Johann Sebastian Bach (24 page)

Considering all the perquisites of a respected and powerful musical office, including a large renovated organ and opportunities for vocal composition, we may wonder why Bach left his Mühlhausen post rather abruptly, after barely twelve months on the job. In all likelihood, he was lured away by a combination of significantly better pay and greatly improved professional conditions. There are no signs that he was trolling for employment elsewhere, and the turn of events may have surprised Bach himself as much as they startled his friends and supporters in the imperial city. In any case, sometime around the middle of June 1708, Bach traveled to Weimar, apparently at the invitation of the court. The timing of the trip may bear directly on a massive 400-florin, year-long organ renovation at the castle church, finished on June 16, by the organ builder Johann Conrad Weisshaupt of Seebergen near Gotha.
⁸⁵
We know from the Obituary that Bach “undertook a journey to Weymar, had the opportunity to be heard by the reigning Duke, and was offered the post of Chamber and Court Organist in Weymar, of which post he immediately took possession.”
⁸⁶
What follows is a plausible sequence of events.

The old and ailing Weimar court organist Johann Effler had supervised the expensive renovation of his organ at the castle church. But when it came time to demonstrate to the duke the results of the project, he did not feel equal to the task of playing the inaugural recital; instead, he invited Bach to come from Mühlhausen to perform and also to have him take part in a critical examination of the organ builder's completed work. After all, Bach's reputation as a virtuoso organist and trustworthy organ expert could hardly have escaped Effler's attention, for in 1703 Bach had traveled from Weimar to Arnstadt for exactly the same reason. The young Bach's rapidly increasing reputation must also have reached Effler's ears. Thus, Bach played the organ, as the Obituary reports, to the delight and amazement of Duke Wilhelm Ernst; Effler asked to retire for reasons of health (only a year later, he is called “an old sick servant”);
⁸⁷
Bach was offered and accepted the position on the spot for a salary of 150 florins plus benefits; and Effler was granted retirement at his full salary of 130 florins. The arrangements in Weimar were completed by June 20,
⁸⁸
allowing Bach to submit his letter of resignation from the Mühlhausen position right after he returned there, on June 25.

What persuaded Bach to accept such a sudden, unexpected offer at the risk of snubbing his Mühlhausen patrons and supporters? Two reasons come to mind. First, what must have seemed to him an extravagant salary that was three times what he had earned in Arnstadt and 75 percent more than he was making in Mühlhausen—a significant factor, especially considering the future of his young family (Maria Barbara was pregnant with their first child). Bach was honest enough to admit right at the top of his Mühlhausen resignation letter that the Weimar offer would permit him “to enjoy a better living,” and by his repetition at the end, “the possibility of a more adequate living,” he confirms the importance of the salary increase. Second, it must have meant nearly as much to him that in his new position as “chamber musician and court organist,” he would be able to perform almost exclusively with professional musicians—a consideration that ties in clearly with his “goal of a well-regulated church music,” as his letter of resignation has it. His brief earlier sojourn at the Weimar court in 1703 might, in fact, have spoiled him forever for a return to working day-in and day-out with an unholy mix of school choirs, nonprofessional helpers, student instrumentalists, and town musicians.

Such uninspiring tasks could explain the “hindrance” and “vexation” that Bach only hinted at in his tactful request for dismissal, dated June 25, 1708 (a highly revealing letter and the first major document in Bach's hand that survives). However, his plan for “a well-regulated church music,” which he did not outline beyond referring to “the church music that is growing up in almost every township, and often better than the harmony that is fashioned here,” would surely have run into all sorts of organizational, programmatic, and financial problems, some of which would have put the two leading Mühlhausen clergymen, Superintendent Frohne at St. Blasius's and Archdeacon Eilmar at St. Mary's, at loggerheads. Their personalities clashed frequently, and their many generational, administrative, and theological differences are well documented. Bach's close association with Eilmar may well have soured his relationship with Frohne, his immediate superior.

