The imposing building of the St. Thomas School closed the west flank of St. Thomas Square, running parallel and close to the inside of the old city wall; the external walls of the school building were particularly thick and used as an extra fortification in earlier times against attack from outside. A small gate near the southwest corner of the school building, the so-called Thomas-Pförtchen (little gate), provided an opening through the city wall for pedestrian traffic. The cantor’s apartment took up a major part of the building’s south wing, while the rector’s quarters lay in the north wing. Approaching the school building from St. Thomas Square, one entered the cantor’s apartment through a door on the left side, ascending two steps. To answer the doorbell, the front door could be opened by a pull mechanism from the second-floor living room immediately above that looked out onto the square and allowed the scanning of visitors. The tiled ground floor—that is, the first floor—contained two rooms, one heated and one unheated; the corner living room downstairs apparently provided study space for the school-age children.46 The front section of the ground floor opened to a split-level structure in the back: four steps down led to the laundry, with a built-in copper wash basin and a door to the outside, and the cellar, with two beer caches and other storage facilities; several steps up led to the maids’ room and the privy. A straight staircase connected the ground floor with the second, which contained a spacious landing, the cantor’s office, the kitchen, the main living room, and the master bedroom. The third and fourth floors were reached by a winding staircase that also led up to a bedroom and drying loft in the attic. According to eighteenth-century urban apartment design, unheated rooms—that is, bedrooms—were ordinarily inaccessible from hallways but could be entered only through the adjacent living rooms, whose stoves were stoked with fuel from the hallway. The cantor’s apartment was equipped with ample built-in closet space, which explains why the 1750 inventory of Bach’s estate enumerates only one dresser, one linen chest, and one wardrobe; other furnishings included six tables, eighteen leather chairs, seven wooden bedsteads, and one writing desk with drawers—undoubtedly Bach’s working desk.47
The cantor’s office suite consisted of the composing studio, a heated corner room with windows facing south and west, and an adjacent chamber as additional work space. From the west window of this corner room, Bach could look out over the city wall to the Pleisse River and the flat countryside; on clear days, the silhouette of the cathedral and castle of Merseburg would have been visible. A large iron stove in the southeast corner of the room was fired from the hallway outside, to the left of the office door; to its right, also outside the door, stood a large book cabinet, with many shelves protected by four lockable doors. How the office suite was furnished is unknown, but besides Bach’s working desk it would surely have contained chairs, musical instruments, and bookshelves. From the hallway in front of his office, Bach could enter the school’s music library, a newly created heated room whose four walls had built-in shelves that accommodated the old St. Thomas library, with its 500-plus titles and 4,500 partbooks, and perhaps also the bulk of Bach’s own sacred compositions. From the library, which may also have served as the principal workplace for Bach’s copyists, a lockable door opened into the auditorium of the secunda class, a large room with four windows facing west that also served as one of Bach’s main teaching and rehearsal spaces. The cantor’s apartment provided access to the school’s classroom from the third and fourth floors as well, similarly to the dormitory of the choral scholars situated on the fifth (mezzanine) floor and on the first and second attic.
The total space of the cantor’s apartment amounted to about 10 by 23.5 Saxon ells; that is, 74.5 square meters (5.6 × 13.3 m.) or 802 square feet (18.4 × 43.6 ft.); the largest room in the apartment, the second-floor living room, was barely 23.5 square meters or 253 square feet, and Bach’s composing studio amounted to little more than half of that. By eighteenth-century bourgeois standards, the Bach family lived in a big house, though it must have felt crowded, considering the large brood of children and the nonfamily traffic that traipsed through daily. The management of the household fell to Anna Magdalena Bach. In addition to the customary maid service, she was probably helped by Friedelena Margaretha Bach, Maria Barbara’s sister, who had lived in the household ever since 1708. When she died on July 28, 1729, at the age of fifty-three, her functions were likely absorbed by Bach’s oldest daughter, Catharina Dorothea, then almost twenty-one. Like two of her stepsisters, Catharina remained single; in fact, the only one of the four Bach daughters who married was Lieschen, who on January 20, 1749, celebrated her wedding with Johann Christoph Altnickol, one of her father’s best students.
