Main. Nevertheless, Ambrosius—perhaps proud of the singularity within the family of his own name—not only favored the unique “Sebastian,” he also chose a fellow musician as name-lending godfather.
It may not be mere coincidence that a generation later Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach selected similarly uncommon names for their two elder sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. The name Johann Sebastian, however, would recur in the family only twice. In 1713, Ambrosius Bach’s eldest son, Johann Christoph, named one of his children after his then already famous brother in Weimar, who acted as godfather at the baptism; but the baby died before he was two months old.2 Then in 1748, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach named his firstborn after his father, who at the time felt unfit to travel from Leipzig to Berlin for the baptism. Johann Sebastian Bach, Jr., not a musician but a gifted draftsman and painter of landscapes whose artistry was greatly admired by his contemporaries, died in 1778 in Rome at the age of twenty-nine.3 Thus, without any action on his part, the Eisenach Johann Sebastian acquired an unmistakable and unambiguous name identification.
If anything can be said for certain about what the parents of the first Johann Sebastian in the Bach family expected of their son, it is that he would become a musician. In the Thuringian towns of the region stretching from Erfurt to Eisenach, the family name Bach had become nearly synonymous with “musician.” Indeed, when a vacancy occurred in 1693 at the Arnstadt court capelle, the count urgently called for “a Bach.”4 Although Johann Sebastian’s extraordinarily individual musical personality and his future singular stature could have been neither expected nor predicted, the fear expressed later by his stepmother that the springs of musical talent in the family might run dry was un-warranted. It was simply assumed that the background, working conditions, and living circumstances of a family of professional musicians would exert an inescapable and deep influence on all of its newborn members.
Before coming to Eisenach in 1671 as director of town music, Johann Ambrosius Bach had been town piper in Arnstadt and then, from April 1667, a violinist in the town music company (an ensemble of professional musicians employed by the town council) of his native Erfurt. With its eighteen thousand inhabitants, Erfurt was by far Thuringia’s largest city and the region’s historical, cultural, educational, and commercial center. Politically part of the electoral archbishopric of Mainz, Erfurt also represented a bi-confessional entity (about 20 percent Roman Catholic) within the traditional Lutheran heartland. (For a map showing places of Bach’s activities, see Appendix 2.)
In the sixteenth century, the ancient region of Thuringia, ruled by the Ernestine branch of the Saxon house of Wettin, split into several duchies (SaxeAltenburg, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Gotha, etc.), while the Albertine (electoral) section of Saxony with its capital Dresden remained intact as a political-geographical unit. Situated within the Ernestine duchies—in addition to the enclave of Erfurt and the free imperial city of Mühlhausen, two metropolitan areas—were several independent principalities ruled primarily by the counts of Schwarzburg (Arnstadt, Rudolstadt, and Sondershausen), Hohenlohe-Gleichen (Ohrdruf), and Reuss (Gera, Greiz). One of the most densely populated areas in Europe, dotted with countless small towns in a politically fractured landscape, Thuringia developed into an economically and culturally vigorous region soon after the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648. Some of the most important intersections of east-west and north-south continental trade routes made the area particularly susceptible to foreign influences—in art and architecture, most notably from Italian and French traditions. Here, as almost nowhere else to such an extent, the manifold European trends met and merged, generating a unique climate that also paved the way for the early eighteenth-century concept of a mixed style in music.
Ambrosius was born in Erfurt on February 22, 1645, son of Christoph Bach (no. 5 in Table 1.1) and Maria Magdalena, née Grabler. Christoph Bach served from 1642 to 1654 as town musician in Erfurt and thereafter as town and court musician in Arnstadt, eleven miles away. Ambrosius and his twin brother, Christoph (12), received their musical training in Arnstadt, first with their father and after his death in 1661 with their father’s younger brother Heinrich (6). After spending the customary five years as apprentice and two years as journeyman in Arnstadt, Ambrosius was appointed to a post in the Erfurt town music company vacated by his cousin Johann Christian (7), who in 1667 was promoted to the band’s directorship. In Erfurt, Ambrosius was also given the opportunity to work with another member of the town music company, his father’s older brother Johann (4), organist at the Prediger Church and the first distinguished musician and composer in the family. This made Ambrosius the only one among nine grandsons of Hans Bach (2) to learn from and work with all three sons of the family’s first professional musician.
