Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  The change in the overall financial situation could hardly have escaped capellmeister Bach. Although from a global perspective the music budget showed little variance, the results in absolute terms were more than alarming. The membership of the capelle decreased—mainly by deaths and attrition—from seventeen salaried musicians in 1717–18 to fourteen in 1722–23. After Bach’s new hires, Vetter and Fischer, left in 1720, no proper replacements were made (see Table 7.1). Two years later, in June 1722, the court flutist and director of the town pipers, Johann Gottlieb Würdig, also left the capelle—probably not voluntarily, for it looks as though Bach had to fire him. Würdig’s salary had previously been reduced three times for disciplinary reasons, once because he chose not to show up for the New Year’s music in 1719 and twice for irregular rehearsal attendance. Again, Bach was apparently prevented from replacing Würdig. Instead, Johann David Kelterbrunnen, not a musician, was hired by the court as dancing master. There being no evidence of Bach’s advocacy for such a position, might this have been a sign (or interpreted by Bach as such) of the influence of the amusa princess? At the beginning of his capellmeistership, Bach was able to add members to the capelle and, by 1718–19, to achieve a net gain, yet now he had to preside over net losses. The period of modest growth for the Cöthen capelle was indeed short, and even though the budget for the court music showed no real downturn until 1721–22, Bach must have seen the handwriting on the wall, or else he would not have considered, in late 1720, the organist post at Hamburg’s St. Jacobi Church as a possible alternative. A period of genuine financial and personnel retrenchment at the court began in 1721, coinciding, in Bach’s perception, with the end of his patron’s bachelorhood.

  There is another way of looking at the financial picture of the Cöthen court music, from a perspective that was certainly not Bach’s. At the beginning of his tenure, Bach’s salary of 400 talers represented almost exactly one-fifth of the music budget, while the salary of the next-highest paid musician, Joseph Spieß, amounted to one-tenth of the budget (the chamber musicians’ salaries were all around 150 talers, and the other capelle members earned a mere fraction of that, down to an annual pay of 32 talers). Considering that the personnel costs represented the bulk of the musical expenses and that toward the end of his residential period as Cöthen capellmeister the combined salaries for Bach and his wife (700 talers) made up as much as a third of the entire budget, we must ask whether Bach may have miscalculated the financial flexibility of his revered patron. The princely singer Anna Magdalena Bach was not only the first full-time female member of the capelle, she was also the highest paid court musician after the capellmeister, earning twice as much as the chamber musicians. Her salary of 300 talers would easily have funded two or three highly qualified instrumentalists, and had Bach chosen to follow that course, he would have maintained the original personnel strength of the capelle. Perhaps he gambled that Anna Magdalena’s appointment would not adversely affect the personnel budget. He certainly would not have realized that this appointment exhausted Leopold’s financial latitude within the narrow margins he had for indulging in personal inclinations (of which music was but one),41 as well as displays of Baroque courtly splendor. Leopold also faced family pressures and intrigues, involving particularly the princess mother Gisela Agnes (who survived Leopold by more than eleven years) and, increasingly, his younger brother and successor, Prince August Ludwig.42

  It fits well into the picture of an economizing Prince Leopold that he declined to appoint a new capellmeister after Bach departed for Leipzig in May 1723; nor was the court singer Anna Magdalena Bach replaced. Instead, engagements of outside musicians increased significantly, reaching a level higher than ever before: eleven guest performances in 1724 and nine in 1725. The court capelle was now led by Bach’s longtime deputy, Joseph Spieß, who kept the title Premier Cammer Musicus but was not promoted to concertmaster. In a formal sense, Bach remained the actual princely Cöthen capellmeister and officially continued to bear the title—more than a mere token of the high esteem in which he was held by Prince Leopold. Indeed, the prestige and reputation of the sovereign of a minor principality might well have profited from the fact that the new cantor and music director at St. Thomas’s simultaneously carried the title of princely Anhalt-Cöthen capellmeister in the city of Leipzig. The warm personal relationship between Bach and his assiduously musical patron appears not to have changed, nor was the capellmeistership just a title. Not only was Bach prominently represented among the later guest performers, he continued to write works for Cöthen; on a more personal level, he dedicated a copy of his first printed keyboard work, the Partita in B-flat major from the Clavier-Übung, BWV 825, to the princely family at the birth on September 12, 1726, of the firstborn to Prince Leopold and his second wife, Charlotte Friederica Wilhelmine of Nassau-Siegen, and included a poem in honor of Emanuel Ludwig, the princely baby.43

