Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  It was the custom of the extended Bach family to gather together once a year. As Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, reported,

  The different members of this family had a very great attachment to each other. As it was impossible for them all to live in one place, they resolved at least to see each other once a year and fixed a certain day upon which they had all to appear at an appointed place. Even after the family had become much more numerous…they continued their annual meetings, which generally took place in Erfurt, Eisenach, or Arnstadt. Their amusements, during the time of their meeting, were entirely musical. As the company wholly consisted of cantors, organists, and town musicians, who had all to do with the Church, and as it was besides a general custom at the time to begin everything with Religion, the first thing they did, when they were assembled, was to sing a chorale. From this pious commencement they proceeded to drolleries which often made a very great contrast with it. For now they sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different. They called this kind of extemporary harmony a Quodlibet, and not only laughed heartily at it themselves, but excited an equally hearty and irresistible laughter in everybody that heard them.29

  Since there were no vacation periods except for harvest time in the fall, these yearly meetings by necessity had to cut into the school schedule. They could take place only on regular weekdays, because on Sundays and religious holidays the musicians all had their church obligations to meet. Therefore, travel to a family gathering in Arnstadt or Erfurt from Eisenach would easily have cost the schoolchildren two or three days of school.

  The annual tradition of family reunions may well have been confined to the generation of Hans Bach’s (2) sons and grandsons active in the geographic triangle Erfurt-Arnstadt-Eisenach. But the actual source for Forkel’s illuminating report can only be what Sebastian Bach himself later told one of his sons. It is more than likely that young Sebastian started accompanying his parents to these family gatherings at an early age, and that they had more or less ended when he reached mature adulthood. At any rate, his own and his siblings’ integration into the large family of professional musicians developed as a matter of course, probably in the same way that the young children learned to handle the tools and materials of the family trade. Considering their school commitments, the children would have had sufficient time to begin a disciplined study of the string and wind instruments that a town piper was expected to master. The weekly school schedule was arranged so that there were two “half day” teaching periods, the first session from 6 to 9 A.M. (in the summer, 7–10 in winter), Monday through Saturday, and the second session from 1 to 3 P.M., with no afternoon sessions on Wednesday or Saturday. For the select chorus musicus, the cantor assembled the students on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for an additional hour, 12–1.

  The musically inclined Sebastian also took the opportunity to spend time with his father’s cousin Christoph Bach (13), town organist and court harpsichordist in Eisenach. Sebastian would later refer to him in the family Genealogy as “the profound composer,” and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach would add “the great and expressive composer.” None of the older family members ever received comparable epithets, let alone a whole paragraph at the beginning of Sebastian Bach’s Obituary, where Christoph’s music is described as

  strong in the invention of beautiful ideas as well as in the expression of the meaning of the words. His writing was, so far as the taste of his day permitted, galant and singing as well as remarkably polyphonous. To the first point, a motet written seventy-odd years ago, in which, apart from other fine ideas, he had the courage to use the augmented sixth, may bear witness; and the second point is borne out just as remarkably by a church piece composed by him for 22 obbligato voices without the slightest violence to the purest harmony, as by the fact that both on the organ and on the clavier he never played in fewer than five real parts.30

  That the Eisenach Christoph is so clearly singled out points to the kind of role model he must have represented for Sebastian, who not only remembered what may have seemed to a child like sheer magic (“he never played in fewer than five real parts”), but who also later described Christoph’s music as beautiful, expressive, progressive, and well crafted. The work “for 22 obbligato voices” is the vocal concerto “Es erhub sich ein Streit,” a piece for St. Michael’s Day that Sebastian later performed in Leipzig. Scored for a double choir of 5 voices each, 4 trumpets, timpani, 3 violins, 3 violas, and continuo (violoncello, violone, and organ), the work is exemplary in its design and its musical interpretation of the text (Michael and his angels fight against the dragon; Revelation 12:7–12). The instrumental introduction (Sinfonia) for strings sounds like the sweetest, most beautifully melodious angels’ consort, while at the same time providing the necessary background against which the musical portrayal of a fateful battle unfolds. The opening words (“And there was war”) are sung in successive vocal entrances whose martial character is underscored by simple rhythmic and intervallic patterns typical of a military band of field trumpeters and drummers. But the instruments are only gradually introduced—the timpani begin and the trumpets follow—building up the angels’ fight with the dragon to an enormous climax at the words “and prevailed not,” when the music reaches its first effective cadence.

