Almost to the day three years earlier, Maria Barbara had suffered the loss of her mother, Catharina Bach, widow of the Gehren organist, Michael. Maria Barbara and her older sisters, Friedelena Margaretha and Barbara Catharina—all well beyond school age—moved to Arnstadt, where they joined the households of their mother’s sisters. Maria Barbara, who had turned twenty the day after her mother’s burial, moved in with her godfather, burgomaster Feldhaus, and his wife Margarethe, her mother’s twin sister and daughter of Johann Wedemann, town scribe in Arnstadt until his death in 1684. The sisters Elisabethand Catharina Wedemann had married brothers, Christoph (13) and Michael (14), sons of the town and court organist Heinrich Bach (6) (see Table 4.3).
By the time of the move, in late 1704, the well-to-do Feldhaus had enough space for his orphaned nieces in the two houses he owned, one called Steinhaus (Stone House) and the other Güldene Krone (Golden Crown). He may even have provided space for Johann Sebastian: after Bach’s departure for Mühlhausen, Feldhaus collected the sum of 30 talers, the amount that the New Church organist received as an annual salary supplement for room and board, suggesting that the burgomaster had provided “food, bed, and room” for Bach.38 Furthermore, Barbara Catharina Bach’s testimony in the Geyersbach affair that she and her cousin Sebastian had come from organist Christoph Herthum’s apartment in Neideck Castle suggests that they were crossing the market square on the way to their common home. Altogether, the three Michael Bach daughters not only added to the dense concentration of Bach family members in Arnstadt, they also reconnected Sebastian with the Bach-Wedemann branch of the family. For in Eisenach, he had grown up with the children his uncle Christoph Bach had with Elisabeth Wedemann, with most of whom he maintained a lifelong contact. Now his own future wife was a Wedemann descendant as well, and the Bach-Wedemann family network would continue to benefit him.
TABLE 4.3. Daughters of the Arnstadt Town Scribe Johann Wedemann (1611–1684) and Their Marriages
Maria Elisabeth
November 26, 1667
Johann Christoph Bach, organist in Eisenach
Catharina
January 13, 1675
Johann Michael Bach, organist in Gehren
Margarethea
February 18, 1679
Martin Feldhaus,a merchant and burgomaster in Arnstadt
Susanna Barbara
1680
Johann Gottfried Bellstedt, assistant town scribe in Arnstadt
Regina
June 5, 1708
Johann Lorenz Stauber, parson in Dornheim
The fourth Wedemann daughter, Susanna Barbara, had married the Arnstadt town scribe, Johann Gottfried Bellstedt (assistant scribe prior to Wedemann’s death), whose brother Johann Hermann held the same position in Mühlhausen and would eventually work out a contract with the new organist. Before being “entrusted with this commission,”39 Hermann Bellstedt would have been the person to notify the Arnstadt clan that Mühlhausen was seeking an organist, knowing as he did that the organist of the New Church in Arnstadt was actively job hunting. Finally, Regina, the youngest of the Wedemann daughters, can be linked to the wedding of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach in Dornheim through the widowed parson Johann Lorenz Stauber, who united the couple at St. Bartholomaeus’s Church there in October 1707. Less than eight months later, Regina Wedemann and Parson Stauber followed suit, taking their own marriage vows.
The Dornheim wedding, which took place almost four months after Bach had relocated to Mühlhausen, closed a chapter of his life that had been so crucial for the young musician’s development and emancipation. But he had clearly outgrown Arnstadt, the quintessential Bach-family town, and leaving would allow him to shake off some of the family chains. The choice of holding the wedding ceremony in Dornheim rather than in Arnstadt might, at first glance, suggest that Bach’s problems with the Arnstadt consistory were persisting, but in fact Dornheim fell under its jurisdiction as well. Moreover, in consideration of Bach’s years of service to the New Church, the usual fees for the wedding ceremony there were remitted.40 The reason for Bach’s choice, then, must have been entirely personal, for at Dornheim the officiating minister was a close family friend. Sadly, no information at all is available about the wedding festivities or the music made on this well-chosen day—October 17, a Monday. The bridegroom and guests from farther away were able to set out for the trip to Dornheim immediately after the morning services the day before.
