Johann Sebastian Bach (9 page)

For special events, the court recruited additional musical personnel from neighboring town and court ensembles at Cassel, Gotha, or Arnstadt. In 1690, a band of woodwind players was added as a fashionable musical innovation, providing the capelle with a regular complement of oboes, recorders, bassoons, and drums. Also, for a period of one year beginning in May 1677, the twenty-four-year-old Johann Pachelbel served the Eisenach capelle before he went on to Erfurt as organist of the Predigerkirche, where he succeeded Johann Bach (4). Pachelbel's short stay clearly left a mark on Ambrosius Bach's family, suggesting a close, cordial, and lasting friendship. In 1680, Pachelbel became godfather to Ambrosius's daughter Johanna Juditha (though he was unable to travel from Erfurt for the baptism) and in 1686 teacher and mentor of Ambrosius's son Johann Christoph, at whose Ohrdruf wedding in 1694 Pachelbel performed along with his friends among the extended Bach family (see Chapter 2).

In addition to the town hall and castle, the third building located on Eisenach's large main square that made up Ambrosius Bach's base of operations was the imposing twelfth-century St. George's Church, which served both the townspeople and the ducal court. The nave of the church, with its three galleries on the south and north sides, was designed to hold more than two thousand worshippers. Here, in the western choir and organ gallery, Ambrosius regularly played with his consorts on all Sundays and feast days and for special services such as funerals and weddings. As well as accompanying the choir, they performed with vocal soloists in all sorts of concerted pieces.

The choir consisted of students from the Latin school's
Chorus musicus
(or Chorus symphoniacus or Cantorey), who were selected on the basis of their musical experience and were granted stipends as choral scholars. The cantor (choral director) also served as teacher of the fourth class
(quarta)
. At the beginning of Ambrosius's Eisenach tenure, Johann Andreas Schmidt served as cantor; he was succeeded in 1690 by Andreas Christian Dedekind, who had previously served as cantor in Arnstadt, where he became a good friend of the Bach family. The school's chorus musicus supplied the church with polyphonic music for regular services throughout the ecclesiastical year and for special services. It also performed for secular occasions such as town council elections, civic ceremonies (for example, at the town hall's
Ratskeller
for the New Year's Day celebration), staged comedies, and certain courtly events such as birthdays in the ducal family. By tradition, several times a year and especially around New Year's Day, the chorus musicus divided into smaller groups, so-called
Currenden
, that sang in the streets of Eisenach and outlying villages to collect money for the teachers and needy students. Martin Luther had once been among such Currende singers.

According to the Weimar Church Order of 1664 (which also applied to Eisenach), there were four designated places for polyphony in the liturgy of the main Sunday worship service: after the readings of the Epistle and the Gospel, after the sermon, and during Communion. The standard repertoire included motets and other unaccompanied (a cappella) music, as available in the so-called Eisenach Cantional.
²²
This book, compiled around 1535 and used throughout the seventeenth century, contained compositions by Johann Walter, Ludwig Senfl, Josquin Desprez, Jacob Obrecht, Thomas Stoltzer, and others. More recent music was also performed: works by Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein, Heinrich Schütz, and Andreas Hammerschmidt; motet collections (for four to eight voices) by Abraham Schadaeus, Melchior Franck, Samuel Scheidt, and Ambrosius Profe;
²³
and compositions of Eisenach's own Johann Christoph Bach (13). Vocal concertos or concertato motets invariably required the participation of the town musicians and on rarer occasions also the capellisten of the court, who were joined with the chorus musicus; the combined forces were usually led by the cantor, but on certain occasions (Easter 1672, for example) by the Hausmann.

