Johann Sebastian Bach (19 page)

The infamous Geyersbach incident began with Bach walking home from Neideck Castle, built between 1553 and 1560, which served as the stately residence of Imperial Count Anton Günther II of Schwarzburg. Beginning in 1683, Count Anton Günther ruled both the Schwarzburg-Arnstadt and Schwarzburg-Sondershausen counties and in 1697 was promoted to princely rank by Emperor Leopold I.
²⁷
The count was married to Auguste Dorothea, daughter of Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, whose love for theater and music, added to the splendor of his court, provided her with magnificent surroundings during her formative years. In many ways, Wolfenbüttel served as a model for Count Anton Günther. The staff of his administration in Arnstadt numbered around 120, as well as many notable scholars and artists, among them the famous numismatists Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, Andreas Morelli, and Christian Schlegel, but also some more obscure scientists engaged as “gold makers.” In matters of culture, the count maintained good relations with Bayreuth, Brunswick, Celle, Dresden, Gotha, Halle, Cassel, Cöthen, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Munich, Nürnberg, Prague, and Weimar; moreover, he established an art collection and a court theater, and showed a keen interest in music. It was this nobleman who, after the untimely death of the Arnstadt court and town musician Johann Christoph Bach, inquired of the widow “whether there was not another Bach available…for he should and must have a Bach again.”
²⁸
And as head of the consistory, he was also Johann Sebastian's nominal superior: Bach's salary orders, for example, were issued in his name, and he was known for his involvement in virtually all realms of public life at Arnstadt.
²⁹
Why should Bach have come (with sword, suggesting formal dress or uniform) from the castle that evening—and, according Barbara Catharina's testimony, specifically from the apartment of the court organist Herthum
³⁰
—if not from some kind of official musical engagement?

Count Anton Günther maintained a court capelle of some twenty musicians, most of them typically functioning in dual roles as musician and servant or court and town musician. After the death in 1701 of the longtime court capellmeister Adam Drese, who had once worked with Heinrich Schütz in Dresden, Paul Gleitsmann, a violinist, lutenist, and viola da gamba player and a veteran member of the capelle, took over its direction.
³¹
While Bach did not hold a court appointment and the Geyersbach story provides at best only indirect evidence of court connections, it would have been only natural for a musician of his background, special talents, and reputation to be drawn occasionally into the court music scene. Musical life at the Arnstadt court after 1700 is poorly documented, but we do know that in 1705 the court theater saw performances of two burlesque operettas: in February,
Das Carneval als ein Verräter des Eckels vor der Heiligen Fastenzeit
(The Carnival as a Tattler on the Loathing of the Holy Lenten Period), and in May,
Die Klugheit der Obrigkeit in Anordnung des Bierbrauens
(The Wisdom of the Government in Regulating Beer Brewing).
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Arnstadtians were able to attend the shows through ticket sales.
³³

The court music scene with its secular and sacred dimensions would have provided numerous opportunities for Bach the keyboardist and versatile instrumentalist. And by continuing his brief Weimar court experience of 1703, the Arnstadt court would have exposed him to musical genres and repertoires that were otherwise not readily accessible to him. The earliest specimen of an Italian chamber cantata in Bach's hand, “Amante moribondo” by the Venetian composer Antonio Biffi, may well originate from there. The court would also have given Bach the opportunity to meet and perform with out-of-town musicians and might provide some kind of clue to “the unfamiliar maiden” (
frembde Jungfer
) whom, according to the consistory minutes, Bach “invited into the choir loft and let…make music there.”
³⁴
Female singers were traditionally barred from performing at churches with Latin school choirs, although in many smaller churches in towns and villages throughout Thuringia women participated in choirs as helpers, so-called
Adjuvanten
. In any event, the incident with the
frembde Jungfer
must have involved an out-of-town singer and not, as often assumed, Bach's distant cousin Maria Barbara, whom he married the following year.
³⁵
Maria Barbara had been living in Arnstadt for several years, so she could scarcely have been described as “unfamiliar.”