On April 8, 1668, a year after joining the Erfurt town music company, Ambrosius Bach married Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of t
he late Valentin Lämmerhirt, an affluent furrier and a longtime and influential town council member in Erfurt. Elisabeth’s much older stepsister Hedwig had already provided a family link: in 1638, she had married Johann Bach (4) and borne three musical sons, Christian (7), Aegidius (8), and Nicolaus (9). A generation later, Johann Sebastian Bach’s older sister Marie Salome would marry the Erfurt master furrier and business partner of the Lämmerhirts, Johann Andreas Wiegand, thereby affirming relations between the Bach family and the Erfurt bourgeoisie—connections that secured a Bach dominance in the Erfurt musical scene for nearly a century.5 The stage set by the Johann Bach / Valentin Lämmerhirt connection with the town council led to a complete reorganization of the Erfurt town music company in the 1660s: Johann Bach not only employed all three of his own sons, he also arranged for the appointments of his brother’s twins, Christoph and Ambrosius. Christoph came first in 1666, and Ambrosius followed a few months later, receiving his appointment on April 12, 1667, just one day after his cousin Johann Christian (7) became director of the town music company.
Connections played a role in Ambrosius Bach’s next appointment as well. The town piper of Eisenach, Christoph Schmidt, died in 1670, creating a vacancy there. His daughter Margaretha was married to Johann Christian Bach (7) of Erfurt, Ambrosius’s cousin, who had apprenticed with Schmidt in Eisenach. Moreover, Christian Bach’s brother Johann Aegidius (8) was married to another Schmidt daughter. On top of that, another of Ambrosius’s cousins, Johann Christoph (13), had served since 1665 as town organist and later also as a member of the court capelle in Eisenach. In short, the connections could hardly have been better, and after a pro forma audition in Eisenach on October 12, 1671, Ambrosius Bach was hired on the spot. An honorarium and expenses, as well as two days’ meals and beer, were provided “for the new town piper and the musicians he had with him.”6 Ambrosius had auditioned with four consorts, and it seems that he brought along to his new job four assistants—three apprentices and one journeyman was a typical complement. His appointment to the directorship of the Eisenach town music company attests to the talents of the twenty-six-year-old musician, as does his initial salary: whereas his predecessor Schmidt had for decades been paid a salary of 27 florins 7 groschen 8 pfennigs, and a housing supplement of 8 florins, Ambrosius’s starting salary jumped to 40 florins 4 groschen 8 pfennigs, and a housing supplement of 10 florins. (For a table of money and living costs in Bach’s time, see Appendix 3.) He also earned a considerable supplementary income—more than twice his salary—from various sources, including the court capelle.
TABLE 1.1. The “Wechmar Bach” Pedigree
From the very beginning, Ambrosius Bach’s musical services to the town and the court were highly appreciated, as they continued to be throughout his tenure. In fact, no Eisenach musician in the entire seventeenth century received as much praise as Ambrosius did. References to his extraordinary kind of music making appear early on. One document, which exempts him from the local brewery tax, not only points to his Christian virtues and moral conduct but praises “his particular professional qualifications, in that he can come up with vocal and instrumental music for worship service and for honorable assemblies with persons of higher and lower ranks in such a way that we cannot remember having ever experienced anything like it in this place.”7 Similarly, a town chronicler’s report displays unparalleled enthusiasm: “In 1672 at Easter the new town piper made music with organ, violins, voices, trumpets and military drums, as had never before been done by any cantor or town musician as long as Eisenach stood.”8 The event referred to here, a festive Easter service at St. George’s, actually marked the auspicious beginning of a new era in Eisenach’s history. That spring, Duke Johann Georg I of Saxe-Eisenach moved his residence permanently from Marksuhl in the countryside to Eisenach, reestablished the old town as the capital of an independent principality.
In October 1671, Ambrosius and Elisabeth Bach moved from Erfurt (where they had an apartment in Johann Bach’s house, “The Silver Pocket,” at Junkersand 1) to Eisenach with their four-month-old son, Johann Christoph. He was their second child; Johann Rudolf, the firstborn, had died before he was half a year old. Six children were born later in Eisenach: Johann Balthasar, Johannes Jonas, Maria Salome, Johanna Juditha, Johann Jacob, and Johann Sebastian (see Table 1.2).9 Since Johannes Jonas died at the age of ten in 1685—just about two months after Johann Sebastian’s birth—and Johanna Juditha one year later at age six, Sebastian grew up with four siblings. But he rarely saw the oldest of them, Christoph, who left Eisenach in 1686 when he was fifteen in order to study with Johann Pachelbel in Erfurt. Moreover, Balthasar, who in 1688 became an apprentice to his father, died at the age of eighteen. When the six-year-old Sebastian attended his brother’s burial in 1691, it was his first conscious encounter with a death within his close circle, a situation he would eventually be exposed to much sooner, more often, and more seriously than many. In fact, from age six, Sebastian lived with his parents, one sister, Salome, and one brother, Jacob, in a family of sadly diminished and still diminishing size. He would survive all of his siblings by a considerable margin: his oldest brother died in 1721 as organist and schoolteacher in Ohrdruf, his brother Jacob a year later as court musician in Stockholm, and his sister Salome Wiegand in 1728 in Erfurt.