Ambrosius Bach's sons, who all attended St. George's Latin School, were presumably members of the chorus musicus, so they would regularly have participated in vocal-instrumental performances with their father. Eight-year-old Sebastian's name shows up on a list of students in the fifth class
(quinta)
of the Latin school in the old Dominican monastery. The school offered six classes, and students generally remained in one class for two years. Although very few students actually made it through all classes, graduation from the first (
prima
, or highest) qualified them for entrance at a university. The school's excellent leadership and high reputation attracted students from a wide region. For the years 1656–97, Heinrich Borstelmann served as rector.
²⁴
Conrector from 1675 was M. Christian Zeidler, previously a professor of Greek and Latin in Coburg; from 1693, he first substituted for the ailing Borstelmann and then held the rectorship from 1697 to 1707. Entrusted with supervising the school from 1691 to 1719 was the theologian M. Johann Christoph Zerbst, general superintendent of churches for the duchy and the clergyman who had baptized Sebastian. He himself had once been a student at the school, a member and prefect of its chorus musicus, and assistant to organist Johann Christoph Bach (13)—clearly someone who fit quite well into the scheme of relationships maintained by the extended Bach family.

In Eisenach, as in most regions and cities of Lutheran Germany at the time, school attendance was mandatory for all boys and girls from age five to twelve. Legislation enacted by Duke Johann Georg I in 1678 because of frequent violations specified that it was a punishable offense for parents within and outside the city walls not to send their children to school. They could, however, choose freely among the eight German schools and the Latin school, although the latter admitted boys only, aged seven to twenty-four. The German schools were mostly small neighborhood establishments, often run by a single schoolmaster, and all followed a prescribed curriculum that focused on religion, grammar, and arithmetic. While they did not ordinarily keep enrollment records, one of the German schools happened to be located in the Fleischgasse,
²⁵
so most likely Sebastian attended there from age five to seven before joining the fifth class (
quinta
) of the Latin school.
²⁶

That Sebastian could enter the Latin school's
quinta
directly indicates that at the age of eight he not only was able to read and write but had also mastered the subject matters covered in the
sexta
. Both the German and Latin schools were dominated by religious instruction, with Bible, hymnal, and catechism as the most important texts. Following the Thirty Years' War, schools in Thuringia and beyond were profoundly influenced by the educational reforms of Jan Amos Comenius, bishop of the Moravian Brethren, and Andreas Reyher, rector of the gymnasium in Gotha, who modernized and restructured the century-old school plans. Without straying from the theological focus, Comenius and Reyher systematized the areas of knowledge and stressed, in addition to the study of languages, grammar, and logic, the importance of contact with objects in the environment, with “real things.” As they did not consider religion and science to be incompatible, belief in God as creator and the perfection of God's creation remained as central as ever. Their books and pedagogy (Q: “Why do you go to school?” A: “So that I may grow up righteous and learned”) would exert a strong influence on Sebastian's schooling in Eisenach, Ohrdruf, and Lüneburg, from the elementary level through the
prima
.
²⁷

Having entered the
quinta
at a younger age than any of his brothers had, Sebastian graduated from the class in 1694 as the fourteenth of seventy-four students of the school. The teacher of the
quinta
was Johann Christoph Juncker, and the subject matter to be covered included Luther's
Catechism
, the psalms, and writing, reading, and grammatical exercises in German and Latin. From the fourth class onward, the main language of instruction was Latin; here, Sebastian fell back to twenty-third place (still two places ahead of his brother Jacob) among the students in the class. But in that year, the ten-year-old lost both parents within the space of nine months, and it is remarkable that he did not fall behind any further. Fortunately, his teacher was the cantor Andreas Christian Dedekind. The boys knew him well as a close friend of the family, and he was able to give Sebastian and Jacob much-needed support during this particularly difficult year.

Sebastian missed forty-eight full days in the school year 1692–93, twenty-nine and a half the next year, and fifty-one and a half the next.
²⁸
Not surprisingly, his academic performance was the best for the year in which he was absent the least. We can only speculate why he missed school: he may have been ill (his brother Jacob was absent less frequently during the same time), or he and Jacob may have been needed to assist in their father's business or take part in other family-related matters.

