Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  The affair, which took place in the electoral Saxon capital, was apparently organized by Bach’s counterpart at the Dresden court capelle, concertmaster Woulmyer, a Flemish violinist who generally went by the frenchified name Volumier. The latter probably invited Bach on behalf of his colleagues at the court capelle who may have been annoyed by Marchand’s notorious arrogance and eccentric behavior, which was attested to even in his obituary of 1732.66 Quite possibly, the whole plot was devised in the hope of sabotaging a court appointment for Marchand. At any rate, Bach was assigned the role of challenger in that he sent Marchand a letter, apparently “at the suggestion and command of some important personages of the court there,”67 likely among them the influential host of the planned contest, General von Flemming. (Count Flemming, incidentally, served from 1724 to 1740 as governor of Leipzig and became one of Bach’s most supportive aristocratic patrons there; Bach composed several congratulatory birthday pieces for him: the Dramma per musica BWV 249b of 1725 as well as the later cantatas BWV Anh. 10 and BWV 210a.)

  How great a disappointment it must have been for Bach, the Dresden court musicians, and the assembled guests that the actual contest never took place should not be underestimated. Listening to the two virtuoso opponents separately could not compare to the thrilling atmosphere of a musical match in which two star performers would challenge each other “to execute ex tempore whatever musical tasks [they] should set [themselves].” What they might have performed can only be guessed, but they would surely have focused on their own best technical skills and stylistic specialties. Here Bach would have found himself in a far more advantageous position, for he was not only thoroughly familiar with the contemporary French keyboard repertoire and stylistic idioms, but he specifically knew works by Marchand (the Möller Manuscript, one of his Ohrdruf brother’s anthologies, contained a Suite in D minor from Marchand’s published Pièces de claveçin, Livre Premier of 1702). Bach’s own keyboard suites reflected, from the very beginning, a deliberate attempt to integrate genuine French elements into this quintessential courtly-French genre. Moreover, in his consistent application of French terminology in the most mature and elaborate set of keyboard suites from the Weimar period, the so-called English Suites (the title of BWV 806a reads “Prelude avec les Suites | composeé | par | Giov: Bast: Bach”), Bach does more than pay mere lip service to their French stylistic orientation. At the same time, he also blends in Italian concerto elements (for instance, in the Prélude to BWV 808), satisfies his own predilection for fugal textures (especially in the concluding Gigue movements), and indulges in a variety of polyphonic writing that penetrates the structure of virtually every suite movement. It is conceivable and even likely that his Dresden performance included material from the English Suites, but Bach might also have includ Chromatic Fantasy and Fugueed bravura pieces of the kind represented by the , BWV 903, which require unparalleled keyboard skills.

  In any keyboard technique, genre, or style, Bach would have been in familiar territory. Marchand, on the other hand, could capitalize only on a much narrower range of musical experience, if his compositional output and its homogenous French design are taken as a guide. Italian or German music would not have been easily accessible in France, and, as Marchand’s works demonstrate, his travels did not bring about any compositional transformation or any stylistic adjustment resulting from foreign influence. At the same time, Marchand would hardly have confined himself to the lightweight kind of music contained in the Nouvelle suitte d’airs pour deux tambourins, musettes ou vielles par Mr Marchand, pieces composed by another member of the extended Marchand family of musicians though mistakenly attributed in the Obituary to Louis.68 Bach was definitely ready to meet a different and more challenging Marchand, the one he knew from the Pièces de claveçin and the one he credited “with the reputation of fine and very proper playing.”

  No sources focusing on the Bach-Marchand affair provide any information on what other contacts Bach may have made during his brief visit to the Saxon capital at a time of significant change for its flourishing music scene.69 The electoral prince Friedrich August had returned in late September 1717 from a year’s sojourn in Venice and brought back with him a complete Italian opera troupe, headed by Antonio Lotti, the newly appointed Dresden court capellmeister, and his deputy, Johann David Heinichen—the only German musician engaged by the electoral prince in Venice. Provisionally established in the fancy-dress hall, the new opera venture was opened on October 25, 1717, with Lotti’s Giove in Argo, a pastoral melodrama in three acts. Bach would have taken note of the production preparations, though he probably did not meet Lotti or we would have heard about it from Carl Philipp Emanuel or from other sources.70 He did see not only concertmaster Woulmyer, but most likely also the violinist Johann Georg Pisendel (who had previously visited with him in Weimar) and probably also Heinichen, an alumnus of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, with whom he maintained good relations until Heinichen’s untimely death in 1729.

