Johann Sebastian Bach (10 page)

According to the Obituary, this vocal concerto, which required the combined forces of the Latin school's chorus musicus, the town music company, and the court capelle, originated before 1680. If Sebastian did not actually participate in a performance in Eisenach, there would have been numerous opportunities for him to hear and perform other music of his renowned relative. Because Ambrosius was not a composer, as far as we know, Johann Christoph Bach's possibly latent influence takes on seminal importance. In the 1690s, he was the only figure of stature in Eisenach who could be identified with the creation of exciting new music, and he was also not afraid of daring something unusual (“he had the courage to use the augmented sixth”). Christoph seems to have fascinated the young boy through his compositions and, in particular, through his activities as organist.

Christoph Bach's significance as a keyboard virtuoso can hardly be judged on the basis of his surviving works for organ and harpsichord, which do not measure up in either quantity or quality to his vocal oeuvre.
³¹
In fact, his particular strength may well have been improvisation, and he may not have been interested in committing the results of his extemporaneous performances to paper. Again, Sebastian's father is not known to have been an expert keyboard player (although he certainly possessed at least basic skills), and so Ambrosius's cousin Christoph must have provided a most natural source of inspiration for the art of organ and harpsichord playing. Sebastian's good relations with some of Christoph's sons even after their father's death in 1703 speak for the closeness of his relationship with their father; for example, Sebastian's Eisenach classmate Johann Friedrich, Christoph's third son, would succeed him in 1708 in Mühlhausen.

The town organist was responsible for the service music at three of Eisenach's churches, St. George's, St. Nicholas's, and St. Anne's, and also for the maintenance of the churches' instruments. Both tasks kept him and his assistants busy, especially since the large organ at St. George's was in a notoriously bad state of repair. The other two churches owned relatively new instruments, St. Nicholas's dating from 1625 and St. Anne's from 1665. The organ at St. George's, by comparison, dated from 1576 and was enlarged and renovated three times before Johann Christoph Bach's arrival in 1665. Further repairs were carried out then, but by 1678 deficiencies had cropped up again. In 1691, Christoph submitted plans for an entirely new instrument, but only in 1697 was a contract signed with organ builder Georg Christoph Sterzing of Ohrdruf, at the price of two thousand florins. Final design plans for an organ of unprecedented size (fifty-eight stops on four manuals and pedal) were prepared by Bach in 1698, and what amounted to the largest organ project ever undertaken in Thuringia began to be realized soon thereafter. The work had to proceed in stages, and Bach was pleased to report in 1701 that “the new organ more and more reaches the state of completion.” Sadly, he himself was never able to play the finished instrument, which was not dedicated until 1707, four years after his death.
³²

All during the 1690s, Sterzing and Christoph Bach were more or less constantly busy fixing the old instrument with its three manuals
(Oberwerk, Rückpositiv, Brustwerk)
and pedal. This activity took place at a time when the boy Sebastian could well have been around to crawl behind the organ's facade and observe what was happening inside; here he would have seen metal and wooden pipes, wind chests, trackers, bellows, and other components of a large-scale mechanical instrument whose complexity was unsurpassed by any other machine in the seventeenth century. Where else but here were the seeds sown for a lifelong fascination with organ design and technology? Moreover, Sterzing, who kept his workshop in Ohrdruf until 1697, remained accessible to Sebastian when he, too, lived there from 1695. A little over twenty years after Sebastian had left the Eisenach Latin school, in 1716, Sterzing and Johann Georg Schröter completed a new organ for the Augustinerkirche in Erfurt, and one of the two examiners brought in to test the instrument on behalf of the church consistory was the most respected organ expert in Thuringia at the time, the concertmaster and court organist to the duke of Saxe-Weimar, Johann Sebastian Bach.

 

Street map of Ohrdruf in a drawing (c. 1710) showing the vicinity of St. Michael's, with Lang Gasse (where Johann Christoph Bach lived), Schul Gasse (location of the Lyceum), the Ohra River, and Ehrenstein Castle (lower right corner).

