Contemporary descriptions of the service for Queen Christiane Eberhardine make specific references to an organ prelude and postlude that, given the importance of the ceremonial event, only Bach could have played. A particularly fitting piece would be the Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV 544, the prelude of which would have drowned out the instrumental ensemble’s tuning for BWV 198, also in B minor;38 the autograph fair copy of BWV 544 dates from 1727–31. Beyond such speculation, however, it must be emphasized that Bach’s activities as an organ recitalist are generally the most inadequately recorded; reports are limited to organ examinations and dedications or to concerts played out of town (see Table 7.5). Not a single recital is documented for Leipzig, yet it would be absurd to conclude that Bach never played there in public and that his reputation as “world-famous organist”—so the heading of the Obituary—was not based on his exposure to Leipzig audiences for nearly three decades. Although no longer holding a post as organist, he remained active as an organ composer and virtuoso throughout his Leipzig years. His output of organ music, even if limited to the repertoire with original and datable sources (see Table 9.1), is distributed evenly over time, and out-of-town public recitals are documented as late as 1747 in Berlin. And works like the Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 548, demonstrate Bach’s remarkable ability to lift the genre of prelude and fugue to an entirely new level, well beyond the scope of The Well-Tempered Clavier, giving it a distinct organistic profile and virtuoso showpiece character. Moreover, BWV 548 in particular reveals the performer-composer’s formidable command not only in sustaining great length (the prelude runs over 137 measures and the fugue over 231) but also in balancing improvisatory and constructive elements. Both the prelude and fugue integrate concerto-like features into their innovative large-scale designs, the prelude displaying a complex ritornello structure ABA-B(c/b)-A-B(c/b)-A (the middle sections of B introduce new material [C] in alteration with modified B material [b]), and the fugue an unprecedented “antidevelopmental” da capo form A-B(b/a-c/a-b/a-a-c)-A (B consists of interludes [b, c] with citations and elaborations of the fugue theme [a]).39
TABLE 9.1. Representative Organ Works from the Leipzig Period
BWV
Title
Date (source)
525–30
Six Sonatas
1727–32 (autograph ms.)
541
Prelude and Fugue in G major (revised version)
c. 1733 (autograph ms.)
544
Prelude and Fugue in B minor
1727–31 (autograph ms.)
548
Prelude and Fugue in E minor
1727–32 (partial autograph ms.)
552, etc.
Clavier-Übung, part III (for contents, see Table 10.7)
1739 (original edition)
562
Fantasia and Fugue (fragment) in C minor
c. 1747–48 and earlier (autograph ms.)
645–50
Six Chorales (“Schübler”)
c. 1747 (original edition)
651–68
Eighteen Chorales (revised versions)
1739–42, 1746–47 (partial autograph ms.)
769
Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch”
c. 1747–48 (autograph ms., original edition)
The best, if not the only suitable, place for the display of Bach’s organistic art would have been St. Paul’s. Leipzig musicians, like actors, dancers, and performing artists of all kinds, were regularly offered rich opportunities for showcasing their talent during the three annual trade fairs, when schools were closed and the whole population became caught up in the fair bustle. In such a context, Bach the organ virtuoso would have been a major attraction, but the combination of St. Paul’s grand organ—for a long time the largest instrument in all of Saxony—and the city’s renowned organist would have proved even more spectacular. As for the content of a typical Bach recital in Leipzig and the show of appreciation for the master of the keyboard, it would have resembled his out-of-town programs. A characteristic example, an appearance in Dresden, is reported in newspapers of September 21, 1725:
When the Capell-Director from Leipzig, Mr. Bach, came here recently, he was very well received by the local virtuosos at the court and in the city since he is greatly admired by all of them for his musical adroitness and art. Yesterday and the day before, in the presence of the same, he performed for over an hour on the new organ in St. Sophia’s Church preludes and various concertos, with intervening soft instrumental music in all keys.40
Here is evidence that during at least one of the two consecutive recitals on the thirty-one-stop Silbermann organ, Bach introduced a novel genre: organ concertos with accompanying string instruments, in all likelihood prototypes of works that were soon integrated into cantata sinfonias of the third Jahrgang and, still later, transformed into harpsichord concertos. Some of them may even have been devised as organ concertos from the outset: the original version of the concerto BWV 1053 is a prime candidate.41 Whether or not the 1725 recitals in the Saxon capital were a preview of what was planned for the upcoming St. Michaelmas Fair in Leipzig, we can take for granted that Leipzig audiences were exposed to the same exciting organ performances and innovative repertoires as concertgoers in Dresden, only more frequently; and where else in Leipzig would Bach have played if not at St. Paul’s?42 Fittingly, the university’s auditorium, the place where Bach would practice, teach, and present his improvisations and newest works, was the venue in Leipzig most closely identified with scholarship, with both the cultivation of traditional erudition and the creation of new knowledge. In the musical world, Bach was peerless, the absolutely dominant figure in Leipzig. Those with whom he had to match wits—to a considerable extent in the public arena—were the academic luminaries of the university.