It was the custom of the extended Bach family to gather together once a year. As Bach's first biographer, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, reported,

 

The different members of this family had a very great attachment to each other. As it was impossible for them all to live in one place, they resolved at least to see each other once a year and fixed a certain day upon which they had all to appear at an appointed place. Even after the family had become much more numerous…they continued their annual meetings, which generally took place in Erfurt, Eisenach, or Arnstadt. Their amusements, during the time of their meeting, were entirely musical. As the company wholly consisted of cantors, organists, and town musicians, who had all to do with the Church, and as it was besides a general custom at the time to begin everything with Religion, the first thing they did, when they were assembled, was to sing a chorale. From this pious commencement they proceeded to drolleries which often made a very great contrast with it. For now they sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different. They called this kind of extemporary harmony a
Quodlibet,
and not only laughed heartily at it themselves, but excited an equally hearty and irresistible laughter in everybody that heard them.
²⁹

 

Since there were no vacation periods except for harvest time in the fall, these yearly meetings by necessity had to cut into the school schedule. They could take place only on regular weekdays, because on Sundays and religious holidays the musicians all had their church obligations to meet. Therefore, travel to a family gathering in Arnstadt or Erfurt from Eisenach would easily have cost the schoolchildren two or three days of school.

The annual tradition of family reunions may well have been confined to the generation of Hans Bach's
(2)
sons and grandsons active in the geographic triangle Erfurt-Arnstadt-Eisenach. But the actual source for Forkel's illuminating report can only be what Sebastian Bach himself later told one of his sons. It is more than likely that young Sebastian started accompanying his parents to these family gatherings at an early age, and that they had more or less ended when he reached mature adulthood. At any rate, his own and his siblings' integration into the large family of professional musicians developed as a matter of course, probably in the same way that the young children learned to handle the tools and materials of the family trade. Considering their school commitments, the children would have had sufficient time to begin a disciplined study of the string and wind instruments that a town piper was expected to master. The weekly school schedule was arranged so that there were two “half day” teaching periods, the first session from 6 to 9
A.M.
(in the summer, 7–10 in winter), Monday through Saturday, and the second session from 1 to 3
P.M.
, with no afternoon sessions on Wednesday or Saturday. For the select chorus musicus, the cantor assembled the students on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for an additional hour, 12–1.

The musically inclined Sebastian also took the opportunity to spend time with his father's cousin Christoph Bach
(13)
, town organist and court harpsichordist in Eisenach. Sebastian would later refer to him in the family Genealogy as “the profound composer,” and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach would add “the great and expressive composer.” None of the older family members ever received comparable epithets, let alone a whole paragraph at the beginning of Sebastian Bach's Obituary, where Christoph's music is described as

 

strong in the invention of beautiful ideas as well as in the expression of the meaning of the words. His writing was, so far as the taste of his day permitted,
galant
and singing as well as remarkably polyphonous. To the first point, a motet written seventy-odd years ago, in which, apart from other fine ideas, he had the courage to use the augmented sixth, may bear witness; and the second point is borne out just as remarkably by a church piece composed by him for 22 obbligato voices without the slightest violence to the purest harmony, as by the fact that both on the organ and on the clavier he never played in fewer than five real parts.
³⁰

 

That the Eisenach Christoph is so clearly singled out points to the kind of role model he must have represented for Sebastian, who not only remembered what may have seemed to a child like sheer magic (“he never played in fewer than five real parts”), but who also later described Christoph's music as beautiful, expressive, progressive, and well crafted. The work “for 22 obbligato voices” is the vocal concerto “Es erhub sich ein Streit,” a piece for St. Michael's Day that Sebastian later performed in Leipzig. Scored for a double choir of 5 voices each, 4 trumpets, timpani, 3 violins, 3 violas, and continuo (violoncello, violone, and organ), the work is exemplary in its design and its musical interpretation of the text (Michael and his angels fight against the dragon; Revelation 12:7–12). The instrumental introduction (Sinfonia) for strings sounds like the sweetest, most beautifully melodious angels' consort, while at the same time providing the necessary background against which the musical portrayal of a fateful battle unfolds. The opening words (“And there was war”) are sung in successive vocal entrances whose martial character is underscored by simple rhythmic and intervallic patterns typical of a military band of field trumpeters and drummers. But the instruments are only gradually introduced—the timpani begin and the trumpets follow—building up the angels' fight with the dragon to an enormous climax at the words “and prevailed not,” when the music reaches its first effective cadence.