OHRDRUF, 1695–1700

I
N THE
C
ARE OF
H
IS
O
LDER
B
ROTHER

Johann Sebastian turned nine in March 1694, and shortly thereafter began in the
quarta
of the Latin school. But just about three weeks after Easter (which fell on April 11), his mother died at the age of fifty. We do not know the cause of her death, or whether it was preceded by illness. The plain entry in the death register (“May 3, 1694. Buried, Johann Ambrosius Bach's wife—without fee”),
¹
the sole reference to the end of Elisabeth Bach's life, does not even remotely hint at the gravity of the emotional responses or the wider implications of this catastrophic event for either Ambrosius Bach's family in general or its youngest member in particular. Ambrosius himself, forty-nine years old, bereaved of his wife of twenty-six years and left with three young children, surely found himself in desperate straits. Just one year earlier he had lost his twin brother, Christoph
(12)
, court and town musician in Arnstadt. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's annotation in the family Genealogy, based on what he must have heard from his father, gives a touching account of the close relationship between the twins:

 

These twins are perhaps the only ones of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely. They looked so much alike that even their wives could not tell them apart. They were an object of wonder on the part of great gentlemen and everyone who saw them. Their speech, their way of thinking—everything was the same. In music, too, they were not to be told apart: they played alike and thought out their performances in the same way. If one fell ill the other did, too. In short, the one died soon after the other.
²

 

Ambrosius may well have believed that after the deaths of his brother and especially his wife, his own end would not be far away. Nevertheless, as other sorely afflicted members of the family had done before, he found a pragmatic way out of his misery. He remembered Barbara Margaretha, the thirty-five-year-old widow of his first cousin Johann Günther Bach
(15)
of Arnstadt and daughter of the Arnstadt burgomaster (mayor) Caspar Keul. Left pregnant with their daughter, Catharina Margaretha, Margaretha Bach had remarried in 1684. With her second husband, Jacobus Bartholomaei, deacon at the New Church in Arnstadt and her senior by almost thirty years, she had another daughter, Christina Maria, in September 1685. But Bartholomaei died only three years later, and Margaretha, widowed again, was now left with two young daughters.
³
Ambrosius Bach, always keeping close ties with his many Arnstadt relatives, proposed and was accepted. The wedding ceremony was performed in Eisenach on November 27, 1694, though not in the church but at the home of the widower,
⁴
then a common practice for remarriages. Johann Sebastian would follow the same tradition when he remarried in Cöthen.

The family of Ambrosius Bach now included Margaretha's two daughters, ages twelve and ten. In the meantime, Elisabeth Bach's twelve-year-old step-grandson, Johann Nicolaus Bach, who had lived with Ambrosius's family for many years and spent four years in the
sexta
,
⁵
left Eisenach in 1694, probably soon after Elisabeth's death.
⁶
The timing of Ambrosius's second marriage was such that he and his new wife with their two sets of children—Marie Salome, Johann Jacob, Johann Sebastian, Catharina Margaretha, and Christina Maria—could look forward to a Christmas season that would help draw the reconstituted family more closely together. Yet there was hardly any time to establish a normal life, as Ambrosius soon fell seriously ill and died on February 20, 1695—just two days before his fiftieth birthday and “twelve weeks and one day,” as Margaretha put it, into their marriage. We learn from the widow's petition for a bounty that there were hefty expenses for medicine and drugs, suggesting that Ambrosius may have suffered from a protracted illness. He was buried four days after his death.
⁷