PROFESSORIAL COLLEAGUES AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
From his first days in Leipzig, Bach cultivated and maintained connections with the city’s political, commercial, and clerical establishment as well as its intellectual elite. In particular, he could rely on support from the highest-ranking state dignitary, General Joachim Friedrich von Flemming, governor of Leipzig. Representing the Saxon electoral court and residing at the Pleissenburg, not far from the St. Thomas Church, Count Flemming had hosted Bach at his mansion in Dresden for the Marchand contest in 1717. As one of the Thomascantor’s staunchest patrons, he commissioned congratulatory cantatas to be performed as serenades (Abend-Music) on his birthday, August 25. We know of two such works for which the music is lost, BWV 249b (1726), and BWV Anh. 10 (1731), both with lyrics by Picander; a third work, BWV 210a, with adjusted text underlay referring to Flemming, was presented between 1727 and 1732. But apart from the normal business he regularly had to conduct with town, church, and university officials, the contacts that provided Bach with the most important challenges and interactions were with the professoriate of the university.
Yet Bach was by no means integrated into the close-knit academic community. He knew well that without university study, let alone a degree, he lacked the formal qualifications required in academe. Moreover, his other connections mattered to him: the offspring of a town piper, he felt comfortable in craft circles that included organ builders, other instrument makers, and musicians in general. His court music experience and, in particular, his incontestable standing as a keyboard virtuoso made him a welcome and respected insider in all domains of professional music making. Indeed, like many of his musician colleagues, he may well have disdained the exclusive and often arrogant world of the professoriate. Nevertheless, Leipzig offered him challenges whose social aspects must have been difficult for him to accept but whose intellectual side he had no reason to avoid. Just the opposite: the increased intellectual dimension noticeable in Bach’s Leipzig works reciprocates these challenges. He not only delivered what was expected of him, but more often than not he took up the gauntlet and returned it in the form of musical daring.
Bach’s daily ro
utine put him in frequent touch with representatives of the university. For example, his superior in church activities was Salomo Deyling, superintendent of the Leipzig church district, who simultaneously held the distinguished chair of professor primariusin the Faculty of Theology. Bach maintained a respectful distance from this eminent theologian eight years his senior, dealing with him primarily on the bureaucratic level. But there were others among the Leipzig professoriate with whom Bach had direct or indirect relations of a more fruitful kind, ranging from the collegial to the personal:43
I. Thomana faculty with university appointments
Johann Heinrich Ernesti, rector of the St. Thomas School from 1684 until his death in 1729; from 1680 assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy and from 1691 professor of poetics; published numerous works, among them books on Suetonius and on epigrams, and a Compendium hermeneuticum. Ernesti’s wife, Regina Maria, was godmother of Gottfried Heinrich Bach (b. 1724).
Christian Ludovici, conrector from 1697 to 1724, when he resigned from the Thomana and moved full time to the university. From 1693 assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy, from 1699 associate professor of oriental languages and the Talmud, and from 1700 until his death in 1732 professor of logic; served two terms, 1724–25 and 1730–31, as rector magnificus. Published many works, primarily on Hebrew topics, including a commentary on Rabbi Levi ben Gerson, as well as a Compendium logicum.
Johann Christian Hebenstreit, conrector from 1724 to 1731. From 1715 assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy, resigned from the Thomana in 1731 to become associate professor of Hebrew and oriental languages and in 1740 professor of theology; succeeded Salomo Deyling in 1755 as professor primarius and served 1745–46 as university rector. Author of many philological and theological books. His wife, Christiana Dorothea, was godmother of Bach’s daughter Christiana Dorothea (b. 1731).
Johann Matthias Gesner, rector from 1730 to 1734; failed to receive a university appointment in Leipzig and therefore left for Göttingen University, where he became the first professor appointed to the new university and founding dean of the Faculty of Philosophy.44 A prolific author on classical philology—Cicero, Horace, Pliny, Quintilianus, and others—he also published a dictionary of Latin etymology. In his 1738 edition (with commentary) of Marcus Fabius Quintilianus’s first-century Institutio oratoria, a classic treatise of ancient rhetoric, Gesner writes the greatest homage paid to Bach in the eighteenth century, in the form of an address to Quintilianus:
You would think but slightly, my dear Fabius, of all these [the accomplishments of the citharists], if, returning from the underworld, you could see Bach (to mention him particularly, since he was not long ago my colleague at the Leipzig St. Thomas School), either playing our clavier, which is many citharas in one, with all the fingers of both hands, or running over the keys of the instrument of instruments, whose innumerable pipes are brought to life by bellows, with both hands and, at the utmost speed, with his feet, producing by himself the most various and at the same time mutually agreeable combinations of sounds in orderly procession. If you could see him, I say, doing what many of your citharists and six hundred of your tibia players together could not do, not only, like a citharist, singing with one voice and playing his own parts, by watching over everything and bringing back to the rhythm and the beat out of thirty or even forty musicians, the one with a nod, another by tapping with his foot, the third with a warning finger, giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it—all alone, in the midst of the greatest din made by all the participants, and, although he is executing the most difficult parts himself, noticing at once whenever and wherever a mistake occurs, holding everyone together, taking precautions everywhere, and repairing any unsteadiness, full of rhythm in every part of his body—this one man taking in all these harmonies with his keen ear and emitting with his voice alone the tone of all the voices. Favorer as I am of antiquity, the accomplishments of our Bach, and of any others who may be like him, appear to me to effect what not many Orpheuses, nor twenty Arions, could achieve.45
Bach, who knew Gesner from Weimar (where the classicist served from 1715 as conrector of the gymnasium and head of the ducal court library), may have been involved in bringing him to Leipzig in 1730, just after he had served for a scant year as rector of the gymnasium in Ansbach. Gesner’s wife, Elisabeth Caritas, was godmother of Bach’s son Johann August Abraham (b. 1733).
