Unlike any of his predecessors or successors, Bach never needed to depend entirely on his appointment as cantor and music director at St. Thomas’s. His stature as a keyboard virtuoso without peer, a widely recognized organological expert, an accomplished composer versed in all musical genres, an experienced leader of high-profile performances, and a sought-after private teacher—all buttressed by his titles of distinguished court capellmeister and court composer—provided him with a choice of outside options and guaranteed him considerable latitude in conducting his Leipzig office. This freedom allowed him to subordinate the cantorate’s established functions to his own interests. At times he demanded the utmost of his singers and instrumentalists by performing church music of unprecedented complexity, and at other times he scaled back his activities by programming less taxing works, mostly by other composers. The same freedom allowed him time off to pursue other professional activities and, if necessary, call on substitutes to take over school duties and direct church performances. Atypically for his time, Bach had managed throughout his career to carry out several projects at once, ranging from those that enhanced the scope of his position to those entirely outside his official obligations but consistent with the pursuit of his own artistic goals.
The award in 1736 of the prestigious title Electoral Saxon and Royal Polish Court Compositeur, which carried no specific obligations but gave Bach the stamp of royal approval with the privileges of courtly affiliation and protection, pleased him to a degree that cannot be overestimated. The honorary title emphatically recognized Bach’s calling and accomplishments as composer, and at that point in his career, this aspect of his musicianship meant more to him than any other. Organ and clavier virtuoso, capellmeister, cantor and music director—these activities had played an important role in his professional life and, to be sure, continued to do so, though on a reduced scale (even his resumption of the Collegium directorship in 1739 lasted only for some three years, and his public appearances as a keyboard performer became rare).4 What never changed were the time and effort spent at his desk in his composing room, in the southwest corner on the second floor of the St. Thomas School building, where little could disturb him.
Here at his desk, Bach was surrounded by shelves bearing the bulk and weight of the products of his creative mind, forcefully affirming the notion that his primary calling was that of a composer. This view was strengthened when he looked at the compositions by his ancestors that had found their way into a collection he maintained. Carl Philipp Emanuel, who later inherited this material, called it the Old-Bach Archive, a term the father may already have coined. The Archive contained most of the surviving compositions produced by the older generations of the Wechmar line Bach family (see Table 1.1), notably works of Johann (4), Heinrich (6), Christoph (13), and Michael (14). It happened that Bach amassed the Archive at about the time that he witnessed, with pride, his older sons leaving the parental home and taking up careers as professional musicians in their own right. It became obvious that the stream of “members of the Bach family who have excelled in practical music”5 would continue in the younger generation. It was in this setting, in about 1735, that Bach undertook a careful documentation of both a family tree and a Genealogy that contained a brief commentary on each male member—virtually all of them musicians—to complement the Archive. Bach, at the age of fifty, was opening a broad historical spectrum that induced him to look in two directions: the musical past of the family and its future—ancestors on one side and his own children on the other—with himself in the middle. The past, present, and future of the family tangibly mirrored the past, present, and future of music within his realm and reach. His own music would now serve as a foundation for the music of the new generation, which also included his students. The gradual “changing of the guard” may have helped Bach gain a sound balance between deliberately distancing himself from official duties and intensifying his compositional introspection. So he embarked on a journey of reflection to critically survey his major works and set the stage for such large-scale projects as The Art of Fugue and the B-minor Mass.
