Johann Sebastian Bach (39 page)

 

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.
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T
ABLE
7.5. Bach's Professional Travels, 1703–50
a

 

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.”
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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.
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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.
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Just as Bach successfully managed to combine both princely and personal business in Berlin, the trip's main purpose—purchasing a new state-of-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.
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Prince Leopold visited only twice, in 1718 and 1720, but remained each time for over a month.

On both his trips, from mid-May to mid-June in 1718 and from late May to early July in 1720, the prince took along his capellmeister and several musicians of the court capelle. The first time, Bach was joined by Joseph Spieß and five other musicians; servants were paid “to help carry the princely
ClaviCymbel
to Carlsbad.”
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We lack specific details on the size of Leopold's musical entourage on the second visit, but we can be sure that on both sojourns rather than having his musicians entertain him in solitude, he chose rather to feature the virtuosos of his capelle, in particular his capellmeister-composer-keyboard artist, before a distinguished audience at the numerous parties arranged for the noble socialites. Besides drinking the waters, the guests spent their leisure time hunting, dining, and enjoying the shows presented by the theatrical and musical groups or individual performers brought along by their noble owner-sponsors.
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Among the early habitual visitors were two exceedingly wealthy and influential Bohemian-Moravian arts patrons, Franz Anton Count Sporck of Prague and Adam Count Questenberg of Jarom
ice. They and their equal and would-be counterparts helped institute a seasonal atmosphere in which the villas, watering places, hotels, casinos, and pavilions of Carlsbad formed an exquisite backdrop to what may have been the earliest regular summer festival of the performing arts. Here the Cöthen court capelle under Bach made its debut in 1718, most likely presenting instrumental ensemble works for up to seven players (even eight, if Prince Leopold participated) and keyboard solo pieces. Here also, Bach and his colleagues could establish personal and professional contacts, and it seems likely that Bach's later connections with the counts Sporck and Questenberg date back to Carlsbad.

The second Carlsbad trip coincided with what was doubtless the most tragic event in Bach's entire life, the sudden and startling loss of Maria Barbara, his wife of twelve and a half years and mother of their four children, Catharina Dorothea, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard, ranging in age from eleven to five. Twins born in 1713 had died shortly after birth, and Leopold Augustus,
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their Cöthen-born son, died very early, too (see Table 11.1). The reference in Bach's Obituary to Maria Barbara's death at age thirty-six, though brief and to the point, reflects nevertheless the childhood memory of its co-author—surely an unforgettably traumatic experience for the six-year-old Carl Philipp Emanuel: “After thirteen years of blissful married life with his first wife, the misfortune overtook him, in the year 1720, upon his return to Cöthen from a journey with his Prince to Carlsbad, of finding her dead and buried, although he had left her hale and hearty on his departure. The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.”
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Several days at least had elapsed between Maria Barbara's death and Bach's arrival in Cöthen. Who would have greeted him first with the shocking news? Whether it was one of the children or Friedelena, their mother's older sister, who had lived in the household for more than a decade, the family's grief was immeasurable and enduring. No causes for Maria Barbara's death are known, and only the burial is documented. The stony entry in the deaths register under July 7, 1720, reads: “The wife of Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, Capellmeister to His Highness the Prince, was buried,” and notes that the full choir of the Latin school sang at the funeral and not, as usual, a partial choir.
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This gesture, together with a generous reduction in the fee charged by the school, beautifully demonstrates the special respect accorded to this daughter of a well-known composer, wife of a now-famous composer, and mother of their fellow student Wilhelm Friedemann.

Only four months after his wife's death, Bach set out on another long-distance trip, this time by himself. His destination was Hamburg, where the post of organist of St. Jacobi's Church had fallen vacant with the death on September 12 of Heinrich Friese, organist and clerk of the church, and successor to the renowned Matthias Weckmann. There can be no question that the thirty-five-year-old widower was unsettled by the devastating tragedy that had afflicted him and his family, but at the same time he might also have wanted to take a fresh look at options that presented themselves elsewhere. He would certainly have been attracted by the church's famous instrument—a four-manual organ with sixty stops built in the years 1688–93 by Arp Schnitger, the most celebrated north German organ builder—and by the seductive prospects of the Hamburg musical scene, which had so fascinated him as a teenager. Back then, the penniless St. Michael's School choral scholar had had to walk or hitchhike the thirty miles from Lüneburg to Hamburg. Now a renowned capellmeister, he traveled the more than two-hundred-mile distance by mail coach (“first class,” so to speak) to what was then Germany's largest metropolis, where one or more concerts were prearranged. Prince Leopold would hardly have objected to anything that prominently featured his capellmeister—who else could put his tiny principality on the map? The vacancy at St. Jacobi, very likely the center of a grand scheme designed by unknown but influential wire pullers to lure Bach to Hamburg, was for him perhaps no more than an excuse to escape temporarily from the provincial climate of Cöthen and breathe new air. Bach would certainly have known about St. Jacobi, but was he also told about another vacancy expected to occur in the not-too-distant future? There may well have been forces at work trying to build up Bach as a future candidate for the cantorate at the Hamburg Johanneum and the musical directorship of the five principal churches. That position was still held by the failing seventy-year-old Joachim Gerstenbüttel, who in fact died in April 1721. Then again, one might reasonably wonder whether Bach's November 1720 visit was a corollary to a contrasting (or corresponding) scheme, masterminded by the same or a different group of strategists, who arranged for Georg Philipp Telemann to present his opera
Socrates
in Hamburg only two months later, in January, and finally landed him Gerstenbüttel's job in July 1721.
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Might there have been a plan to attract both Telemann and Bach to Hamburg?