The traditional view, however, that the active Pietist Frohne may have distrusted his organist because he couldn't stand the orthodox Eilmar and that frustrations over this feud drove Bach away from Mühlhausen, does not hold up.
⁸⁹
We know that even before Bach arrived on the scene, Eilmar had made some bold and unauthorized decisions about “how the divine service should be held and what, apart from the regular order, should be read, explained, and sung,” for which Frohne later scolded him in one of his many militant theological pamphlets.
⁹⁰
But such conflicts had nothing to do with Pietist versus orthodox points of view. The Pietist movement within the Lutheran Church of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which emphasized devotional godliness, the renunciation of worldly pleasures, and the spirit of Christian living beyond the letter of doctrine, deeply influenced the church in virtually all Lutheran lands and congregations. A large number of the cantata texts later set by Bach reflect the absorption of Pietist language and ideas and, in fact, the cross-influence of Pietist and orthodox tendencies. But as far as we can tell, Bach never let himself be drawn into the aggressive conflict between
Kirchen
-and
Seelen-Music
—traditional church music on the one hand and music for the soul on the other—which had a stifling effect on both sacred and secular musical life elsewhere in Germany.
⁹¹

One other passage in Bach's resignation letter sheds light on his overall musical plans. In conjunction with his stated “ultimate goal, namely a well-regulated church music, to the Glory of God and in comformance with your [the parishioners'] wishes,” he mentions that he had “acquired from far and wide, not without cost, a good store of the choicest church compositions.” This reference to Bach's working apparatus gives us another indication of his self-directed manner of learning, which, while sparing no expense, enabled the young composer to examine a broad range of music “from far and wide” in representative examples. It also helped him gain insight into different styles, techniques, and genres by the time-tested method of surveying, copying, and emulating
exempla classica
. Bach had started to build his personal library of sacred music for study, reference, and performance purposes long before Mühlhausen. He may also have inherited materials from his own father and from Maria Barbara's father, which could well have marked one of the beginnings of what Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach later referred to as the Old-Bach Archive. Unfortunately, no real traces are left of this “good store” in its pre-Weimar state,
⁹²
but the stylistic orientation of Bach's earliest cantatas suggests primary models that were not found among prevailing seventeenth-century pieces but rather among those in vogue around 1700 and later, with something like “late Buxtehude”—among German examples—forming a point of departure.

One day after he received Bach's letter of resignation, an obviously startled Conrad Meckbach, the same senior consul and former burgomaster who a year earlier had proposed Bach's appointment, officially presented the letter to the parish convent with the words that “the organist Pach had received a call to Weimar and had accepted the same, and accordingly made written request for his dismissal.” Meckbach then submitted, with expression of regrets, that “since he could not be made to stay, consent must doubtless be given, but in notifying him it should be suggested that he help bring to completion the project [of rebuilding the organ] that had been undertaken.”
⁹³
In order to atone for the unintended commotion he had created, Bach apparently offered his help to the parish convent in finding a suitable successor. A scant two weeks later, Johann Friedrich Bach, third son of the late Eisenach organist Johann Christoph Bach (13), was presented to the parish convent and was subsequently appointed to the post vacated by his cousin—but at a salary that had dropped back to what Johann Georg Ahle had earned.
⁹⁴

Johann Sebastian Bach and the Mühlhausen authorities parted on good terms, and both he and Maria Barbara left behind a number of people with whom they had become close. Their firstborn son, Wilhelm Friedemann, was named after the Mühlhausen lawyer Paul Friedemann Meckbach, son of Conrad and apparently a friend of Sebastian's. Friedemann, together with Anna Dorothea Hagedorn, daughter of pastor Eilmar and probably Barbara's friend, served as Wilhelm Friedemann's godparents, and both attended his baptism in Weimar on November 11, 1710.
⁹⁵
Bach would certainly have tended the ambitious organ-rebuilding project at St. Blasius's that he had designed, and he could easily have done so during his trips back to Mühlhausen to conduct the council pieces he wrote for 1709 and 1710. Many years later, old connections with Mühlhausen were renewed when Sebastian and Barbara's third son, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, was appointed organist at St. Mary's in 1735, succeeding his father's former colleague, Johann Gottfried Hetzehenn. When Bach accompanied his son to his audition, the parish convent held a special dinner in honor of “Herr Capell-Meister Bach of Leipzig,” who examined the newly built organ at St. Mary's “without charge…communicated his opinion, and informed them about what was still missing.”
⁹⁶
Bach was fondly remembered, and his early reputation had by now been replaced by celebrity status.