The wedding would have been a major family event, comparable to if not surpassing the celebration in 1694 when Bach’s older brother was married in Ohrdruf and his father, Ambrosius, as well as Johann Pachelbel performed. This time, only one member of the parental generation (that is, of all the grandchildren of Hans Bach) was still living: Johann Aegidius Bach (8), director of the Erfurt town music company.41 Christoph Herthum could have joined him as another representative of that generation of musicians. But Maria Barbara’s and Johann Sebastian’s siblings and cousins, their spouses, and some of their children could easily have formed a most respectable ensemble including among the professionals Johann Christoph Bach (17) of Gehren, Johann Bernhard Bach (18) of Eisenach, Johann Christoph Bach (19) of Erfurt, Johann Valentin Bach (21) of Schweinfurt, Johann Christoph Bach (22) of Ohrdruf, Johann Ernst Bach (25) of Arnstadt, and Johann Nicolaus Bach (27) of Jena, the latter a first cousin of Maria Barbara’s. The event would have provided a chance to return to a famous wedding piece written by the late brother of Maria Barbara’s father, Johann Christoph Bach (13) of Eisenach. An original set of parts for this dramatic secular work, “Meine Freundin, du bist schön,” existed in Johann Sebastian’s library, with a title wrapper in his own later hand (see illustration, page 38). There are also two wedding pieces by Bach that may have been written around the time of his own wedding: the cantata “Der Herr denket an uns,” BWV 196, a setting of Psalm 115: 12–15, with a scoring (four-part vocal ensemble, strings, and continuo) suitable for the small Dornheim church, a fifteenth-century structure with a history dating back to the twelfth century;42 and the Quodlibet BWV 524 (scored for four voices and continuo), with a parodistic text and a plethora of coarse allusions, including references to Bach’s circle of family and friends.43 Both compositions seem to originate from 1707–8 (with the autograph of BWV 524 securely datable to Bach’s Mühlhausen period), but we have no concrete evidence to connect either one with this wedding—nor, for that matter, with the slightly later Stauber-Wedemann wedding, surely another music-making opportunity for the members of the Bach family.
“FIRST FRUITS” AND THE BUXTEHUDE EXPERIENCE
As annoying, embarrassing, and disruptive as the various run-ins with the consistory may have been for Bach, their overall significance was marginal. It is only because the pertinent documents transmit most of the scant biographical information we have for the Arnstadt period that their content dominates our thinking. They especially distract from the fact that for nearly four years, from August 1703 through May 1707, the young musician experienced circumstances that bordered on the ideal. In an economically secure and socially agreeable situation, Bach enjoyed an extremely light workload as organist of the New Church, leaving him time for practicing, studying, and composing. He likely occupied a comfortable room or apartment in one of the two Arnstadt houses belonging to Burgomaster Feldhaus, where he surely kept a harpsichord and perhaps other keyboard instruments. But first and foremost, he had at his disposal a brand-new organ, the perfect training equipment for refining his technical keyboard skills and for formulating his own musical ideas, testing them both in the privacy of his practice hours at the church and in front of a large audience during the divine services.
The overall musical scene in Arnstadt was active but conventional, certainly not vigorous, and perhaps on the dull side. That would have been Bach’s own perception, for neither the court nor the town offered any musical figures who were able to generate excitement, let alone provide him stimulation or challenges. He soon discovered that his was the best show in
town, also the one with the largest audience—around 1,500 worshippers attending the New Church every Sunday. And he clearly worked hard at his craft, even though most Arnstadters, who took the solid music making of anyone named Bach for granted, did not realize what kind of genius resided in their town.