In the absence of public social and welfare programs, family and self-reliance played a major role in managing all kinds of hardships, and through several generations the extended Bach family was exemplary in this respect. When Ambrosius moved from Erfurt to Eisenach, he took along his youngest sister, Dorothea Maria, then nineteen and in need of intensive care because she was seriously handicapped, both physically and mentally.10 The family was also joined by Eva Barbara Lämmerhirt, Elisabeth Bach’s widowed mother, who left her Erfurt home perhaps in order to provide a helping hand to her daughter and her growing family, but perhaps also because she needed help herself. She died just one year after the move, in 1673, and Dorothea Maria did not live much longer either; she was buried in 1679. Three years later, two of Ambrosius’s cousins, Christian (7) and Nicolaus (9), fell victim to the plague that swept through Erfurt in 1682–83 and diminished the city’s population by almost half; their colleague and friend Johann Pachelbel lost his wife and baby son as well. To escape the plague, Christian’s son Johann Jacob (b. 1668) moved to Eisenach and became an apprentice and then journeyman to Ambrosius. He remained with his uncle for almost ten years, but died of an unknown cause in 1692—for young Sebastian, the second death at home within a year.11 From July 1683, Ambrosius and Elisabeth Bach also took care of the orphaned one-year-old Johann Nicolaus, who was born shortly after his father, Nicolaus (9), had died of the plague in July 1682. When the boy’s mother died almost exactly a year later, it fell to Elisabeth to provide a home for her stepsister’s grandson. Johann Nicolaus later went to school together with his younger cousin Sebastian and left Eisenach for Erfurt only after Elisabeth Bach’s death in 1694.12
TABLE 1.2. Maria Elisabeth and Johann Ambrosius Bach’s Children
1. Johann Rudolf
baptized Erfurt, January 19, 1670; died Erfurt, July 17, 1670 (age 6 months)
2. Johann Christoph
bapt. Erfurt, June 18, 1671; d. Ohrdruf, February 22, 1721 (age 49)
3. Johann Balthasar
bapt. Eisenach, March 6, 1673; d. Eisenach, April 5, 1691 (age 18)
4. Johannes Jonas
bapt. Eisenach, February 2, 1675; d. Eisenach, May 22, 1685 (age 10)
5. Marie Salome
bapt. Eisenach, May 27, 1677; d. Erfurt, December 27, 1728 (age 51)
6. Johanna Juditha
bapt. Eisenach, January 28, 1680; d. Eisenach, May 3, 1686 (age 6)
7. Johann Jacob
bapt. Eisenach, February 11, 1682; d. Stockholm, April 16, 1722 (age 40)
8. Johann Sebastian
born Eisenach, March 21, 1685; d. Leipzig, July 28, 1750 (age 65)
The Eisenach Bachs’ house was always full, populated not only
with children and relatives, but also with the apprentices. This meant that the house ordinarily had to accommodate three additional people between fifteen and twenty years of age, assuming that the fourth of the town piper’s consorts was a journeyman who provided his own accommodation. Clearly, the need for adequate living quarters for the director of the town band cannot be underestimated. At first, Ambrosius rented an apartment in the house of the ducal head forester, Balthasar Schneider, near the Frauenplan (site of today’s Ritterstrasse 11). After Ambrosius and his family acquired citizenship in Eisenach in 1674, they purchased a home. (This house, however, in which Sebastian was born, no longer stands.)13 Situated at the Fleischgasse (the site of today’s Lutherstrasse 35) in the center of town, the house was registered in Ambrosius Bach’s name from 1675 to 1695. Among his later neighbors on the same street were his cousin Johann Christoph Bach (13) and the cantor Andreas Christian Dedekind. When Ambrosius purchased the house, he probably used funds left by his mother-in-law, Eva Barbara Lämmerhirt. Since the Lämmerhirts ran a successful fur business in Erfurt (from which Johann Sebastian later received a generous inheritance), town councillor Valentin Lämmerhirt’s widow had not been left without means; before joining her daughter’s household in Eisenach, she had sold her Erfurt house to Johann Bach for 120 florins.14 In general, there was no serious financial trouble in Ambrosius Bach’s household—quite the opposite of the rather desperate economic situation in which, for example, his Eisenach cousin and companion, the town organist Johann Christoph (13), constantly found himself.15
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