TABLE 11.2. Layout of the Cantor’s Apartment, 1732
Note: The number and direction of windows are in parenthesis; italics indicate that the room was heated.
Altnickol matriculated at Leipzig University in 1744 and quite possibly numbered among the cantor’s select few pupils who received free tuition, room, and board—as is documented for Bach’s Weimar student, Philipp David Kräuter, and his very last student, Johann Gottfried Müthel. Müthel, a young and gifted court organist with Duke Christian II Ludwig of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, received a stipend from his duke to study with Bach in Leipzig. The court issued a passport, on May 5, 1750, and a letter of introduction to Bach that was personally signed by the duke “for the organist Müthel, who will take a leave of absence for a year and go to Leipzig to the famous organist and composer Bach in order to perfect himself in his metier.”48 It was later reported that “the Capellmeister Bach accepted him graciously and provided him with a place in his house, and that Müthel availed himself of his instruction with the greatest attentiveness.”49 As Bach was to die two months later, Müthel could benefit only briefly from Bach’s teachings, though he apparently developed close relations with the family.50
From Kräuter, who studied with Bach back at Weimar in 1712–13, we receive a much more detailed account of a live-in student-apprentice. Kräuter’s stipend was provided by the city of Augsburg. His first report to the scholarship committee, dated April 30, 1712, shortly after his arrival in Weimar, ends with an enthusiastic report about the multifaceted learning experience under Bach’s tutelage:
I shall report, according to your kind instruction, how I have used these funds and how I have duly arranged with my new teacher, Mr. Bach in Weimar, for a year’s board and tutelage. The traveling expense was between 25 and 26 florins, since the roads were very bad and I had to give the coachman almost twice the normal compensation. I gave 4 florins to Mr. Bach for half the month of April, since I was concerned that he might count the entire month as part of the year that now is to commence with the month of May. He had initially asked for 100 reichsthaler to cover the year, but I was able to lower it to 80 thlr., against which he will offer me board and tuition…. It is assuredly six hours per day of guidance that I am receiving, primarily in composition and on the keyboard, at times also on other instruments. The rest of the time I use by myself for practice and copying work, since he shares with me all the music I ask for. I am also at liberty to look through all of his pieces.51
Bach basically continued the practice he had grown up with in his parents’ home in Eisenach, where his father’s apprentices lived with the family while studying with and assisting their master. During Kräuter’s time in Weimar, Johann Martin Schubart, a pupil of Bach’s from Mühlhausen days, was also studying with Bach and may have been boarding with the family as well.52 After the Bachs moved to Cöthen and then to Leipzig, more than one live-in student-apprentice at any given time seems improbable, especially in view of the family’s growth.