  Bach first returned to Cöthen in July 1724 for a performance that also involved Anna Magdalena for which the two together received 60 talers; also engaged for the guest performance was the organist Johann Schneider of Saalfeld and the tenor Carl Friedrich Vetter, once a member of the Cöthen capelle.44 The next documented visit, again with Anna Magdalena, relates to the birthdays in December 1725 of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold, at which “the Leipzig Cantor Bach and his wife…gave a number of performances.”45 In all likelihood, the capellmeister returned to his former place of work at least once a year, but the only other known visit took place in January 1728, apparently in conjunction with the New Year’s Day festivities. It was probably the last time Prince Leopold heard Bach perform, for he died on November 19 of that year, a few weeks before his thirty-fourth birthday.

  Nearly five years after having left the Cöthen court service, Bach paid his beloved former patron final honors when he composed and performed—with Anna Magdalena, son Wilhelm Friedemann, and musicians from Halle, Leipzig, Merseburg, Zerbst, Dessau, and Güsten—the music for the state funeral that took place four months after the prince’s death, on Wednesday and Thursday, March 23–24, 1729. The two compositions have not survived, but the court records specify that the first piece (BC B21)—described as lasting “a considerable time”—was performed at the 10 P.M. service on Wednesday in the illuminated reformed town church and cathedral St. Jacobi, whose walls were veiled in black.46 The music began on the arrival in the church of the funeral procession, following the horse-drawn hearse with the princely casket, but nothing is known about its genre, scoring, or character. After the performance, the short service continued with a prayer, the congregational hymn “Nun lasset uns den Leib begrab’n,” the entombment in the family crypt, and the benediction, followed by another hymn, “Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr.”

  The libretto for the second and apparently larger work, “Klagt, Kinder, klagt es aller Welt,” BWV 244a (BC B22), performed the following morning at the memorial service in the same church, was written by Bach’s Leipzig poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, alias Picander. It describes an elaborate work of twenty-four movements divided into four sections, to be integrated into the lengthy memorial service, at the center of which stood a sermon on Psalm 68:21, “Wir haben einen Gott, der da hilft, und einen Herrn, der vom Tod errettet” (We have one God of salvation and one Lord, who rescues us from death), a verse Bach also set as the opening to section II of his funeral music. The lost music borrowed two movements from the 1727 Tombeau, BWV 198, for Christiane Eberhardine, saxon electoress and queen of Poland, as well as seven arias and two choruses from the St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, of the same year. Although we have no information on the changes incorporated by Bach in reworking the borrowed music, the parody models provide a reliable sense of the work’s general scale and character. And that Bach turned to the greatest work he had composed till then, the St. Matthew Passion, shows his desire to pay homage to his revered prince with the best music of which he was capable.