Still, Bach was no dissociated or estranged character who isolated himself in his composing studio: he took on, for example, more instrument projects in the 1740s than ever before. He tested the new organ by Johann Scheibe of Leipzig for St. John’s, a church (no longer standing) surrounded by the large municipal cemetery just outside Leipzig’s walls. The instrument (with twenty-two stops on two manuals and pedal) was dedicated in December 1743 and “deemed flawless by Capellmeister Bach and Mr. Zacharias Hildebrandt, after the strictest examination that an organ was perhaps ever subjected to.”6 Bach collaborated again with Hildebrandt on a new instrument for St. Wenceslas’s Church in Naumburg, the largest organ design and construction project of the Leipzig organ builder’s career. For four days in late September 1746, Bach and Gottfried Silbermann examined the instrument (with fifty-three stops on three manuals and pedal) and wrote a highly favorable report for the Naumburg town council.7
Throughout the decade, Bach maintained an intense professional life on several fronts and cultivated his many musical and social contacts. He had outstanding private students, notably Johann Friedrich Agricola, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Johann Christoph Altnickol, Johann Christian Kittel, and Johann Gottfried Müthel—all of whom later assumed influential musical positions and, through their own teachings and writings, solidified the tradition of a “Bach School.” Bach’s reputation, gregarious character, and discursive manner lured many a musician and musical connoisseur to make contact with him, and the bustling life of the commercial city and university town offered plentiful opportunities for such relationships. Tangible evidence for these contacts survives in the form of short album entries, for which Bach invariably chose a canon in enigmatic notation. Only three of these dedicatory canons are dated: BWV 1075 of 1734 for an unknown visitor, BWV 1077 of 1747 for the theology student Johann Gottfried Fulde, and BWV 1078 of 1749 for a person by the name of Faber.8 These and other such contrapuntal pieces shed light on the atmosphere in which these encounters took place, in that they induced the learned composer to challenge his visitors with simple-looking yet complex vignettes of musical logic. Although we can identify few of the musical gentlemen undoubtedly held spellbound by his scholarship and artistry, we do know that the young composer and theorist Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg—most likely on his return from Paris to Berlin between 1747 and 1749—spent time with Bach and consulted with him on fugal composition.9 The visit, which must have occurred just when Bach was preparing his Art of Fugue for publication, was apparently a crucial background event for Marpurg’s planning of his two-volume essay Abhandlung von der Fuge of 1753–54—the first-ever systematic treatise on fugal composition—which in many ways takes Bach’s Art of Fugue as a point of departure. Marpurg’s Leipzig visit and personal exposure to the old fugue master explains why the Bach heirs turned to him in 1752 for writing a preface to the second edition of The Art of Fugue, thereby tying the practical tour de force with the theoretical one.
In June 1747, Lorenz Christoph Mizler passed through his old stomping grounds, on his way from Erfurt, where he took his doctorate in medicine, to Warsaw, where he would work mainly as a practicing physician. During his stopover in Leipzig, he finally managed to persuade his former teacher, the Thomascantor, to join the Society of Musical Science, a loose association of intellectually minded musicians that Mizler had founded in 1738. Bach became the fourteenth member of this exclusive corresponding society,10 which aimed at fostering contacts among the regular members by mailing twice a year, at around Easter and St. Michael’s Day, a circular containing musical news, essays, and practical and theoretical works contributed or selected by the membership. Bach made quick use of this convenient means of communication among colleagues. In the packet mailed from Leipzig after St. Michael’s Day 1747, he sent around copies of the Triple Canon for six voices, BWV 1076, the piece depicted on the Hausmann portrait and also issued by Bach as a separate
