Johann Sebastian Bach (74 page)

From Kräuter, who studied with Bach back at Weimar in 1712–13, we receive a much more detailed account of a live-in student-apprentice. Kräuter's stipend was provided by the city of Augsburg. His first report to the scholarship committee, dated April 30, 1712, shortly after his arrival in Weimar, ends with an enthusiastic report about the multifaceted learning experience under Bach's tutelage:

 

I shall report, according to your kind instruction, how I have used these funds and how I have duly arranged with my new teacher, Mr. Bach in Weimar, for a year's board and tutelage. The traveling expense was between 25 and 26 florins, since the roads were very bad and I had to give the coachman almost twice the normal compensation. I gave 4 florins to Mr. Bach for half the month of April, since I was concerned that he might count the entire month as part of the year that now is to commence with the month of May. He had initially asked for 100 reichsthaler to cover the year, but I was able to lower it to 80 thlr., against which he will offer me board and tuition…. It is assuredly six hours per day of guidance that I am receiving, primarily in composition and on the keyboard, at times also on other instruments. The rest of the time I use by myself for practice and copying work, since he shares with me all the music I ask for. I am also at liberty to look through all of his pieces.
⁵¹

 

Bach basically continued the practice he had grown up with in his parents' home in Eisenach, where his father's apprentices lived with the family while studying with and assisting their master. During Kräuter's time in Weimar, Johann Martin Schubart, a pupil of Bach's from Mühlhausen days, was also studying with Bach and may have been boarding with the family as well.
⁵²
After the Bachs moved to Cöthen and then to Leipzig, more than one live-in student-apprentice at any given time seems improbable, especially in view of the family's growth.

Carl Philipp Emanuel remembered the Bach household during the Leipzig years as a “pigeonry,” with people swarming in and out all the time. He invoked that picture to help him explain to Forkel the dire lack of information about the simple facts of his father's life, let alone his thoughts: “With his many activities he hardly had time for the most necessary correspondence, and accordingly would not indulge in lengthy written exchanges. But he had the more opportunity to talk personally to good people, since his house was like a pigeonry, and just as full of life. Association with him was pleasant for everyone, and often very edifying. Since he never wrote down anything about his life, the gaps are unavoidable.”
⁵³
What does come through clearly in Carl's description, however, is the outgoing attitude of his father and the convivial and stimulating atmosphere he created, his taking the time to talk with people. Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach kept an open house where they welcomed many friends and colleagues from near and far. “No master of music,” the Hamburg Bach later recalled, “was apt to pass through this place [Leipzig] without making my father's acquaintance and letting himself be heard by him.”
⁵⁴
Guests included some of the leading figures in contemporary German musical life, among them Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Jan Dismas Zelenka, Franz Benda, Johann Joachim Quantz, and the husband-and-wife team of Johann Adolph Hasse and the celebrated Faustina Bordoni, who came to Leipzig several times.
⁵⁵
Visits of individual musicians, such as that of the Dresden flutist Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, are usually undatable and reported only coincidentally, mostly for secondary reasons (Buffardin told Bach about meeting and teaching his brother, Johann Jacob, at Constantinople)
⁵⁶
or to make a particular point. For example, about the visit in the 1730s of the erstwhile royal Swedish court capellmeister, Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch, Forkel relates that this “conceited and arrogant clavier player” came to Leipzig not to hear Bach “but to let himself be heard. Bach received him kindly and politely, listened to his very indifferent performance with patience; and when Hurlebusch, on taking leave, made the eldest sons a present of a printed collection of sonatas, exhorting them to study them diligently (they who had studied very different things), Bach only smiled to himself and did not at all change his friendly behavior to the stranger.”
⁵⁷

When the Bachs entertained at home, they arranged for house concerts, when the occasion arose. Johann Elias Bach tells of such an incident in a letter draft where he mentions that Wilhelm Friedemann “was here for over four weeks, having made himself heard several times at our house along with the two famous lutenists Mr. [Silvius Leopold] Weiss and Mr. [Johann] Kropffgans” from Dresden.
⁵⁸
But the welcoming hospitality of the cantor and his wife surely extended beyond amusing their musical guests. What would their ample and costly supply of silverware have been used for other than dinner parties?
⁵⁹
What purpose would two silver coffee pots, big and small, a tea pot, and two sugar bowls, larger and smaller, with spoons (valued at over 65 talers), have served other than drinking coffee and tea with friends? What use would Bach have had for four
tabatières
(probably gifts, valued at over 54 talers) other than stuffing and smoking a pipe or taking snuff in a gregarious circle of colleagues and friends? When Bach retreated into the solitude of his composing studio, all by himself, he apparently preferred to do so with a bottle of brandy.

B
ALANCING
O
FFICIAL
D
UTIES AND
P
RIVATE
B
USINESS

For the Bachs, living in the St. Thomas School building meant that the regular school rhythm governed much of their daily lives. As part of the cantor's obligations, he, the rector, the conrector, and the
tertius
took turns as inspector for the week. The school regulations prescribed that

 

the Inspector conducts morning and evening prayers…. He see that the school is called at 6
A.M
. in winter, at 5
A.M
. in summer, and that fifteen minutes later all are assembled for prayers in the auditorium downstairs. He says prayers again at 8
P.M
., and is careful to note that none is absent and that no lights are taken into the dormitories. At meals he must see that there is no boozing, that Grace is said in German before and after meal, and that the Bible or a history book is read during the repast. It is his duty to make sure that the scholars return in full number and at the proper hour from attending funerals, weddings, and especially the winter
currende
singing; particularly must he satisfy himself that none comes home having drunk too much…. The Inspector holds the key to the infirmary and visits the patients in it. Absence from his duty during the day entails a fine of four groschen, and at night of six.
⁶⁰