So between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two—today’s college years—Bach worked not quite in seclusion, but in circumstances that required him to satisfy entirely on his own his strong yearning to advance. He made the best out of the situation by focusing on intensive self-study, building on the broad foundations laid in Ohrdruf and Lüneburg. In Arnstadt, the Obituary relates, “he really showed the first fruits of his application to the art of organ playing and to composition, which he had learned chiefly by observing the works of the most famous and proficient composers of his day and by the fruits of his own reflection upon them.”44 Having received a solid Latin school grounding, he well understood the role of exempla classica for the advancement of learning and so turned to the best models, which he found in “the works of Bruhns, Reinken, Buxtehude, and several good French organists.” As these preferences show, the Lüneburg-Hamburg experiences left their particular mark, but other German and Italian composers played a significant role as well. After all, from his Eisenach days he had grown up with German and Italian repertoires, whereas north German and French music represented more of a recent discovery. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach offers a corrective when he specifies in a letter to Forkel that “besides Froberger, Kerll, and Pachelbel” (the focus of the Ohrdruf repertoire), his father “heard and studied the works of [Girolamo] Frescobaldi, the Baden Capellmeister [Caspar Ferdinand] Fischer, [Nicolaus Adam] Strunck,”45 followed by the list from the Obituary and the added name of Georg Böhm. Even this expanded list must be considered representative at best, for we know from other evidence that at this early point he was also familiar with works of Johann Kuhnau, Giovanni Legrenzi, Arcangelo Corelli, and many others.46
Bach’s inquisitiveness led him to quickly scrutinize and absorb these masters’ different compositional approaches and their enormous stylistic breadth. Of particular interest to him were the various ways they elaborated a musical subject in fugal form. Unlike the free textures of preludes or dance movements, the rigorous polyphonic structure of a fugue required a firm command of the principles and rules of counterpoint. From the beginning, Bach savored the challenge of formulating a musical thought that would not just provide the raw material for a musical structure but that would define the shape of its individual voices, their interaction, the progress of the piece, and finally the character of the whole. “Through his own study and reflection alone he became even in his youth a pure and strong fugue writer,” reports Carl Philipp Emanuel, noting that “the above named favorites—the list beginning with Froberger—were all strong fugue writers.”47
Bach’s deep immersion in the contrapuntal intricacies of composition and his analysis of many different fugal examples spurred him to form a musical logic that became an unmistakable hallmark of his style. One of his study methods consisted of taking a given model and turning it into a new work, not by arranging it but by appropriating the thematic material, subjects, and countersubjects and rewriting the score to create a different piece—a new solution to what he took to be a musical question. And in the process of recomposing, he discovered new thematic connections or contrapuntal combinations as well as new harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic features. Among such works are not only the harpsichord fugues based on Reinken’s Hortus musicus (BWV 954, 965/2, and 966/2), but also the organ fugues BWV 574b after Legrenzi, BWV 579 after Corelli’s Opus 3 of 1689, and the harpsichord fugues BWV 946, 950, and 951 after Albinoni’s Opus 1 of 1694. In all these fugues, Bach explores the possibilities of double counterpoint, in which the upper and lower voices are freely switched. He was drawn to the Italian works because they, in particular, featured attractive themes in cantabile style that typical north German fugues rarely offered.
The absence of a reliable chronology for Bach’s early works prevents us from determining with any precision what constituted the basket of first fruits that Bach filled between 1703 and 1707. But we can say with certainty that in his thirteen hundred days at Arnstadt, Bach worked exceedingly hard to advance his performing skills (particularly the art of improvisation, an essential element of any organist’s background) and to further his compositional technique. The fluent elegance of the notation in the few surviving Arnstadt samples of Bach’s music48 hand presents ample evidence that they resulted from extensive composing on paper. Autograph manuscripts from before 1706–7 exist for only five works: the Fantasia in C minor, BWV Anh. 205; the Prelude in C minor, BWV 921; the Prelude in G minor, BWV 535a; and the chorale settings “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” BWV 739 and 764. All of them are fair copies and not composing scores, meaning that the works as such predate their autograph sources. Moreover, these manuscripts are indicative of the great care and pride with which the young composer notated and preserved his creations.