  According to the Obituary, this vocal concerto, which required the combined forces of the Latin school’s chorus musicus, the town music company, and the court capelle, originated before 1680. If Sebastian did not actually participate in a performance in Eisenach, there would have been numerous opportunities for him to hear and perform other music of his renowned relative. Because Ambrosius was not a composer, as far as we know, Johann Christoph Bach’s possibly latent influence takes on seminal importance. In the 1690s, he was the only figure of stature in Eisenach who could be identified with the creation of exciting new music, and he was also not afraid of daring something unusual (“he had the courage to use the augmented sixth”). Christoph seems to have fascinated the young boy through his compositions and, in particular, through his activities as organist.

  Christoph Bach’s significance as a keyboard virtuoso can hardly be judged on the basis of his surviving works for organ and harpsichord, which do not measure up in either quantity or quality to his vocal oeuvre.31 In fact, his particular strength may well have been improvisation, and he may not have been interested in committing the results of his extemporaneous performances to paper. Again, Sebastian’s father is not known to have been an expert keyboard player (although he certainly possessed at least basic skills), and so Ambrosius’s cousin Christoph must have provided a most natural source of inspiration for the art of organ and harpsichord playing. Sebastian’s good relations with some of Christoph’s sons even after their father’s death in 1703 speak for the closeness of his relationship with their father; for example, Sebastian’s Eisenach classmate Johann Friedrich, Christoph’s third son, would succeed him in 1708 in Mühlhausen.

  The town organist was responsible for the service music at three of Eisenach’s churches, St. George’s, St. Nicholas’s, and St. Anne’s, and also for the maintenance of the churches’ instruments. Both tasks kept him and his assistants busy, especially since the large organ at St. George’s was in a notoriously bad state of repair. The other two churches owned relatively new instruments, St. Nicholas’s dating from 1625 and St. Anne’s from 1665. The organ at St. George’s, by comparison, dated from 1576 and was enlarged and renovated three times before Johann Christoph Bach’s arrival in 1665. Further repairs were carried out then, but by 1678 deficiencies had cropped up again. In 1691, Christoph submitted plans for an entirely new instrument, but only in 1697 was a contract signed with organ builder Georg Christoph Sterzing of Ohrdruf, at the price of two thousand florins. Final design plans for an organ of unprecedented size (fifty-e
ight stops on four manuals and pedal) were prepared by Bach in 1698, and what amounted to the largest organ project ever undertaken in Thuringia began to be realized soon thereafter. The work had to proceed in stages, and Bach was pleased to report in 1701 that “the new organ more and more reaches the state of completion.” Sadly, he himself was never able to play the finished instrument, which was not dedicated until 1707, four years after his death.32