  We can assume that most members of the Dresden capelle attended Bach’s performance at the mansion of Count Flemming. More important, however, Bach was able to get a feel for the vibrant, rich, abundant musical life at the electoral Saxon and royal Polish court of Dresden, a European cultural center on a scale far beyond anything he had known before. In Dresden, unparalleled sums of money were spent for art and entertainment: the personnel budget alone of the Italian opera company amounted to 45,033 talers, the French ballet cost 17,700 talers, and the stage sets, decorations, and costumes for the opera Giove in Argo 8,578 talers. The salaries for musicians were similarly off chart (and not just reflecting the higher cost of living in the Saxon capital): capellmeister Lotti, along with his wife, the singer Santa Stella, earned 10,500 talers; vice-capellmeister Heinichen made 1,200 talers and concertmaster Woulmyer the same—exactly three times as much as the future Cöthen capellmeister. Of course, Bach would hardly have known of these figures, but his brief first brush with the Dresden court gave him a good idea of conditions in a world-class musical center.

  On his return to Weimar, Bach’s disappointment over the noncontest with Marchand must have been severely compounded by the loss of the prize he had won, supposedly by a nasty act of embezzlement whose particulars remain obscure. After all, 500 talers represented a large sum of money for Bach, substantially more than twice his current annual salary in Weimar and even 100 talers above his future salary as Cöthen capellmeister. Add to this his frustrations over the capellmeister-less situation at the Weimar court and his own “lame duck” status as concertmaster, and we can imagine his impatience as he anticipated the promising appointment as princely Cöthen capellmeister. Soon after his return from Dresden, he made some demand—for an earlier dismissal, perhaps, or something else related to his imminent departure—that embroiled him in a situation where he lost his temper. Whether he managed to enrage Duke Wilhelm Ernst directly or only a high official in the Wilhelmsburg, nothing apparently could save him from serious trouble; an intervention of his protector, Duke Ernst August, could even have made matters worse. As a result of the incident, “on November 6, the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge’s place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavorable discharge.”71

  The wording “quondam[erstwhile] concertmaster” suggests that Bach had already quit his Weimar court service by early November, but that his dishonorable release was not yet formally granted until a month later. Apparently for no other reason than a show of anger,72 the Cöthen capellmeister-designate was kept in jail for nearly four weeks, a period that marked the absolute low point in Bach’s professional life. Understandably, the episode is not reported in the Obituary nor in any other early biographical source,73 although a useful hint is provided by Ernst Ludwig Gerber (whose father, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, studied with Bach in Leipzig during the 1720s) when he relates that Bach wrote his Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I,
“in a place where ennui, boredom, and the absence of any kind of musical instrument forced him to resort to this pastime.”74 Though we cannot take this to mean that the work was begun and completed during Bach’s imprisonment, a substantial portion of the twenty-four preludes and fugues may well have originated in this unhappy venue.

  After his release from prison on December 2, Bach could not leave Weimar in a great hurry, for he needed to move a family of six. Whether he himself made a quick trip to Cöthen in order to be present, in his capacity as capellmeister, at the festivities on the occasion of Prince Leopold’s birthday on December 10 is questionable. But if so, he would have had to combine this trip with a sojourn in nearby Leipzig, where by special invitation of the rector of the university, he spent December 16–18 examining the new large organ made by Johann Scheibe for St. Paul’s (University) Church.75