Bach’s achievements before he became organist in Arnstadt have traditionally been underestimated,49 and that applies to his Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, and early Weimar years as well. A complicating factor in defining the Arnstadt repertoire of keyboard works is that Bach made later use of some of the compositions, for both performance and teaching, which resulted in often substantial, sometimes multiple revisions. Nevertheless, we can say that the Arnstadt repertoire comprises organ chorales of various types (chorale partitas, larger and smaller chorale preludes, chorale harmonizations); fantasias, preludes, and toccatas (without fugues, with integrated fugues, and with separate fugues), as well as single fugues for organ and harpsichord; and suites, partitas, sonatas, and variations for harpsichord. In all likelihood, some of the earliest settings from the later Orgel-Büchlein (such as “Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn,” BWV 601, and “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” BWV 639) originate from Arnstadt;50 probably also the Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582, in many ways an homage to Buxtehude and Reinken. Buxtehude’s ostinato works provided the immediate model for Bach, and Reinken introduced him to the permutation fugue, in which each voice enters with the same series of subject and countersubjects. The young organist and composer accepted the challenge and met it, as in so many other cases, by not merely transcending the prototypes but actually redefining the genre.
It probably took less than two years (plus the unpleasant Geyersbach affair) for Bach to realize the serious drawbacks of staying in Arnstadt. The musical scores he studied must by then have looked more attractive to him than the musical life in this Thuringian town and its vicinity. So he decided to take a month’s leave in order to realize a dream. If there was ever a musician Bach was dying to meet, it was Dieterich Buxtehude—not a far-fetched desire and one he apparently shared with others: for in 1703, George Frideric Handel and Johann Mattheson had paid a short visit to Buxtehude in Lübeck, from which they returned to Hamburg with powerful impressions.51 For them and for Bach, Buxtehude, then in his mid-sixties, signified a kind of father figure who anticipated the ideal of the autonomous composer, a category unheard of at the time. The bourgeois, liberal, and commercial atmosphere of the free imperial city of Lübeck provided Buxtehude with considerable flexibility in developing and realizing his various projects. Although he held the distinguished position of organist at St. Mary’s, his overall activities were characterized by a display of artistic initiative combined with unusual managerial independence. Courtly service would not have permitted such free conduct. Buxtehude was able to develop his career as a virtuoso, to travel, and to surround himself with pupils. He regularly played public organ recitals in Lübeck, performing compositions of his own that set new standards of form, size, texture, and character. He seized numerous opportunities for composing vocal works and, acting as his own impresario, organized and financed performances of evening concerts (Abend-Musiken) at his church. For these concerts, he leaned on both Hamburg opera conventions and the Car
issimi oratorio tradition to create, around 1678, the prototype of the large-scale, multisectional German oratorio, whose librettos he regularly published. He also published two collections of sonatas, Opus 1 in 1694 and Opus 2 in 1696. In short, he conducted his office of organist in the style of a municipal capellmeister, thereby serving as a clear role model, most notably for Georg Philipp Telemann when he took a post in Hamburg and Bach when he moved to Leipzig.
Moreover, Buxtehude exemplified the ideal type of the universal musician, balancing theory and practice. Scholarly theoretical erudition counted among the prerequisites for a high musical office, and Buxtehude easily filled the bill. His theoretical background, which reflected the Italian tradition of Gioseffo Zarlino, was supplied most likely through Matthias Weckmann and Reinken. However, Buxtehude placed more emphasis on musical practice: rather than writing treatises, he demonstrated his contrapuntal sophistication in diverse practical applications, thus again showing the way for the Bach of The Well-Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue—that is, Bach the musical scholar.
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