  TRAVELS AND TRIALS

  Cöthen’s location within
the mostly rural territory of the small principality and a good distance away from any city of size would certainly have created a sense of isolation and narrowness for anyone. Even for Bach, who by 1717 had had only short brushes with larger cities such as Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Hamburg, and Lübeck, Cöthen was much smaller and more remote than either Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, or Weimar. However, as the principal mail-coach line from Hamburg to Leipzig via Magdeburg led through the little princely residential town, often mockingly dubbed “Cow Cöthen,” residents could see an inviting and convenient prospect for escape. Bach must have welcomed the opportunity to travel more than ever before; in any case, he took more trips while in Cöthen than he did in any other five-year period of his life. His professional travels, both in the service of the court and on his own, contributed to his musical, social, and cultural experience while they also expanded his political and geographic horizons (see Table 7.5). A survey of his travels readily illustrates that Bach’s life, lived within narrow geographic confines, was very different from that of the cosmopolitan Handel, for example, his compatriot of the same age. Yet the strictures did not foster an attitude of provincialism on Bach’s part, especially when it came to the requirements of his “trade,” musical performance and musical science. On the contrary, just as he was ready to face any challenge by Louis Marchand, he was even more curious and eager to meet George Frideric Handel.

  Bach first attempted to meet Handel in June 1719 by making a trip to nearby Halle, Handel’s hometown. We know about this trip only through what Forkel called a “very just and equitable estimate of Bach’s and Handel’s respective merits,” published anonymously in 1788. That author, who could hardly have been anyone other than Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, takes issue with a question asked after Bach’s death by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, with reference to Louis Marchand’s “defeat” by Bach:

  “Did not the great Handel avoid every occasion of coming together with the late Bach, that phoenix of composition and improvisation, or of having anything to do with him?” etc. And the commentary is: Handel came three times from England to Halle: the first time about 1719, the second time in the thirties, and the third time in 1752 or 1753. On the first occasion, Bach was Capellmeister in Cöthen, twenty short miles from Halle. He learned of Handel’s presence in the latter place and immediately set out by stage coach and rode to Halle. The very day he arrived, Handel left. On the second occasion, Bach unfortunately had a fever. Since he was therefore unable to travel to Halle himself, he at once sent his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to extend a most courteous invitation to Handel. Friedemann visited Handel, and received the answer that he could not come to Leipzig, and regretted it very much. (J. S. B. was at that time already in Leipzig, which is also only twenty miles from Halle.) On the third occasion, J. S. was already dead. So Handel, it seems, was not as curious as J. S. B., who once in his youth walked at least 250 miles to hear the famous organist in Lübeck, Buxtehude. All the more did it pain J. S. B. not to have known Handel, that really great man whom he particularly respected.47

  TABLE 7.5. Bach’s Professional Travels, 1703–50a

  Altenburg

  1739 (organ examination)

  Arnstadt

  1703 (organ examination)

  Berlin

  1719 (harpsichord purchase); 1741, 1747 (guest performances at court: keyboard)

  Carlsbad

  1718, 1720 (with Prince Leopold and members of the Cöthen court capelle)

  Cassel

  1732 (organ examination, accompanied by Anna Magdalena)

  Cöthen

  1724, 1725 (guest performances, with Anna Magdalena); 1728 (guest performance); 1729 (guest performance at Prince Leopold’s funeral, with Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann)

  Dresden

  1717 (contest with Marchand); 1725, 1731 (organ recitals at St. Sophia’s); 1733 (dedication, Missa BWV 232); 1736 (organ recital at Our Lady’s), 1738, 1741 (purpose unknown)

  Erfurt

  1716 (organ examination)

  Gera

  1724 (organ examination)

  Gotha

  1717 (guest performance: Passion)

  Halle

  1713 (audition); 1716 (organ examination); 1719 (failed attempt at meeting Handel)

  Hamburg

  1720 (audition)

  Langewiesen

  1706 (organ examination)

  Leipzig

  1717 (organ examination, St. Paul’s Church); 1723 (audition)

  Lübeck

  1704–5 (Buxtehude’s Abendmusic, etc.)

