Sebastian Bach

It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius in a great man's forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which we have to do.

In no family, perhaps, is it of greater moment than in that of Sebastian Bach, wherein his special tastes and powers all have their prophecy and preparation in a tradition where everything is musical.

From the first years of the sixteenth century-so soon, in other words, as the arising of a national religion has revealed to us the life of the German people-we have already traces of Bachs scattered among the valleys of Thuringia. There are Bachs near Arnstadt, in Erfurt, and Gotha, and Wechmar, places hereafter to be remembered in the musical vocations of their descendants. The ancestor of Sebastian appears, a little later, as a baker of Wechmar. This Veit Bach (? 1619), named from Saint Vitus, the patron of the church there, is related to have passed some years in Hungary, and to have gone back to his home when the rigour of dominant Jesuitism made living in Hungary hard and perilous. We may here note the sole basis for the common story that the family of Bach was of Hungarian descent. Veit sold his goods and set up as a baker, and then as a miller, in his native village. He had-so Sebastian tells the tale-his chief delight in a little cithara (Cythringen), which he would take with him into his mill and play thereon while the corn was grinding. They must have sounded merrily together! Howbeit, so he learnt the sense of time; and in this wise music first came into his house. But music had already a professor among the Bachs, and it was to Caspar Bach, the town piper of Gotha, that Veit entrusted his son Hans.

Hans Bach, player and carpet-weaver, whose portrait was taken with a fiddle and a brave beard1 and ornamented with a fool's cap, returned from his apprenticeship in his double craft, to settle at Wechmar, where he lived until 1626, when the plague killed him, with many of his kinsfolk, in middle life. His was a blithe personality, in great request in all the places round, as much, it seems, for his hearty goodfellowship as for the help he gave the town musicians wherever he went. To three of his large family, which included apparently three Hanses and certainly two Heinrichs, he handed down, with a part of his open generous nature, that musical inheritance which in their hands grew into an artistic possession rich with the promise of greater fruit. It is worth while to stay a moment at this point to observe how deep roots music had struck into the family of Bach. For it seems that Hans had a brother whose three sons shewed sufficient excellence for the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt to send them into Italy that they might complete their artistic training. Another son became the ancestor of a continuous succession of musicians, the last of whom, fourth of his line holding office in the ducal court of Meiningen, died organist there in 1846. Among this branch Johann Christian, distinguished as Clavier-Bach, a music-master at Halle, deserves commemoration from his friendship with Wilhelm Friedemann, the son of Sebastian, if only to illustrate the bond which held together the most remotely connected members of the family.

The household at Wechmar was broken up at the death of Hans, and the three brothers, Johann, Christoph, and Heinrich, separated to form new homes in other parts of Thuringia. But the intercourse of themselves and of their children was never in the least relaxed. They married into the same families, helped one another in sickness or poverty; the younger members were apprenticed to their elder kinsfolk and often succeeded to their posts when they died; and the yearly gatherings of the entire family held their ground for a century. The closeness of this attachment merits insisting upon especially, when we consider the troubled times on which the family was thrown at its first dispersion. For the thirty years' war in its wearisome progress makes the outward history of Germany, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, little more than a record of battles and sieges, with scant breathing-spaces of peace, not long enough for the towns to recover from exhausting occupations of foreign troops. In this age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of civil war the passion of religious hatred, threatened to dissolve the natural bonds of the family and of the race. Men sank into a blind and listless state, abandoning themselves to any vice or excess that seemed to deaden the thought of the morrow. It was therefore amid every circumstance of adversity that the Bach family grew to its full stature; and it is the more noteworthy that the latest, most learned, and most laborious biographer of Sebastian is unable to furnish a single evidence, in the entire records of his kindred, of the least deflection from the straitest paths of virtue.2