The consistory's complaint—especially petty since Bach seems to have consulted in the matter with the pastor of the New Church, Magister Uthe—may have merely annoyed him, but taken together with the forceful admonition made at the same hearing about his lack of relations with the student choir clearly indicated that he had little or no room for maneuvering. The congregation of the New Church was entitled to enjoy modern-style church music, and the consistory legitimately expected both the organist and the student choir to play a mutually constructive role in establishing a viable and attractive musical program. But Bach saw no way toward a realistic compromise. His standards and ambitions were much too remote from that of the basically leaderless choir. Bach realized that orderly progress could not be achieved with the help of a mere student prefect; a person of authority, with proper disciplinary oversight, was needed. He also realistically understood that he himself, on the basis of his youth alone, would not be in a position to claim the necessary authority, and for this reason requested a
director musices
from outside. He also avoided saying anything negative about the student choir; in fact, he expressed his willingness to participate if only under the proper leadership. In other words, he was not pointing out any lack of musical competence on the part of the choir, but a lack of discipline, which not only affected the choral situation but apparently had wider ramifications. Indeed, during Bach's time in Arnstadt, municipal and church authorities recorded many complaints about the excessive behavior of undisciplined Lyceum students.
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So after three years, he saw little future for himself at the New Church.

As for Arnstadt itself, as much as he appreciated that his grandfather's town was the nerve center of the Bach family and provided plenty of advantages and connections, Sebastian must have felt keenly that its narrow confines and its close-knit family environment severely hampered his privacy and freedom of movement. Eying a position in the free imperial city of Mühlhausen, he showed a readiness to move again out of the traditional family realm—he had savored his time in Lüneburg, hundreds of miles away from home. He apparently deemed such a step essential to starting a family of his own and solidifying the family bonds in a different way. For he had become close to Maria Barbara, daughter of his father's cousin Michael Bach, the late organist and town scribe of Gehren, and the two of them wanted to marry. After Johann Sebastian had secured the new position, they indeed arranged for a wedding at the village church of Dornheim, three miles from Arnstadt, on October 17, 1707.

Almost to the day three years earlier, Maria Barbara had suffered the loss of her mother, Catharina Bach, widow of the Gehren organist, Michael. Maria Barbara and her older sisters, Friedelena Margaretha and Barbara Catharina—all well beyond school age—moved to Arnstadt, where they joined the households of their mother's sisters. Maria Barbara, who had turned twenty the day after her mother's burial, moved in with her godfather, burgomaster Feldhaus, and his wife Margarethe, her mother's twin sister and daughter of Johann Wedemann, town scribe in Arnstadt until his death in 1684. The sisters Elisabethand Catharina Wedemann had married brothers, Christoph
(13)
and Michael
(14)
, sons of the town and court organist Heinrich Bach
(6)
(see Table 4.3).

 

By the time of the move, in late 1704, the well-to-do Feldhaus had enough space for his orphaned nieces in the two houses he owned, one called Steinhaus (Stone House) and the other Güldene Krone (Golden Crown). He may even have provided space for Johann Sebastian: after Bach's departure for Mühlhausen, Feldhaus collected the sum of 30 talers, the amount that the New Church organist received as an annual salary supplement for room and board, suggesting that the burgomaster had provided “food, bed, and room” for Bach.
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Furthermore, Barbara Catharina Bach's testimony in the Geyersbach affair that she and her cousin Sebastian had come from organist Christoph Herthum's apartment in Neideck Castle suggests that they were crossing the market square on the way to their common home. Altogether, the three Michael Bach daughters not only added to the dense concentration of Bach family members in Arnstadt, they also reconnected Sebastian with the Bach-Wedemann branch of the family. For in Eisenach, he had grown up with the children his uncle Christoph Bach had with Elisabeth Wedemann, with most of whom he maintained a lifelong contact. Now his own future wife was a Wedemann descendant as well, and the Bach-Wedemann family network would continue to benefit him.

T
ABLE
4.3. Daughters of the Arnstadt Town Scribe Johann Wedemann (1611–1684) and Their Marriages