  All during the 1690s, Sterzing and Christoph Bach were more or less constantly busy fixing the old instrument with its three manuals (Oberwerk, Rückpositiv, Brustwerk) and pedal. This activity took place at a time when the boy Sebastian could well have been around to crawl behind the organ’s facade and observe what was happening inside; here he would have seen metal and wooden pipes, wind chests, trackers, bellows, and other components of a large-scale mechanical instrument whose complexity was unsurpassed by any other machine in the seventeenth century. Where else but here were the seeds sown for a lifelong fascination with organ design and technology? Moreover, Sterzing, who kept his workshop in Ohrdruf until 1697, remained accessible to Sebastian when he, too, lived there from 1695. A little over twenty years after Sebastian had left the Eisenach Latin school, in 1716, Sterzing and Johann Georg Schröter completed a new organ for the Augustinerkirche in Erfurt, and one of the two examiners brought in to test the instrument on behalf of the church consistory was the most respected organ expert in Thuringia at the time, the concertmaster and court organist to the duke of Saxe-Weimar, Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Street map of Ohrdruf in a drawing (c. 1710) showing the vicinity of St. Michael’s, with Lang Gasse (where Johann Christoph Bach lived), Schul Gasse (location of the Lyceum), the Ohra River, and Ehrenstein Castle (lower right corner).

  2

  Laying the Foundations

  OHRDRUF, 1695–1700

  IN THE CARE OF HIS OLDER BROTHER

  Johann Sebastian turned nine in March 1694, and shortly thereafter began in the quarta of the Latin school. But just about three weeks after Easter (which fell on April 11), his mother died at the age of fifty. We do not know the cause of her death, or whether it was preceded by illness. The plain entry in the death register (“May 3, 1694. Buried, Johann Ambrosius Bach’s wife—without fee”),1 the sole reference to the end of Elisabeth Bach’s life, does not even remotely hint at the gravity of the emotional responses or the wider implications of this catastrophic event for either Ambrosius Bach’s family in general or its youngest member in particular. Ambrosius himself, forty-nine years old, bereaved of his wife of twenty-six years and left with three young children, surely found himself in desperate straits. Just one year earlier he had lost his twin brother, Christoph (12), court and town musician in Arnstadt. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s annotation in the family Genealogy, based on what he must have heard from his father, gives a touching account of the close relationship between the twins:

  These twins are perhaps the only ones of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely. They looked so much alike that even their wives could not tell them apart. They were an object of wonder on the part of great gentlemen and everyone who saw them. Their speech, their way of thinking—everything was the same. In music, too, they were not to be told apart: they played alike and thought out their performances in the same way. If one fell ill the other did, too. In short, the one died soon after the other.2

  Ambrosius may well have believed that after the deaths of his brother and especially his wife, his own end would not be far away. Nevertheless, as other sorely afflicted members of the family had done before, he found a pragmatic way out of his misery. He remembered Barbara Margaretha, the thirty-five-year-old widow of his first cousin Johann Günther Bach (15) of Arnstadt and daughter of the Arnstadt burgomaster (mayor) Caspar Keul. Left pregnant with their daughter, Catharina Margaretha, Margaretha Bach had remarried in 1684. With her second husband, Jacobus Bartholomaei, deacon at the New Church in Arnstadt and her senior by almost thirty years, she had another daughter, Christina Maria, in September 1685. But Bartholomaei died only three years later, and Margaretha, widowed again, was now left with two young daughters.3 Ambrosius Bach, always keeping close ties with his many Arnstadt relatives, proposed and was accepted. The wedding ceremony was performed in Eisenach on November 27, 1694, though not in the church but at the home of the widower,4 then a common practice for remarriages. Johann Sebastian would follow the same tradition when he remarried in Cöthen.

  The family of Ambrosius Bach now included Margaretha’s two daughters, ages twelve and ten. In the meantime, Elisabeth Bach’s twelve-year-old step-grandson, Johann Nicolaus Bach, who had lived with Ambrosius’s family for many years and spent four years in the sexta,5 left Eisenach in 1694, probably soon after Elisabeth’s death.6 The timing of Ambrosius’s second marriage was such that he and his new wife with their two sets of children—Marie Salome, Johann Jacob, Johann Sebastian, Catharina Margaretha, and Christina Maria—could look forward to a Christmas season that would help draw the reconstituted family more closely together. Yet there was hardly any time to establish a normal life, as Ambrosius soon fell seriously ill and died on February 20, 1695—just two days before his fiftieth birthday and “twelve weeks and one day,” as Margaretha put it, into their marriage. We learn from the widow’s petition for a bounty that there were hefty expenses for medicine and drugs, suggesting that Ambrosius may have suffered from a protracted illness. He was buried four days after his death.7