print. Father Meinrad Spiess of the Benedictine Abbey of Yrsee in southern Germany, a member of the society, attached a copy of BWV 1076 (one of only two that survive) to his working exemplar of his own treatise on practical musical composition.11 Spiess probably found in the same circular a copy of the Musical Offering, BWV 1079, for Mizler had reported to him on September 1: “On my return by way of Leipzig spoke to Capellmeister Bach, who told me of his Berlin journey and the story of the fugue he played before the king, which will shortly be engraved in copper and a copy of which will appear in the packet of the Society. I have already seen the beginning of it.”12 Later, Bach mailed the Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch,” BWV 769, “fully worked out,” as Mizler testifies in a concluding paragraph to Bach’s Obituary. He also presented to the society a reprint of the canon BWV 1076, and, according to Mizler, “he would undoubtedly have done much more had not the shortness of time—he was member for only three years—prevented him from doing so.”13
Mizler makes no mention, however, of a conflict Bach had with Johann Gottlieb Biedermann, rector of the gymnasium in Freiberg, which erupted in 1749 over the role of music and musicians at Latin schools and which created a major stir well beyond the Saxon borders and also touched the society’s interests. The conflict resulted from a performance at the gymnasium of a singspiel composed by Bach’s former student Johann Friedrich Doles, cantor at Freiberg (and Bach’s second successor as Thomascantor). Under the heading De Vita musica (Of Musical Life), Biedermann published a school pamphlet in May 1749 in which he took pleasure in referring to all musicians, without exception, as depraved and wicked. The article, sent to Leipzig probably by Doles himself, infuriated Bach. He commissioned the organist, writer, and instrument maker Christoph Gottlieb Schröter of Nordhausen, with whom he had been in contact for over thirty years, to review and refute the Biedermann piece, and offered to get the review published “in the learned journals”—an allusion to Mizler’s Musikalische Bibliothek. Schröter, likewise a member of the Society of Musical Science, accepted the task, acknowledging that the pamphlet’s “principal aim, despite its title, was not at all directed to the praise of music and its kindred arts” but openly revealed the rector’s “unfriendly attitude toward the innocent art of music.” In a letter of December 10, 1749, to another colleague, Georg Friedrich Einike of Frankenhausen, Bach stated that “Schröter’s criticism is well written, and to my taste, and will soon make its appearance in print.” He concluded, almost surely with a sidelong glance at Thomasrector Ernesti, with the bitingly sarcastic remark that, with further refutations to be expected, “the rector’s dirty ear will be cleansed and made more fit to listen to music.”14 The remark was also a kind of pun: the term for “dirty ear,” Dreck-ohr, resembles that for “rector” (Rec-dor) as pronounced in the Saxon dialect. Some details of the affair were reported in 1751 by Johann Mattheson, who also included Bach’s derogatory pun with the fastidious comment (in French): “A base and disgusting expression, unworthy of a Capellmeister; a poor allusion to the word rector.”15
Bach let himself be drawn even more deeply into the matter and, in some ways, managed to make the Biedermann affair very much his own case. Despite the statement about Schröter’s “well-written” review, he considered it much too mild. He therefore added his own sharp-tongued comment on the text and, as Einike later reported,
sent on a few copies of the said review, but in such form that…it no longer resembled Mr. Schröter’s original in the least but had many additions and many changes. Mr. Schröter, when he saw this gruesome mixture, could not help being offended about it and…bade me inform Mr. Bach “that the violent changes made in his criticism had offended him deeply” further, “that his consolation in the matter was that no reader who was familiar with his way of writing or thinking, from other sources, could consider him the author of such a mixture, not to mention the unhappy title Christian Reflections upon, etc.”
Although no copy of the review with Bach’s hot-tempered emendations and the unauthorized heading “Christian Reflections” has turned up, it is easy to imagine that what affected Bach’s sensitivities so strongly and provoked his apparently unmeasured response was a matter of school politics. Given the parallels between the Freiberg and Leipzig situations, specifically between the rectors Biedermann and Ernesti, Bach felt that he had to throw his weight behind a defense of the cantorate. He may have tried to explain just that to his irritated colleague in Nordhausen, Schröter, who complained to Einike on June 5, 1750—less than two months before the Thomascantor’s death—that “Capellmeister Bach remains at fault, no matter how he twists or turns, now or in the future.” While intending a counterattack on Biedermann’s assault, Bach had unintentionally managed to insult his own ally.