We can imagine how this sudden turn of events must have devastated Margaretha, who at age thirty-six had now lost three husbands within thirteen years, and the children, especially the two nine-year-olds, Sebastian and Christina Maria. There was little time for despair, however; among other things, the widow was responsible for keeping the town music company going for the next six months (the period in which a new director would be chosen); during this time, she received Ambrosius's full salary, out of which she had to pay his two journeymen and two apprentices. She also received collegial help: her petition for a bounty, for example, was written on behalf of “the sorrowing widow and the poor fatherless orphans” by Andreas Christian Dedekind, cantor of St. George's School.
⁸
The petition reveals that Ambrosius's employees, two journeymen and two apprentices “who could already pass for journeymen,” were able to fulfill the scheduled obligations for the town and church music. It also shows that the widow worried about the waning of musical talent in the Bach family, six of the nine grandsons of Hans Bach (see Table 1.1) having died between 1682 and 1695. Count Anton Günther of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt had supposedly asked the widow of Ambrosius's twin, Christoph, “whether there was not another Bach available who would like to apply for [ Johann Christoph's] post, for he should and must have a Bach again.” Margaretha's comment in her petition sounds utterly hopeless: “But this was not to be, for the dear God has caused the springs of musical talent in the Bach family to run dry within the last few years.” Understandably, her own experience during the previous twelve years made the future look bleak and made her completely blind to the younger generation, among them the greatest talent ever produced by this extraordinary family—her stepson Sebastian.

Within the span of a few months, Ambrosius Bach's family broke apart, but the broader and well-tested family support structures immediately went into effect. Ambrosius's considerations for needy members of his extended family were now reciprocated, to the benefit of his own surviving dependents. After selling the Eisenach house, Margaretha Bach seems to have moved with her two daughters back to her parental family in Arnstadt, where we lose their tracks. Marie Salome, eighteen years of age, left to join her mother's relatives, the Lämmerhirts in Erfurt. And her two little brothers, Jacob and Sebastian, were welcomed into the household of their oldest brother, Johann Christoph, newly established organist at St. Michael's in Ohrdruf. (For Sebastian, no alternative refuge existed, as his godfather Sebastian Nagel had died in 1687.) The estate of Ambrosius Bach was presumably distributed to his surviving children, who were principal heirs. The sale of the Eisenach house would have generated cash that all of them could use, the younger ones in particular for educational purposes. There was furniture to be disposed of, household goods, books, music, and especially musical instruments. Considering the usual extent of a town piper's standard equipment, each of the three sons must have inherited a basic stock of string, wind, and keyboard instruments.

Ambrosius's eldest son Christoph had studied for three years (1686–89) with Johann Pachelbel in Erfurt and, while only seventeen and still a student, had briefly held the post of organist at St. Thomas's in Erfurt (1688–89).
⁹
There, according to an autobiographical note, he found “both the remuneration and the structure of the organ—the latter being my principal concern—to be poor.”
¹⁰
He then left Erfurt for Arnstadt, where he had been called to assist his ailing uncle Heinrich
(6)
, Ambrosius's last surviving brother, in his various duties as organist of three churches, Our Lady's Church and at the so-called Upper Church, which primarily served the court. Heinrich Bach, in Arnstadt since 1641, had been in poor health since the early 1680s; he was first assisted by his youngest son, Johann Günther
(15)
, and then after Günther's death by his son-in-law, Christoph Herthum, who in 1671 became Christoph's godfather. So close connections were there, but Christoph could provide temporary help to his uncle for only a year—in 1690, he accepted the position as organist at St. Michael's, the principal church in nearby Ohrdruf.

Ohrdruf, a small town at the foot of the Thuringian Forest, twenty-five miles southeast of Eisenach, was the site of an ancient settlement. In 727, a group of Scottish-Irish missionary monks under Boniface had established a small Benedictine monastery with a chapel, St. Michael's, by the Ohra River. This structure, the oldest house of God in all of Thuringia, became the foundation on which a larger church was built in the early 1400s, a century before Ohrdruf accepted the Lutheran Reformation in 1525. Little is left of the historic church; on November 27, 1753, a devastating fire swept through the town, and St. Michael's fell victim to the flames. In the late seventeenth century, Ohrdruf had about 2,500 inhabitants and, with its Ehrenstein Castle (see illustration, p. 32)—a four-winged, sixteenth-century structure near St. Michael's in the center of town—served as the secondary residence of the counts of Hohenlohe-Gleichen (whose main landed property lay around Öhringen in southern Germany). Wechmar, the place Veit Bach (white-bread baker from Hungary and progenitor of the family of musicians) once settled and the hometown of his son, Hans Bach
(2)
, seven miles northeast of Ohrdruf, belonged to the same county, an enclave engulfed by the duchy of Saxe-Gotha. So by moving in 1690 to Ohrdruf, Christoph Bach in a sense returned to his family's place of origin, although until then no musician from the Bach family had ever served in the town. Only the wife of Ambrosius Bach's twin brother, Christoph had come from there, and Heinrich Bach's (6) daughter Anna Elisabeth was married to the Ohrdruf cantor Johann Heinrich Kühn.