 

There was no way around the inspector's service, so Bach had to take on this responsibility once a month throughout his twenty-seven-year tenure, a burden not exactly conducive to musical creativity. Largely parallel to the school rhythm, his own workday began at 5
A.M
. (6 in winter), a lunch break came at 11, and dinner was held at 6
P.M
. Even if he observed the 9
P.M
. bedtime of the school dormitory—which he probably did not—his workday would have lasted fifteen to sixteen hours. With daily singing exercises from noon to 1
P.M
.,
⁶¹
private vocal and instrumental lessons (outside the academic lecture periods of 7–10
A.M
. and 1–3
P.M
.), and other obligations, he was caught in a tight schedule of the kind he had never before experienced. He surely had not been used to anything like it in his previous court positions at Weimar and Cöthen. But the unfamiliar discipline clearly did not deter him, for example, from his ambitious project of putting together a new and large repertoire of church music that would serve for decades to come. What Bach actually invested in the St. Thomas cantorate was known only to him and was certainly not measurable by the conventional means applied by his superiors, who thought he was cutting corners when he skipped a singing class or had a choral prefect take it over.
⁶²
Whatever reduction of his brutal schedule Bach managed to achieve—always at the expense of being considered irresponsible—the everyday obligations of his office remained as arduous as they were inexorable.

To some extent, the relentless school timetable is replicated in Bach's own cantata production schedule, certainly during the periods when he engaged in weekly composition. The process from the beginning of the preparatory work to the performance of the completed piece followed a regular pattern:

1. Select or have selected (by clergy) the text (also arrange texts—approximately six per cantata booklet—and prepare about twelve such booklets per year for publication).
   
2. Compose choruses, arias, recitatives, and chorales—generally in that order (beginning on Monday, if not before);
   ⁶³
   prepare the music paper and score, and write the more elaborate movements first, to allow enough time for copying and rehearsing.
   
3. Organize and supervise the copying effort to make performance parts (assemble the copyists around tables in the cantor's office and the library).
   
4. Review the performance materials (proofread, correct, enter articulation and other performance markings).
   
5. Conduct rehearsals (generally no more than one complete read-through on Saturday).
   

This process was interrupted not only by teaching and being on duty every Friday from 7 to 8
A.M
. for the weekly prayer service, but also by weddings and funerals. As a requirement of the city, the school had to participate in all public funerals. These took place after 3
P.M
. so that instruction would not be hindered, with the number of participating students depending on the bereaved family's ability to pay. For both students and teachers a major source of income, funerals involving the “Whole School” (all classes) were the most expensive, and those requiring a “Larger Half School” (
prima, secunda, tertia, and quinta
), a “Smaller Half School” (
prima and tertia, or secunda and quarta
), or a “Quarter School” (one of the lower classes) less costly. Independent of its size, the school choir was escorted by members of the faculty, who collected fees commensurate with their rank and function: for a Whole School, the rector received 1 taler, the conrector 8 groschen, the cantor 15 groschen, and so forth; for a Larger Half School, the rector was paid 15 groschen, the conrector 6 groschen, the cantor 1 taler; and for a Quarter School, the rector earned 1 groschen 6 pfennig, the conrector 3 pfennig, and the cantor 6 pfennig. The musical assignments varied according to what was ordered, from elaborate motets (such as “O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht,” BWV 118, dating from around 1736, with portable instruments for the funeral procession: 2 litui [special trumpets], cornetto, and 3 trombones)
⁶⁴
to simple unison chorales without accompaniment. Wedding ceremonies, where school participation was not compulsory, occurred less frequently and were handled more flexibly. They also were divided into two categories: a full wedding Mass involved a cantata performance (BWV 34a, 120a, 195, and 197, for instance), while a half wedding Mass required only four-part chorales (BWV 250–252 represent a sample from after 1730). Altogether, funerals and weddings took up a considerable amount of time every week.

Considering these additional obligations, it is truly remarkable that Bach was able to manage, on the side, so to speak, such demanding activities as the directorship of the Collegium Musicum—if only after largely completing the cantata repertoire for the school—and practicing and preparing for recitals, let alone teaching private pupils. Those who came to him for private studio instruction fell into two groups: professional students, whom he usually taught in exchange for services and a modest fee, and wealthy amateurs, mostly from among aristocratic students at the university, who paid a hefty fee. The latter provided him with considerable extra income; for a keyboard lesson he gave in 1747 to Eugen Wenzel Count of Wrbna, Bach received 6 talers, or six times the highest fee charged for a funeral or wedding.
⁶⁵
In addition, he rented the count a clavier for several months at a monthly fee of 1 taler 8 groschen.

Bach kept a sizable collection of instruments in his home. His estate catalog lists no fewer than eight harpsichords, one pedal harpsichord, two lute claviers, one spinet, two violins, a piccolo violin, three violas, a
Bassetchen
(viola pomposa), two cellos, a viola da gamba, and a lute.
⁶⁶
Some of these instruments he needed for his own, his wife's, and his children's use, for instructional purposes, for performances at home, and for supplementing Collegium and church instruments. Others, however, especially keyboard instruments, were available for rent. A dunning letter to the Leipzig innkeeper Johann Georg Martius (or his son), who specialized in funeral and wedding parties, sheds light on Bach's instrumentrental business. An obviously angry cantor wrote on March 20, 1748, to his debtor:

 

Mr. Martius,

My patience is now at its end. How long do you think I must wait for the harpsichord? Two months have passed, and nothing has changed. I regret to write this to you, but I cannot do otherwise. You must bring it back in good order, and within five days, else we shall never be friends. Adieu.