  Mühlhausen

  1707 (audition); 1709, 1710 (guest performances: town council election cantata); 1735 (organ examination)

  Naumburg

  1746 (organ examination, St. Wenceslaus’s)

  Potsdam

  1747 (guest performance at court: keyboard)

  Sangerhausen

  1702 (audition)

  Schleiz

  1721 (guest performance at court)

  Traubach

  1712 (organ examination)

  Weimar

  1708 (organ recital, palace church)

  Weissenfels

  1713 (guest performance at court: BWV 208); 1725 (guest performance: BWV 249a); 1729 (guest performance); 1739 (purpose unknown, with Anna Magdalena)

  Zerbst

  1722 (guest performance at court)

  Destination unknown:

  1729 (absent from Leipzig for 3 weeks, before March 20); 1736 (absent for 2 weeks, after July 17)

  While there is no evidence whatsoever that Handel deliberately avoided Bach, the assumption that one was “not as curious” as the other is probably correct.

  Earlier in 1719, Bach had been in Berlin to acquire a new harpsichord for the Cöthen princely court that had been ordered from Michael Mietke, court instrument maker in Berlin, who was famous for building fine, elegantly decorated harpsichords. Possibly Bach had previously visited Berlin in order to commission the instrument, but on March 1 the court treasury advanced him 130 talers “for the harpsichord built in Berlin and travel expenses.”48 We can deduce that the harpsichord arrived in Cöthen on or shortly before March 14, because that day the chamber valet and copyist of the capelle, Gottschalck, was reimbursed for 8 talers cartage “for the Berlin Claveçyn” (which no longer exists, but was still listed in an 1784 capelle inventory as “the grand harpsichord with 2 manuals, by Michael Mietke in Berlin, 1719; defect”). The dates suggest that Bach stayed in Berlin for a week to ten days, a period that afforded him the opportunity to make various contacts and also to perform at the Prussian court. Appropriate connections could easily have been made for him by those of his Cöthen colleagues who, six years ago, had left the court capelle of King Friedrich I of Prussia. Here he most likely met Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, brother of the deceased king and youngest son of the “grand elector,” Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. The margrave maintained his own small capelle in Berlin, whose members likely remained in touch with their former colleagues now in Cöthen.49 And it was Margrave Christian Ludwig for whom, two years later, Bach assembled Six Concerts avec plusieurs Instruments, the Brandenburg Concertos. As a matter of fact, Bach reveals unmistakably in his 1721 preface of the dedication score that he had indeed played for the margrave two years earlier:

  As I had a couple of years ago the pleasure of appearing before Your Royal Highness, by virtue of Your Highness’s commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the small talents that Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honor me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my composition: I have then in accordance with Your Highness’s most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments.50

  Just as Bach successfully managed to combine both princely and personal business in Berlin, the trip’s main purpose—purchasing a new state-o
f-the-art harpsichord for the Cöthen court—also greatly benefited him both officially and personally: as princely capellmeister on the one hand and as keyboard virtuoso on the other. This kind of dual support and patronage from the court was, after all, also in the best interest of the prince. An extraordinary musician in his service would only shed glory on the princely court, and even if Bach traveled by himself and performed at other courts, he would do so as the capellmeister of the prince of Anhalt-Cöthen.

  There were two special occasions on which the prince found himself in a position to showcase Bach and the elite ensemble abroad, both times at Carlsbad (today’s Karlovy Vary) in northwestern Bohemia, some 130 miles south of Cöthen. Of feeble health since age twenty-one, Prince Leopold followed the advice of his physician, Dr. Gottfried Weber,51 to take the waters at this fashionable spa. Its saliferous medicinal springs were said to have been discovered in the fourteenth century by Emperor Carl IV, who had then chartered the town. However, its development and promotion as an elegant health and vacation resort emerged only in 1711, when the newly crowned Emperor Carl VI and his family began their regular summer visits from Vienna to the “imperial spa” at the Bohemian shoulder of the Ore Mountains. Carlsbad then quickly attracted the upper echelons of the European aristocracy, many of whom stayed there for a major part of the summer season.52 Prince Leopold visited only twice, in 1718 and 1720, but remained each time for over a month.