COURT ORGANIST AND
CAMMER MUSICUS
IN WEIMAR, 1708–1714

T
HE
F
IRST
S
IX
Y
EARS AT THE
D
UCAL
C
OURT

Considering the unanticipated and hectic decisions made within just a couple of weeks during June 1708, Bach acted most responsibly by seeing to a smooth and orderly transition. He appears not to have left Mühlhausen before his successor, who was chosen on July 4, could take over; but by July 14, he and Maria Barbara had relocated to Weimar. That day, “the newly arrived Court Organist from Mühlhausen” received a gift of 10 florins—equivalent to nearly a full month's salary.
¹
In Weimar, the Bachs moved into an apartment at the house of Adam Immanuel Weldig,
²
master of the pages, falsettist in the court capelle, and, incidentally, an alumnus of the Leipzig St. Thomas School. This
Freyhaus
(free house), one of several dwellings across town reserved for court employees, was located directly on the market square in the center of town, a five-minute walk from the Wilhelmsburg, the ducal palace that served as the principal place of work for both Weldig and Bach. Weldig, however, sold his house in August 1713, having left Weimar at the beginning of that year to accept a similar position at the Weissenfels court. Bach may well have remained at the house and perhaps even expanded his living quarters.

At the time of the move, Maria Barbara was four months pregnant with their first child, daughter Catharina Dorothea. She would be born at their new home and baptized on December 29, 1708, at St. Peter and Paul's Church in the market square, the town's main house of worship. From a March 1709 census listing the occupants of Bach's apartment, we learn that Maria Barbara's much older, unmarried sister Friedelena Margaretha Bach joined them in Weimar, probably around the birth of their first child (she would remain in the Bach household until her death in 1729), in part to help her sister and brother-in-law with their growing family: also born in Weimar were Wilhelm Friedemann, 1710; the twins Maria Sophia and Johann Christoph, who died soon after birth, 1713; Carl Philipp Emanuel, 1714; and Johann Gottfried Bernhard, 1715.

Bach returned to a familiar territory, which he would have remembered well from the six months he had spent there only five years earlier. But he now held the respected position of court organist and chamber musician, so very little would actually have reminded him of his days as lackey. And with an initial salary of 150 florins plus incidentals (eighteen bushels of wheat, twelve bushels of barley, four cords of firewood, and thirty pails of tax-free beer),
³
he could indeed look forward to “a better living,” as his Mühlhausen resignation letter reads. Although much smaller than Mühlhausen, this capital of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar had a population of about five thousand in the early eighteenth century, almost a third of whom were directly or indirectly employed by the court. More than fifty thousand people lived in the duchy as a whole, which for generations was ruled by a less than happy pattern of co-reigning dukes from the Ernestine-Saxon dynasty.

In 1683, Dukes Wilhelm Ernst and Johann Ernst III took over joint ruler-ship after the death of their father, Duke Johann Ernst II. The older of the two brothers, Duke Wilhelm Ernst, resided at the Wilhelmsburg, a massive structure built by Duke Wilhelm IV in 1650–54 after the end of the Thirty Years' War (except for its tower, the castle would be completely laid to ruin by a devastating fire in 1774). Forty-six years old when Bach arrived in Weimar, Wilhelm Ernst was throughout his life the dominant of the co-regents. After an unhappy and childless marriage during which he lived separated from his wife, he influenced Weimar's courtly and civic life enormously, in both secular and religious affairs. On his birthday in 1696, the first opera performance was given at Wilhelmsburg Palace, though this court opera continued for only four years.
⁴
The duke's antiquarian and bibliophilic interests led him to establish, in 1702, a coin cabinet and a large court library under the directorship of Salomo Franck, who in the previous year had come to Weimar as secretary of the consistory (he had written an opera libretto in 1697, and would later provide cantata texts for Bach). Under the duke's guidance, the Weimar Latin School was upgraded to the level of gymnasium, offering a broader and more scholarly education. Magister Johann Christoph Kiesewetter of Ohrdruf, under whom Bach had attended the Lyceum there, was appointed rector of the gymnasium in 1712 and, in turn, hired the young Magister Johann Matthias Gesner (later Bach's rector at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig) as conrector in 1715. The gymnasium's cantor and teacher of the quartahad been, since 1697, Georg Theodor Reineccius, an active composer who collaborated with the town organist Johann Gottfried Walther at St. Peter and Paul's and who was responsible for providing choristers for the palace church (in 1713, Reineccius became godfather to Bach's daughter Maria Sophia, suggesting a close personal relationship).
⁵
Also under Wilhelm Ernst, Weimar's St. Jacob's Church, which had been destroyed earlier, was rebuilt. Bach and other members of the court capelle joined in the festive inaugural procession and then performed a Mass and a cantata at the dedication service on November 6, 1713.
⁶