  Bach’s departure dealt the Weimar court capelle a near-fatal blow that permanently dampened the quality of musical life at the ducal court there. While the death of the old capellmeister Drese, almost exactly a year earlier, did not call for swift action because his absence made no noticeable difference, the loss of Bach left an acute gap. A genuine crisis was at hand, as both Wilhelm Ernst and Ernst August must have recognized. As the members of the capelle fell into the category of joint servants, the decision made after Bach’s departure by the co-reigning dukes required a compromise: Johann Wilhelm Drese (presumably Duke Wilhelm Ernst’s candidate) was promoted from vice-capellmeister to capellmeister, and Bach’s longtime student and assistant Johann Martin Schubart (apparently Duke Ernst August’s candidate) was appointed chamber musician and court organist, both on January 5, 1718. The posts of vice-capellmeister and concertmaster remained vacant, but the copyist’s fee was now reassigned from Drese to the capellist August Gottfried Denstedt (see Table 6.2), and to avoid a net loss for the capelle, the lutenist Gottlieb Michael Kühnel was hired as an additional court musician.76 However, the salaries of the leadership group of the court capelle were basically what they had been ten years earlier (see Table 6.6). During the intervening years, virtually all incremental funds for the court capelle were spent on Johann Sebastian Bach, as both dukes clearly understood that investing in him would bring them more than their money’s worth.

  7

  Pursuing “the Musical Contest for Superiority”

  CAPELLMEISTER IN CÖTHEN, 1717–1723

  PRINCELY PATRONAGE

  It seems a curious coincidence that Bach, right before settling in Cöthen, spent a few days in Leipzig, where he would eventually move—from Cöthen. As noted earlier, he had been invited by the rector of Leipzig University to examine the recently completed organ at St. Paul’s Church (simultaneously the main lecture hall of the university), and his short stay allowed him some time to form at least a superficial impression of Leipzig and perhaps to meet with the old and distinguished cantor at St. Thomas’s, Johann Kuhnau. Bach knew Kuhnau as leader of the team that had examined the organ at Our Lady’s Church in Halle in 1716 and therefore would certainly have valued his opinion of the new fifty-three-stop Scheibe organ at the University Church. Most of Bach’s time, however, was devoted to examining the organ itself, about which he wrote a lengthy report on December 17, the Friday before the third Sunday in Advent.1 Although he had found fault with a few details—notably uneven wind pressure, inequality of voicing, and heavy action—he generally praised the organ builder’s work and suggested that Scheibe “be held harmless for the parts he has constructed.” Upon submitting his report on December 18, the day of his departure from Leipzig, Bach collected a fee of 20 talers from the rector, Professor Rechenberg—five times as much as he had received some fourteen years earlier for his first organ examination at Arnstadt. Then a mere lackey, he now signed the organ report and the receipt of his fee as “Capellmeister to the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen.” But there was yet another and more significant difference. In 1703, the eighteen-year-old Bach was looking forward to a career as organist; in 1717, he had effectively brought that career to an end, at least in a formal sense, for he would never again hold a post as organist. The chapter as court organist in Weimar was closed, and he had now, at age thirty-two, reached the peak of the conventional musical hierarchy. He was headed for Cöthen to take his place as princely capellmeister.

  From Leipzig to Cöthen—the contrast could hardly have been sharper: here a bustling, wealthy metropolis with over thirty thousand inhabitants, a commercial town and seat of the most prestigious German university, there a modest and rather dull residential town of about one-tenth the size (the entire, predominantly agrarian, principality of Anhalt-Cöthen had a population of only ten thousand); here several big Lutheran churches with an active musical life (in one of which Bach had just examined a large, brand-new organ), there, in Calvinist surroundings, a single Lutheran town church with a poorly maintained organ and no musical life to speak of; here a cultural and musical tradition that extended over several centuries, with a notable number of celebrities, especially among the cantors at St. Thomas’s, there a tiny, courtly musical establishment, recently installed, that had been abandoned by its capellmeister before it could even begin to flourish. Would Bach, coming from Leipzig and having recently glimpsed unparalleled courtly splendor in Dresden, have had no qualms about going as capellmeister to Cöthen?