Bach’s principled defense of the cantorate squares well with his position in the prefect dispute of the late 1730s, even to the extent that in both cases his ardor led him to get carried away and overshoot the mark. Despite his often negative experiences, Bach had the highest esteem for his school and church offices throughout his Leipzig tenure. And it seems that when he self-consciously steered his own course, he did so in justice to himself, to his cantorate, and, by extension, to his function as capellmeister and his calling as composer. Hence, he saw no conflict in the 1730s between school and church on the one hand and the Collegium Musicum on the other, nor in the balancing act of administering the cantorate and pursuing his compositional interests. In the 1740s, these interests ranged conceptually and stylistically from the commissioned 1742 burlesque cantata “Mer han en neue Oberkeet,” BWV 212, with a comical text written in dialect, to the introspective and abstract contrapuntal perspectives of The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, an entirely self-determined project.
The number of commissioned works originating from the 1740s is understandably very small, since Bach had few incentives to seek them after he gave up the Collegium directorship, and little opportunity to perform vocal compositions outside the Leipzig churches. Bach seems also to have reduced his public appearances for keyboard and chamber performances, at least during the second half of the 1740s. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Sonnenkalb, a choral scholar at St. Thomas’s who was close to the Bach family, reported in 1759 that “this great artist did not let himself commonly be heard outside of his own house; but there concerts were held quite often.” He also relates that those performances involved not only the two youngest sons but also their older step-brothers, when they visited, and Bach’s assistant and later son-in-law Altnickol.16 Guest performances outside Leipzig were even rarer, but we must assume that any travels by Bach, notably the two trips to Berlin in 1741 and 1747, were undertaken with official invitations.
We know about the first of those trips only because Bach wrote from Berlin to his family at the beginning of August 1741 and Johann Elias Bach wrote him there on August 5 and 9.17 He had returned by August 25, in time for the performance of the cantata for the city council election. The Berlin sojourn may have been related to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s employ in the court capelle of Friedrich II, who had acceded to the Prussian throne in 1740. An official court visit, which Bach may well have envisioned in planning the journey, did not materialize. Bach apparently stayed with the physician Georg Ernst Stahl, privy councillor at the court and a family friend,18 who seems to have played a role in arranging for the trip and whose house was located on Unter den Linden, the avenue in the center of Berlin that led up to the royal palace. Though Bach was not granted an encounter with the king, he must have met Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, the king’s chamberlain and, like the king, an accomplished flutist: an early manuscript copy of the Flute Sonata in E major, BWV 1035, bears the remark “after the [lost] autograph by the composer, which was written anno 17, when he was at Potsdam, for privy chamberlain Fredersdorff.”19 The digits missing from the year can be filled in to read either 1741 or 1747, but considering Bach’s tight schedule in 1747 and also for stylistic reasons, 1741 is the more plausible date.
The second tri
p to Berlin and Potsdam in May 1747 turned into one of the most important events of Bach’s life. It was also the high-water mark of his public recognition when German newspapers in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and probably elsewhere picked up the official Potsdam press release of May 11:
One hears from Potsdam that last Sunday [May 7] the famous Capellmeister from Leipzig, Mr. Bach, arrived with the intention to have the pleasure of hearing the excellent Royal music there. In the evening, at about the time when the regular chamber music in the Royal apartments usually begins, His Majesty was informed that Capellmeister Bach had arrived at Potsdam and was waiting in His Majesty’s antechamber for His Majesty’s most gracious permission to listen to the music. His August self immediately gave orders that Bach be admitted, and went, at his entrance, to the so-called Forte et Piano, condescending also to play, in His Most August Person and without any preparation, a theme for the Capellmeister Bach, which he should execute in a fugue. This was done so happily by the aforementioned Capellmeister that not only His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment. Mr. Bach found the theme propounded to him so exceedingly beautiful that he intends to set it down on paper as a regular fugue and have it engraved on copper. On Monday, the famous man let himself be heard on the organ in the Church of the Holy Spirit at Potsdam and earned general acclaim from the listeners attending in great number. In the evening, His Majesty charged him again with the execution of a fugue, in six parts, which he accomplished just as skillfully as on the previous occasion, to the pleasure of His Majesty and to the general admiration.20
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