  We can imagine how this sudden turn of events must have devastated Margaretha, who at age thirty-six had now lost three husbands within thirteen years, and the children, especially the two nine-year-olds, Sebastian and Christina Maria. There was little time for despair, however; among other things, the widow was responsible for keeping the town music company going for the next six months (the period in which a new director would be chosen); during this time, she received Ambrosius’s full salary, out of which she had to pay his two journeymen and two apprentices. She also received collegial help: her petition for a bounty, for example, was written on behalf of “the sorrowing widow and the poor fatherless orphans” by Andreas Christian Dedekind, cantor of St. George’s School.8 The petition reveals that Ambrosius’s employees, two journeymen and two apprentices “who could already pass for journeymen,” were able to fulfill the scheduled obligations for the town and church music. It also shows that the widow worried about the waning of musical talent in the Bach family, six of the nine grandsons of Hans Bach (see Table 1.1) having died between 1682 and 1695. Count Anton Günther of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt had supposedly asked the widow of Ambrosius’s twin, Christoph, “whether there was not another Bach available who would like to apply for [ Johann Christoph’s] post, for he should and must have a Bach again.” Margaretha’s comment in her petition sounds utterly hopeless: “But this was not to be, for the dear God has caused the springs of musical talent in the Bach family to run dry within the last few years.” Understandably, her own experience during the previous twelve years made the future look bleak and made her completely blind to the younger generation, among them the greatest talent ever produced by this extraordinary family—her stepson Sebastian.

  Within the span of a few months, Ambrosius Bach’s family broke apart, but the broader and well-tested family support structures immediately went into effect. Ambrosius’s considerations for needy members of his extended family were now reciprocated, to the benefit of his own surviving dependents. After selling the Eisenach house, Margaretha Bach seems to have moved with her two daughters back to her parental family in Arnstadt, where we lose their tracks. Marie Salome, eighteen years of age, left to join her mother’s relatives, the Lämmerhirts in Erfurt. And her two little brothers, Jacob and Sebastian, were welcomed into the household of their oldest brother, Johann Christoph, newly established organist at St. Michael’s in Ohrdruf. (For Sebastian, no alternative refuge existed, as his godfather Sebastian Nagel had died in 1687.) The estate of Ambrosius Bach was presumably distributed to his s
urviving children, who were principal heirs. The sale of the Eisenach house would have generated cash that all of them could use, the younger ones in particular for educational purposes. There was furniture to be disposed of, household goods, books, music, and especially musical instruments. Considering the usual extent of a town piper’s standard equipment, each of the three sons must have inherited a basic stock of string, wind, and keyboard instruments.

  Ambrosius’s eldest son Christoph had studied for three years (1686–89) with Johann Pachelbel in Erfurt and, while only seventeen and still a student, had briefly held the post of organist at St. Thomas’s in Erfurt (1688–89).9 There, according to an autobiographical note, he found “both the remuneration and the structure of the organ—the latter being my principal concern—to be poor.”10 He then left Erfurt for Arnstadt, where he had been called to assist his ailing uncle Heinrich (6), Ambrosius’s last surviving brother, in his various duties as organist of three churches, Our Lady’s Church and at the so-called Upper Church, which primarily served the court. Heinrich Bach, in Arnstadt since 1641, had been in poor health since the early 1680s; he was first assisted by his youngest son, Johann Günther (15), and then after Günther’s death by his son-in-law, Christoph Herthum, who in 1671 became Christoph’s godfather. So close connections were there, but Christoph could provide temporary help to his uncle for only a year—in 1690, he accepted the position as organist at St. Michael’s, the principal church in nearby Ohrdruf.