Johann Sebastian Bach (73 page)

The father's pedagogical investment in the future of his sons is best represented by the Clavier Book for his oldest, Wilhelm Friedemann.
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Although no comparable material has survived for any of the other children, their musical upbringing could hardly have differed much, as their various creative lives amply manifest. Bach also helped launch their careers; his efforts on behalf of the unhappy Johann Bernhard were by no means exceptional. He often took the crucial initiative. For example, he composed and wrote the letter that Wilhelm Friedemann submitted in 1733 to the Dresden city council in applying for the organist post at St. Sophia's Church (even the signature is in the father's hand!); on the same day, June 7, he also sent a letter of recommendation for his son to the church consistory member in charge of the appointment.
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Moreover, Bach copied out the audition piece for his son: the Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541.
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The question arises: was all this done by an overzealous father with an overprotective attitude? Bach also called on his musical and political connections to secure a place for Carl Philipp Emanuel, who in 1738 joined the private capelle of crown prince Friedrich, the later king of Prussia. Helpful go-betweens were most likely Johann Joachim Quantz and the brothers Graun, Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb, all close acquaintances of Bach's who had been hired by the musically ambitious crown prince. As an alternative, Carl Philipp Emanuel was given the opportunity, after completing his university studies at Frankfurt on the Oder, to escort “a young gentleman” on a grand tour through Austria, Italy, France, and England.
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The gentleman was none other than the son of Count Keyserlingk in Dresden, one of Bach's most important patrons, and the scheme had clearly been worked out by the two fathers. Finally, the appointment in 1749 of the seventeen-year-old Johann Christoph Friedrich to the court at Bückeburg bears the father's mark as well. Bach sent his second youngest on his way with an accompanying note to Count Wilhelm of Schaumburg-Lippe: “Since Your Imperial Highness has deigned to honor one of my family to be in the service of Your Highness, I send with this my son, hoping that he may be able to offer Your Imperial Highness complete satisfaction.”
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Count Wilhelm's father had earlier married the widow of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen
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—old, established connections apparently still worked well.

Bach had every reason to be proud of his sons, but he may not have been an “easy” father. The information we have about his behavior is too fragmentary to allow for any judgments about his character. But from his defiant attitude in matters of accompanying congregational hymn singing and the violent brawl with Geyersbach back in Arnstadt to the insubordinate demeanor that led to his detention in Weimar and in Leipzig (according to rector Ernesti) to his chasing the prefect Krause “out of the choir loft with much shouting and noise,”
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we can deduce that he was impatient, often unyielding, and irascible when provoked. Bach is said to have conducted himself in a generally “peaceful, quiet, and even-tempered way” in the face of all kinds of unpleasantness “as long as it concerned only his own person,” but the same source acknowledges that he “became a very different man if he felt threatened in his art, which he held sacred, and that he then became mightily enraged and in his zeal sought to find vent by the strongest expressions.”
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He probably had few reasons to argue with his sons over matters of musical substance and artistic conviction, although he saw all four of them go their own ways, distinct from that of their father. Indeed, that met with Bach's approval, as none of them were trained to imitate his musical orientation. Thus, each of the four composing brothers followed his personal stylistic preferences and each eventually developed a musical language that confirmed his father's ideals of individuality.

We must apply several grains of salt before we swallow a 1792 report by Carl Friedrich Cramer that Bach “was satisfied only with Friedemann, the great organist. Even of Carl Philipp Emanuel he said (unjustly!), ‘'Tis Berlin Blue! It fades easily!' He always applied to the London Chrétien Bach the verse by Gellert: ‘The boy progresses surely by his stupidity!' Actually this one of the three Bachs made the greatest progress.”
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Cramer claimed to have received the statement “direct from the mouth of Friedemann,” and precisely therein lies a problem—the self-serving nature of Friedemann's testimony. On the other hand, there is sufficient evidence that the oldest son received preferential treatment, that Sebastian and Friedemann were musically and intellectually close, and that Carl was the more independent of the two older sons. The reference to the youngest may reflect critical comments on Christel's progress in school, about which nothing is known today, but then he expressed his love and support by making him a gift of three harpsichords.
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Like the rector of St. Thomas's, the cantor and his family occupied a spacious apartment in the school building right next to the church on its south side. We have detailed information about Bach's Leipzig living quarters (corresponding knowledge is completely lacking for any of Bach's earlier life stations). The specific facts about the layout of the cantor's apartment before and after the 1731–32 renovation of the school building are based primarily on drawings by the master mason George Werner, reports on the building project, and later descriptions of the cantor's apartment in the building,
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which was pulled down in 1902. Before 1731, the apartment was considerably smaller, the old school building having only three stories where the new one had five. Disruptions during the construction phase between May 1731 (after the Easter Fair) and April 1732 must have been considerable. The Bach household had to relocate, and in late June 1731 the family took up temporary quarters in a house at Hainstrasse 17 belonging to the law professor Dr. Christoph Donndorf (the annual rent of 120 talers, covered by the city, hints at the magnitude of the free-housing benefit as part of the cantor's compensation).
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When the family returned to their apartment on April 24, 1732, they had gained an enlarged, heated living room and a new bedroom on the third floor, which had previously held only one living room; another heated living room was available on the newly built fourth floor, along with a large bedroom in the second attic under the new curb roof (see Table 11.2, p. 406).