  But Bach knew that he had no choice and that there was little if any room for doubts. Eager to get away from Weimar, he was looking forward to a unique opportunity: he could expect to work for a patron whose musical background and interests were as strong as he could wish for and whose personal support was unquestionable; he would be one of the best-compensated court officials in the principality,2 evidence of the prestige that came with the position and of the high priority assigned to it by the reigning prince; and he would be in charge of an elite professional ensemble whose core group of musicians had recently been recruited from Berlin and whose overall caliber by far exceeded that of the Weimar ensemble. Indeed, Bach would find conditions that would encourage him to pursue further “the musical contest for superiority”—a course so forcefully confirmed by his recent experience at the Dresden court. That the actual competition with the French virtuoso Marchand did not materialize would only have intensified his eagerness and impatience to meet his equal and, just as important, to find a match in musical personnel for the proper realization of his musical ideas. In this regard, the Cöthen court capelle would serve him well.

  Bach picked up his first pay on December 29, 1717;3 the wording in the princely account records—“the newly arrived Capellmeister”—suggests that he had arrived just in time for the celebration of New Year’s Day, traditionally one of the major musical events at the Cöthen court. Contrary to a long-held view, he did not move to Cöthen right after his release from detention and dishonorable discharge from the Weimar court on December 2, or there would have been an earlier payment record—for example, on a date close to Prince Leopold’s birthday on December 10. It is unlikely, then, that Bach was present for the birthday festivities that year even though technically his appointment dated back to August 7, when he signed his Cöthen contract and accepted a gift of 50 talers. And in fact, the December 29 payment was back pay: his basic annual salary of 400 talers prorated for the five months from August through December.4 This means that Bach, who collected his Weimar salary through the third quarter of 1717, was paid twice in August and September. For the fourth (St. Lucia) quarter, he received no pay from the Weimar court, either as additional punishment in conjunction with his arrest, for unauthorized absences from the castle church or from Weimar itself (his trip to Dresden in the fall?), or for both reasons. The last quarter payment went instead to Bach’s student and successor Johann Martin Schubart, who probably stood in for him whenever needed.

  Relocating his family and personal effects to Cöthen, some seventy miles northeast of Weimar, was a much bigger undertaking than his move nine and a half years earlier from Mühlhausen to Weimar. The family had
grown to six, with the oldest daughter, Catharina Dorothea, now nine years old and the three boys, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard, seven, three, and two, respectively; Maria Barbara’s sister Friedelena came along, too. For the first three and a half years, the Bach family rented a spacious apartment in a house close to the main gate of the princely palace (most likely at what is today’s parsonage, Stiftstrasse 12) belonging to Elisabeth Regina Schultze, widow of Oberamtmann Johann Michael Schultze. (In the 1690s, before the Agnus Church was built, the house had accommodated the worship services of the small Lutheran congregation in Calvinist Cöthen.) When that house was purchased in 1721 for the Lutheran parson, Bach probably moved to another (unknown) place, likely again no more than a short walk away from the palace.5

  First documented in 1115, Cöthen had served since 1603 as the residence for the rulers of the small principality of Anhalt-Cöthen. The larger region of Anhalt, a level area situated between the foot of the lower Harz Mountains and the river Elbe, was once ruled by the Ascanians, one of the most ancient houses of Germany, and was later divided into several principalities held by various branches of the family. The division of 1603 created the almost equally small principalities of Anhalt-Dessau, Anhalt-Bernburg, Anhalt-Cöthen, Anhalt-Plötzgau, and Anhalt-Zerbst, which were surrounded for the most part by Saxon and Prussian territories. The town of Cöthen was dominated by its princely palace and gardens, designed by the architect brothers Bernhard and Peter Niuron of Lugano and built in stages between 1597 and 1640. Two prominent staircase towers framed the central structure of the palace. Its southern wing, the Ludwigsbau, was named for Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Cöthen, who had laid the foundation for Cöthen’s cultural claim to fame in 1617 by establishing the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, or Fruit-Bearing Society, a literary organization modeled after the Florentine Accademia della Crusca whose aim was maintaining the purity of the German language. Under Ludwig’s second successor and nephew, Prince Emanuel Leberecht (r. 1691–1704), the cultivation of music found its modest but solid beginnings, even though its further development stagnated for almost ten years after his death until Prince Leopold, his son, completed the father’s vision of a prospering court music.6