Duke Johann Ernst III, who occupied the more modest Red Palace nearby, and who had employed Bach in 1703, died in 1707. He had been primarily responsible for reassembling the court capelle from 1683 onward, after his father had dissolved it some twenty years earlier: he began by hiring Johann Samuel Drese as capellmeister and Johann Effler as court organist. Johann Ernst's oldest son, Ernst August, acceded to the position of co-regent in 1709—Bach's second year at Weimar—when he reached the age of majority. But from the very beginning, his uncle Wilhelm Ernst, accustomed to his statutory seniority from the days of joint rule with his younger brother, claimed absolute predominance, especially in the duchy's domestic policy. The relationship between the co-reigning dukes suffered quietly under the weight of their incompatible personalities: Wilhelm Ernst, twenty-six years older, was rigidly conservative and zealously religious, while Ernst August displayed a more enlightened attitude, though he was no less stubborn. During their long joint rule of nineteen years, both uncle and nephew had a share in provoking power struggles that at times reached preposterous proportions, as, for example, when Duke Wilhelm Ernst in one of his arbitrary despotic acts had Duke Ernst August's councilors arrested. But matters deteriorated even further after 1728, when Ernst August assumed undivided rule as absolute monarch.
⁷

Bach could hardly have anticipated the roiling political climate at the Weimar court and probably assumed, naively, that in his role as a ranking court musician he would not be directly affected by disputes within the ducal family. Yet over the years, the controversial question of who had control over joint servants directly affected the members of the court capelle. Bach could not have known, for example, that in 1707, before his time, Duke Wilhelm Ernst had decreed that members of the court capelle were allowed to make music at the Red Palace only with his special permission. Wilhelm Ernst, who in June 1708 had particularly admired Bach's playing and engaged him virtually on the spot, continued to hold Bach in highest esteem. Indeed, on June 3, 1711, he ordered a substantial salary increase, from 150 to 200 florins, in response to Bach's “humble request because the salary and allowance of his predecessor [Effler had died the previous April]…will cease completely and revert to…the princely treasury.” He also provided Bach with additional allowances.
⁸
Whether Bach produced an attractive outside offer or simply made the case on the basis of his performance in Weimar, it is altogether remarkable that having been appointed at a salary substantially higher than his predecessor's and equal to the vice-capellmeister's, Bach was now, only three years later, put on the same pay scale as the capellmeister, Johann Samuel Drese, whose annual salary of 200 florins remained unchanged for his entire thirty-three-year term of office.