The organist post at St. Michael's was a respectable one, for the church, which contained two organs, was both the town's and the county's main house of worship. The incumbent was obligated to play at the Siechhofskirche, the hospital chapel, too, and most likely at the chapel of Ehrenstein Castle whenever members of the ruling family were in town and private services were held for them. Johann Christoph's initial annual salary amounted to forty-five florins, plus in-kind compensation (grain and wood). In 1696, his salary was increased to seventy florins, and further in-kind payments were added in light of his having declined an attractive offer from Gotha to succeed his former teacher Pachelbel as town organist. The larger of the two Ohrdruf organs (with twenty-one stops on
Oberwerk, Rückpositiv
, and pedal), built only in 1675 and expanded in 1688,
¹¹
was relatively new and must have appeared quite alluring to the eighteen-year-old organist upon his appointment. However, the instrument, built by Heinrich Brunner of Sandersleben, was incomplete and suffered from serious defects, and the necessary repairs were delayed for years, despite the Ohrdruf town council's threat to seize the organ builder's assets. Pachelbel, visiting from Gotha, provided a detailed report on the organ's unsatisfactory state of repair in February 1693. Three years later, the organ builder Christian Rothe of Salzungen wrote an expert evaluation, but it took another ten years to finish the repairs. (An apprentice to Rothe at the time, Heinrich Nicolaus Trebs, would later become a close colleague of Bach in Weimar.) In sum, St. Michael's instruments required considerable attention by the organist to be kept in playing condition. That this should be the case precisely during Sebastian's Ohrdruf years was important, for the boy, who clearly had a knack for musical instruments and their technology, was given an ideal opportunity to gain firsthand experience in organ building.

On October 23, 1694, Johann Christoph had married Johanna Dorothea Vonhoff, daughter of an Ohrdruf town councillor. The Eisenach cantor Andreas Christian Dedekind reported that he, along with Pachelbel, Ambrosius Bach, and Ambrosius's cousin Johann Veit Hoffmann, performed at a wedding in Ohrdruf in the fall of 1694—surely Christoph's, and the only occasion for the young Sebastian to have seen his elder brother's master teacher. The musical program at the ceremony conceivably included the Eisenach Johann Christoph Bach's (13) wedding piece “Meine Freundin, du bist schön,” a dramatized compilation of texts from the Song of Songs, scored for 4 soloists, chorus, solo violin, 3 violas, and continuo. The only surviving manuscript of the piece happens to be in the hand of Ambrosius Bach, the groom's father and an accomplished violinist (see illustration, p. 38). On July 21, 1695, the first child, Tobias Friedrich, was born to the Ohrdruf organist and his wife; the second, Christina Sophia, followed in 1697. Altogether the couple had six sons and three daughters, the youngest of whom, Johann Sebastian, died as a child. Several of the sons later found employment as musicians in Ohrdruf—two of them, Johann Bernhard and Johann Heinrich, after having studied for several years with their uncle Sebastian in Weimar and in Leipzig.

When the household of Christoph and Dorothea Bach absorbed Jacob and Sebastian in 1695, their family was still small; but considering the modest income of the Ohrdruf organist, the obligation to house, feed, and teach the thirteen-and nine-year-old brothers must have caused considerable hardship. In fact, Sebastian's school record reveals that Christoph was not able to provide unassisted support, and Sebastian's Ohrdruf sojourn depended largely on the availability of free board. The same must have applied to Jacob, although he did not stay in Ohrdruf for more than a year; by July 1696, at only fourteen years of age, he returned to Eisenach as an apprentice to Johann Heinrich Halle, his father's successor as director of the town music company.