The imposing building of the St. Thomas School closed the west flank of St. Thomas Square, running parallel and close to the inside of the old city wall; the external walls of the school building were particularly thick and used as an extra fortification in earlier times against attack from outside. A small gate near the southwest corner of the school building, the so-called
Thomas-Pförtchen
(little gate), provided an opening through the city wall for pedestrian traffic. The cantor's apartment took up a major part of the building's south wing, while the rector's quarters lay in the north wing. Approaching the school building from St. Thomas Square, one entered the cantor's apartment through a door on the left side, ascending two steps. To answer the doorbell, the front door could be opened by a pull mechanism from the second-floor living room immediately above that looked out onto the square and allowed the scanning of visitors. The tiled ground floor—that is, the first floor—contained two rooms, one heated and one unheated; the corner living room downstairs apparently provided study space for the school-age children.
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The front section of the ground floor opened to a split-level structure in the back: four steps down led to the laundry, with a built-in copper wash basin and a door to the outside, and the cellar, with two beer caches and other storage facilities; several steps up led to the maids' room and the privy. A straight staircase connected the ground floor with the second, which contained a spacious landing, the cantor's office, the kitchen, the main living room, and the master bedroom. The third and fourth floors were reached by a winding staircase that also led up to a bedroom and drying loft in the attic. According to eighteenth-century urban apartment design, unheated rooms—that is, bedrooms—were ordinarily inaccessible from hallways but could be entered only through the adjacent living rooms, whose stoves were stoked with fuel from the hallway. The cantor's apartment was equipped with ample built-in closet space, which explains why the 1750 inventory of Bach's estate enumerates only one dresser, one linen chest, and one wardrobe; other furnishings included six tables, eighteen leather chairs, seven wooden bedsteads, and one writing desk with drawers—undoubtedly Bach's working desk.
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The cantor's office suite consisted of the composing studio, a heated corner room with windows facing south and west, and an adjacent chamber as additional work space. From the west window of this corner room, Bach could look out over the city wall to the Pleisse River and the flat countryside; on clear days, the silhouette of the cathedral and castle of Merseburg would have been visible. A large iron stove in the southeast corner of the room was fired from the hallway outside, to the left of the office door; to its right, also outside the door, stood a large book cabinet, with many shelves protected by four lockable doors. How the office suite was furnished is unknown, but besides Bach's working desk it would surely have contained chairs, musical instruments, and bookshelves. From the hallway in front of his office, Bach could enter the school's music library, a newly created heated room whose four walls had built-in shelves that accommodated the old St. Thomas library, with its 500-plus titles and 4,500 partbooks, and perhaps also the bulk of Bach's own sacred compositions. From the library, which may also have served as the principal workplace for Bach's copyists, a lockable door opened into the auditorium of the
secunda
class, a large room with four windows facing west that also served as one of Bach's main teaching and rehearsal spaces. The cantor's apartment provided access to the school's classroom from the third and fourth floors as well, similarly to the dormitory of the choral scholars situated on the fifth (mezzanine) floor and on the first and second attic.

The total space of the cantor's apartment amounted to about 10 by 23.5 Saxon ells; that is, 74.5 square meters (5.6 × 13.3 m.) or 802 square feet (18.4 × 43.6 ft.); the largest room in the apartment, the second-floor living room, was barely 23.5 square meters or 253 square feet, and Bach's composing studio amounted to little more than half of that. By eighteenth-century bourgeois standards, the Bach family lived in a big house, though it must have felt crowded, considering the large brood of children and the nonfamily traffic that traipsed through daily. The management of the household fell to Anna Magdalena Bach. In addition to the customary maid service, she was probably helped by Friedelena Margaretha Bach, Maria Barbara's sister, who had lived in the household ever since 1708. When she died on July 28, 1729, at the age of fifty-three, her functions were likely absorbed by Bach's oldest daughter, Catharina Dorothea, then almost twenty-one. Like two of her stepsisters, Catharina remained single; in fact, the only one of the four Bach daughters who married was Lieschen, who on January 20, 1749, celebrated her wedding with Johann Christoph Altnickol, one of her father's best students.

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11.2. Layout of the Cantor's Apartment, 1732

Altnickol matriculated at Leipzig University in 1744 and quite possibly numbered among the cantor's select few pupils who received free tuition, room, and board—as is documented for Bach's Weimar student, Philipp David Kräuter, and his very last student, Johann Gottfried Müthel. Müthel, a young and gifted court organist with Duke Christian II Ludwig of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, received a stipend from his duke to study with Bach in Leipzig. The court issued a passport, on May 5, 1750, and a letter of introduction to Bach that was personally signed by the duke “for the organist Müthel, who will take a leave of absence for a year and go to Leipzig to the famous organist and composer Bach in order to perfect himself in his metier.”
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It was later reported that “the Capellmeister Bach accepted him graciously and provided him with a place in his house, and that Müthel availed himself of his instruction with the greatest attentiveness.”
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As Bach was to die two months later, Müthel could benefit only briefly from Bach's teachings, though he apparently developed close relations with the family.
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