Johann August Ernesti, conrector from 1731 (appointed by Gesner) and rector from 1734 to 1758; from 1742 simultaneously associate professor of ancient classical literature at the university, from 1756 professor of rhetoric, and from 1759, after resigning his Thomana post, professor of theology. One of the most widely published academic authors, he wrote works on Homer, Cicero, New Testament hermeneutics, and many other subjects. In the later 1760s, Goethe attended his lectures.46 Godfather of Bach’s sons Johann August Abraham (b. 1733) and Johann Christian (b. 1735).
Johann Heinrich Winckler, instructor at the St. Thomas School from 1731 to 1739 (as collega quartus, another Gesner appointee); from 1729 (at age twenty-six) assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy, from 1739 associate professor of Greek and Latin, from 1742 professor of logic, and from 1750 professor of physics (successor to Mentz, see below); served three terms as rector magnificus, 1744–45, 1747, and 1749, and was in 1747 elected to membership in the Royal Society, London. After publishing in philosophy and classics (on Cicero, among others), he turned to scientific subjects and became one of the most influential eighteenth-century German scientists, with ground-breaking publications on experimental physics in general and on electricity in particular, including Gedanken von den Eigenschaften, Würkungen und Ursachen der Electricität of 1744;47 his Anfangsgründe der Physik was translated into English (1757) and soon thereafter into French and Russian. As with Ernesti, Goethe studied with Winckler, too.48
In 1732, Winckler wrote the libretto for Bach’s cantata “Froher Tag, verlangte Stunden,” BWV Anh. 18 (music lost), performed at the dedication of the renovated and enlarged St. Thomas School. In a 1765 treatise, Untersuchungen der Natur und Kunst, he mentions in a discussion on acoustical phenomena a “musical connoisseur” whose ears can “differentiate between innumerable tones,” and cites Gesner’s comment on Bach.49
II. Members of the St. Thomas clergy with university appointments
Urban Gottfried Siber, minister at St. Thomas’s from 1714 until his death in 1741; from 1714 simultaneously professor of ancient church history in the Faculty of Theology, as first incumbent of the chair, with a command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish; author of many books. He baptized three Bach children: Gottfried Heinrich (b. 1724), Johann August Abraham (b. 1733), and Johann Christian (b. 1735).
Romanus Teller, minister at St. Thomas’s and St. Peter’s from 1737 to 1740; from 1738 associate professor of theology, published numerous theological books. Bach chose him as his father confessor, 1738–40.50
Christian Weiss, Jr., minister at St. Nicholas’s from 1731 to 1737 and from 1740 associate professor of theology at the university. Son of Pastor Christian Weiss, Sr. (Bach’s father confessor, 1723–36), he was godfather of Bach’s daughter Johanna Carolina (b. 1737). His sister, Dorothea Sophia Weiss, godmother of Bach’s son Johann Christoph Friedrich (b. 1732), was married to Johann Erhard Kapp, professor of rhetoric at Leipzig University.
Christoph Wolle, minister at St. Thomas’s from 1739; from 1721 assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy, and from 1748 professor of theology. He was a pupil at the St. Thomas School in 1715–18 and sang under Kuhnau. A versatile linguist (he mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, English, and Dutch) and much-appreciated preacher, he was more closely connected with Enlightenment philosophy than any other Leipzig theologian at the time, as reflected in his numerous books on dogmatics, ethics, and hermeneutics. Bach’s father confessor, 1741–50.51
III. Members of the Philosophy and Law Faculties
Joha
nn Jacob Mascov, from 1719 professor of constitutional law and history and member of the city council; from 1735 also head of the council library, and from 1737 city judge. Author of many historical works, mainly on the Holy Roman Empire, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. One of the most illustrious and widely known members of the faculty, he attracted in particular students from aristocratic families, whom he instructed in issues of government. Like Baudis, he participated in Bach’s election and remained generally supportive of Bach’s decisions that required town council approval, such as appointments to the town music company.52
Johann Christoph Gottsched, from 1725 assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy, from 1730 associate professor of logic, from 1734 professor of poetics, logic, and metaphysics; served four terms as rector: 1738–39, 1740–41, 1742–43, and 1748–49. He was the leading figure in the early German Enlightenment. Particularly influential were two of his early works, which saw several reprints: Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst of 1730, a book on literary and linguistic theory and practice, drama, rhetoric, and poetics, and Erste Gründe der gesamten Weltweisheit of 1733, his chief philosophical work.
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