Despite the undeniable support he received from the Wilhelmsburg, Bach must have developed closer personal ties to the Red Palace. The young Duke Ernst August, who played both violin and trumpet and who was known for his active acquisition of musical instruments and performing materials for his large music library,
⁹
paid Bach in 1711–12 for giving keyboard lessons to his page Adam von Jagemann (who also received dance instruction from Bach's colleague and landlord Weldig).
¹⁰
The duke's twelve-year-old half-brother, Prince Johann Ernst, was taught the violin as a small child and, from 1707 on, studied keyboard and composition with Johann Gottfried Walther, the Weimar town organist and distant relative of Bach's (in 1708, Walther wrote an instruction manual,
Praecepta der musicalischen Composition
, for the prince and presented it to him as a nameday gift). Bach later transcribed four of the prince's compositions, for organ and harpsichord (BWV 592, 595, 982, and 987).
¹¹
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reported to Forkel that along with Prince Leopold of Cöthen and Duke Christian of Weissenfels, “Duke Ernst August in Weimar…particularly loved him, and rewarded him appropriately.”
¹²
Whether or not the warmer relationship with Ernst August ultimately had a negative impact on Wilhelm Ernst's attitude toward Bach, a sizable salary supplement for his final Weimar years was covered by the younger duke's treasury.
¹³

Bach's double function as court organist and chamber musician reflects his versatility and expertise as a performer, but increasingly as a composer, too. As a member of the court capelle, he belonged to the group of “joint servants” and was therefore employed by both dukes and paid by the joint treasury. In 1708–9, Bach's first year, the capelle consisted of twelve mostly full-time members
¹⁴
(see Table 5.1).

T
ABLE
5.1. The Weimar Court Capelle, 1708–9

This list does not include trumpeters and timpanists, who were typically counted separately in princely households and were carried by the military budget. Personal servants were not listed either, as, for example, Prince Johann Ernst's chamber valet and violin teacher, Gregor Christoph Eylenstein.
¹⁵
The list also omits the part-time musicians who occupied lackey or other courtly functions but were essential for providing musical balances when called for; nor does it include the Weimar town musicians and town organist, who often joined the court ensemble in varying roles, or the cantor and members of the chorus musicus from the Weimar gymnasium. Capellmeister Drese, then director of the Weimar court music for twenty-five years, must have been supportive of Bach's appointment. Bach, in turn, will have remembered him as well as his colleagues Alt, Ehrbach, Döbernitz, Hoffmann,
¹⁶
and Weldig, all members of the capelle back in 1703. The younger Drese, son of the capellmeister, had been away in 1702–3 studying in Venice and perhaps elsewhere in Italy at the expense of the Weimar court;
¹⁷
he was appointed to his present post after the death in 1704 of the former vice-capellmeister Georg Christoph Strattner.

Bach's principal assignment was that of court organist. In that capacity he served at the palace church at the southern end of the Wilhelmsburg's east wing, the center of Duke Wilhelm Ernst's religious and ceremonial activities. Fully integrated into the architectural design of the Wilhelmsburg, the unusually shaped church was dedicated in 1658. Built on a footprint of about 100 by 40 feet, it rose to a total height of about 90 feet from the floor to the tip of the crowning cupola.
¹⁸
The tall structure of the sanctuary, with two sets of galleries surrounding the relatively narrow rectangular hall, extended upward over three floors (see illustration, p. 146). Cut into the flat ceiling of the sanctuary (about 65 feet above the floor level) was a wide rectangular aperture—about 13 by 10 feet and surrounded by a balustrade—that opened into the music gallery, a spacious domed compartment called the
Capelle
. As was customary for music galleries, the balustrade would have been designed to serve as an elongated music stand so that singers and players could be placed—depending on the size of the ensemble—around two, three, or four flanks of the aperture. The painted cupola extending about 15 feet above the gallery level projected an open heaven and clouds with figures of angels and putti. Appropriately named
Weg zur Himmelsburg
(Road to Heaven's Castle)—for short,
Himmelsburg
—by its theologically minded planners, the pious Duke Wilhelm IV and his architect Johann Moritz Richter, the church represented the image of its true religious function: a way station between the Wilhelmsburg and heaven, between the earthly ducal residence and God's castle. The limited seating capacity of the church presented no major problem since services were attended only by the ducal families, sitting in their princely boxes, and by members of the princely household, other gentry, court officials, and select employees seated in the pews of the narrow nave and in the surrounding double galleries. For the worshippers, music from the
Capelle
above the ceiling, enhanced by the “echo tower” effect of its dazzling acoustics, would have been perceived as sounds descending from heaven—corresponding to the ancient imagery of an angels' concert.