Carl Philipp Emanuel remembered the Bach household during the Leipzig years as a “pigeonry,” with people swarming in and out all the time. He invoked that picture to help him explain to Forkel the dire lack of information about the simple facts of his father’s life, let alone his thoughts: “With his many activities he hardly had time for the most necessar
y correspondence, and accordingly would not indulge in lengthy written exchanges. But he had the more opportunity to talk personally to good people, since his house was like a pigeonry, and just as full of life. Association with him was pleasant for everyone, and often very edifying. Since he never wrote down anything about his life, the gaps are unavoidable.”53 What does come through clearly in Carl’s description, however, is the outgoing attitude of his father and the convivial and stimulating atmosphere he created, his taking the time to talk with people. Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach kept an open house where they welcomed many friends and colleagues from near and far. “No master of music,” the Hamburg Bach later recalled, “was apt to pass through this place [Leipzig] without making my father’s acquaintance and letting himself be heard by him.”54 Guests included some of the leading figures in contemporary German musical life, among them Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Jan Dismas Zelenka, Franz Benda, Johann Joachim Quantz, and the husband-and-wife team of Johann Adolph Hasse and the celebrated Faustina Bordoni, who came to Leipzig several times.55 Visits of individual musicians, such as that of the Dresden flutist Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, are usually undatable and reported only coincidentally, mostly for secondary reasons (Buffardin told Bach about meeting and teaching his brother, Johann Jacob, at Constantinople)56 or to make a particular point. For example, about the visit in the 1730s of the erstwhile royal Swedish court capellmeister, Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch, Forkel relates that this “conceited and arrogant clavier player” came to Leipzig not to hear Bach “but to let himself be heard. Bach received him kindly and politely, listened to his very indifferent performance with patience; and when Hurlebusch, on taking leave, made the eldest sons a present of a printed collection of sonatas, exhorting them to study them diligently (they who had studied very different things), Bach only smiled to himself and did not at all change his friendly behavior to the stranger.”57
When the Bachs entertained at home, they arranged for house concerts, when the occasion arose. Johann Elias Bach tells of such an incident in a letter draft where he mentions that Wilhelm Friedemann “was here for over four weeks, having made himself heard several times at our house along with the two famous lutenists Mr. [Silvius Leopold] Weiss and Mr. [Johann] Kropffgans” from Dresden.58 But the welcoming hospitality of the cantor and his wife surely extended beyond amusing their musical guests. What would their ample and costly supply of silverware have been used for other than dinner parties?59 What purpose would two silver coffee pots, big and small, a tea pot, and two sugar bowls, larger and smaller, with spoons (valued at over 65 talers), have served other than drinking coffee and tea with friends? What use would Bach have had for four tabatières (probably gifts, valued at over 54 talers) other than stuffing and smoking a pipe or taking snuff in a gregarious circle of colleagues and friends? When Bach retreated into the solitude of his composing studio, all by himself, he apparently preferred to do so with a bottle of brandy.
BALANCING OFFICIAL DUTIES AND PRIVATE BUSINESS
For the Bachs, living in the St. Thomas School building meant that the regular school rhythm governed much of their daily lives. As part of the cantor’s obligations, he, the rector, the conrector, and the tertius took turns as inspector for the week. The school regulations prescribed that
the Inspector conducts morning and evening prayers…. He see that the school is called at 6 A.M. in winter, at 5 A.M. in summer, and that fifteen minutes later all are assembled for prayers in the auditorium downstairs. He says prayers again at 8 P.M., and is careful to note that none is absent and that no lights are taken into the dormitories. At meals he must see that there is no boozing, that Grace is said in German before and after meal, and that the Bible or a history book is read during the repast. It is his duty to make sure that the scholars return in full number and at the proper hour from attending funerals, weddings, and especially the winter currende singing; particularly must he satisfy himself that none comes home having drunk too much…. The Inspector holds the key to the infirmary and visits the patients in it. Absence from his duty during the day entails a fine of four groschen, and at night of six.60
There was no way around the inspector’s service, so Bach had to take on this responsibility once a month throughout his twenty-seven-year tenure, a burden not exactly conducive to musical creativity. Largely parallel to the school rhythm, his own workday began at 5 A.M. (6 in winter), a lunch break came at 11, and dinner was held at 6 P.M. Even if he observed the 9 P.M. bedtime of the school dormitory—which he probably did not—his workday would have lasted fifteen to sixteen hours. With daily singing exercises from noon to 1 P.M.,61 private vocal and instrumental lessons (outside the academic lecture periods of 7–10 A.M. and 1–3 P.M.), and other obligations, he was caught in a tight schedule of the kind he had never before experienced. He surely had not been used to anything like it in his previous court positions at Weimar and Cöthen. But the unfamiliar discipline clearly did not deter him, for example, from his ambitious project of putting together a new and large repertoire of church music that would serve for decades to come. What Bach actually invested in the St. Thomas cantorate was known only to him and was certainly not measurable by the conventional means applied by his superiors, who thought he was cutting corners when he skipped a singing class or had a choral prefect take it over.62 Whatever reduction of his brutal schedule Bach managed to achieve—always at the expense of being considered irresponsible—the everyday obligations of his office remained as arduous as they were inexorable.
To some extent, the relentless school timetable is replicated in Bach’s own cantata production schedule, certainly during the periods when he engaged in weekly composition. The process from the beginning of the preparatory work to the performance of the completed piece followed a regular pattern:
Select or have selected (by clergy) the text (also arrange texts—approximately six per cantata booklet—and prepare about twelve such booklets per year for publication).
Compose choruses, arias, recitatives, and chorales—generally in that order (beginning on Monday, if not before);63 prepare the music paper and score, and write the more elaborate movements first, to allow enough time for copying and rehearsing.
Organize and supervise the copying effort to make performance parts (assemble the copyists around tables in the cantor’s office and the library).
Review the performance materials (proofread, correct, enter articulation and other performance markings).
Conduct rehearsals (generally no more than one complete read-through on Saturday).
This process was interrupted not only by teaching and being on duty every Friday from 7 to 8 A.M. for the weekly prayer service, but also by weddings and funerals. As a requirement of the city, the school had to participate in all public funerals. These took place after 3 P.M. so that instruction would not be hindered, with the number of participating students depending on the bereaved family’s ability to pay. For both students and teachers a major source of income, funerals involving the “Whole School” (all classes) were the most expensive, and those requiring a “Larger Half School” (prima, secunda, tertia, and quinta), a “Smaller Half School” (prima and tertia, or secunda and quarta), or a “Quarter School” (one of the lower classes) less costly. Independent of its size, the school choir was escorted by members of the faculty, who collected fees commensurate with their rank and function: for a Whole School, the rector received 1 taler, the conrector 8 groschen, the cantor 15 groschen, and so forth; for a Larger Half School, the rector was paid 15 groschen, the conrector 6 groschen, the cantor 1 taler; and for a Quarter School, the rector earned 1 groschen 6 pfennig, the conrector 3 pfennig, and the cantor 6 pfennig. The musical assignments varied according to what was ordered, from elaborate motets (such as “O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht,” BWV 118, dating from around 1736, with portable instruments for the funeral procession: 2 litui [special trumpets], cornetto, and 3 trombones)64 to simple unison chorales without accompaniment. Wedding cerem
onies, where school participation was not compulsory, occurred less frequently and were handled more flexibly. They also were divided into two categories: a full wedding Mass involved a cantata performance (BWV 34a, 120a, 195, and 197, for instance), while a half wedding Mass required only four-part chorales (BWV 250–252 represent a sample from after 1730). Altogether, funerals and weddings took up a considerable amount of time every week.
Considering these additional obligations, it is truly remarkable that Bach was able to manage, on the side, so to speak, such demanding activities as the directorship of the Collegium Musicum—if only after largely completing the cantata repertoire for the school—and practicing and preparing for recitals, let alone teaching private pupils. Those who came to him for private studio instruction fell into two groups: professional students, whom he usually taught in exchange for services and a modest fee, and wealthy amateurs, mostly from among aristocratic students at the university, who paid a hefty fee. The latter provided him with considerable extra income; for a keyboard lesson he gave in 1747 to Eugen Wenzel Count of Wrbna, Bach received 6 talers, or six times the highest fee charged for a funeral or wedding.65 In addition, he rented the count a clavier for several months at a monthly fee of 1 taler 8 groschen.
Bach kept a sizable collection of instruments in his home. His estate catalog lists no fewer than eight harpsichords, one pedal harpsichord, two lute claviers, one spinet, two violins, a piccolo violin, three violas, a Bassetchen (viola pomposa), two cellos, a viola da gamba, and a lute.66 Some of these instruments he needed for his own, his wife’s, and his children’s use, for instructional purposes, for performances at home, and for supplementing Collegium and church instruments. Others, however, especially keyboard instruments, were available for rent. A dunning letter to the Leipzig innkeeper Johann Georg Martius (or his son), who specialized in funeral and wedding parties, sheds light on Bach’s instrumentrental business. An obviously angry cantor wrote on March 20, 1748, to his debtor:
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