Johann Bach, the eldest of Hans's family with whom we have to do, was apprenticed to the town piper of Suhl, whose daughter he afterwards married, and whose son he came in time to welcome as a pupil and a kinsman in his house. He became organist at Schweinfurt, and ultimately director of the town musicians at Erfurt. It was a hard time, this of war, for musicians; but they had their meed of glory-and profit-when any peace festivities came. And Johann Bach seems to have made himself indispensable, like his father, in all the musical affairs of the place. He began, in fact, a line of musicians so indissolubly bound up with the life of the town, that more than a century later, when all the house was extinct, the town musicians of Erfurt still retained the generic title of "the Bachs." Adding to the duties of town musician those of organist to the Dominican church, he becomes a prominent forerunner in the two paths in which the genius of his family was to reach its climax. His home, also, lying equally accessible to Arnstadt and Eisenach, remained for long the centre of the greater family of the Bachs in general. It was in Johann that his youngest brother, Heinrich, found a guardian, when he was left an orphan in his twelfth year. Heinrich was not only the greatest musician of his generation, but also specially his father's son in that kindliness and merry temper which made him as much the delight of his family as he had been of his father in his boyish days. He played in the Erfurt band until he gained the post for which nature and training had fitted him, as organist at Arnstadt, a post which he retained with increasing honour and distinction for above half a century. Of his organ works little remains, but we have the accordant testimony of his contemporaries to place him among the greatest organists of his time. An equal agreement acknowledges his genial lovable nature, in all its freshness and childlike gaiety, which it was beyond the power of adversity to embitter or to corrupt.

Johann and Heinrich married sisters. Both had to pass through their times of misfortune, and Heinrich's first years of marriage were also years of great poverty. The pittance allowed him by the town of Arnstadt was irregularly paid, or not paid at all, in consequence of the immense drain upon the resources of Germany made by the continued-it seemed, the endless-war. Heinrich had to sue as a beggar to the Count of Schwarzburg. But no trouble made either of the brothers waver in their warm-hearted generosity to their kin or in their earnestness in their calling. They lived in the honourable esteem of the Thuringian towns wherein they dwelt, and left behind them a new generation to carry on and to exalt their fathers' art and name. Each left two sons; and, by a curiously repeated custom, each of these pairs of brothers married sisters. Renown first came to the younger branch, and the skill and learning with which the sons of Heinrich were informed remains a monument of their father's powers, as distinct and certain as if he were still known to us as a composer. Johann Christoph and Johann Michael are an astonishing phenomenon in this mid-time of national depression. Their writing has a freshness and vigour which seems to carry us back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the spirit of Germany was strong and creative, or forward to the age following, when the people had again recovered its strength. Of the greater achievements of the latter time the work of Johann Christoph and Michael appears as a prelude. In the pedigree of Sebastian Bach they fade to a comparative obscurity; viewed by themselves they are luminaries of signal brilliance. Johann Christoph was more than a complete master of the musical science of his day; he was also one of the first who ventured to deviate from the rigid rules of the early contrapuntists, to make them freer, more flexible, and more significant. He is a link between ancient and modern music, blending the old church modes with the modern tonality of major and minor. Besides this, he marks an important step in the growth of dramatic music. His Michaelmas piece, The Fight with the Dragon, follows in the track of those Germans who had invented the idea of setting to music scenes from Biblical history, Schuetz and Hammerschmidt; but it goes far beyond them in command of the orchestral body, and in the genius of dramatic utterance. The sacred drama is, in his hands, clearly on the road which leads to the perfected oratorio of Handel or the no less perfected Passion music of Sebastian Bach. But the permanent interest of Johann Christoph Bach lies, even more than in his historical significance, in the beauty of his melodies and the expressiveness3 with which he wrought them. It was Sebastian, his cousin in the next generation, who first knew how to appreciate his great predecessor. Contemporaries, however, were attracted rather by Johann Michael. But, excellent musician as he was, and gifted with a fine artistic sense, Michael failed specially in that power of expression which signalized his brother. The motets by which he is best known are deficient in symmetry. The ideas they contain are irregularly worked, and appeal to us by isolated beauties rather than by the unity of their spirit. The performance lags behind the conception. Of the instrumental works of the two brothers, works principally for the organ, and also for clavichord, there is not space to speak here. It is enough to have indicated in bare outline their general position. Their external history need only so far detain us as to notice that the elder was organist at Eisenach, the younger at Gehren near Arnstadt, and that Michael's daughter became the wife of her cousin Sebastian.

The musical faculty grew to ripeness more rapidly in the family of Heinrich Bach than in those of either of his brothers. Johann's sons were of course musicians, but composition first appeared in a grandson, Johann Bernhard, a man of wide capacity. He was cembalist in the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach's band, and of such distinction as an organist, that he was chosen to succeed to the post of his illustrious cousin, Johann Christoph, at the latter's death. He holds an honourable rank as a composer, having written orchestral suites as well as the proper productions of his office, organ-chorales. The latter follow somewhat directly in the steps of the famous organist of Erfurt-afterwards of Nuernberg-Johann Pachelbel, whose influence is indeed paramount over all the Bachs of his time. The orchestral works, however, have overtures which are described as equal in power and energy to some of those to Handel's operas and as only surpassed in genius and richness by Sebastian's own. They have the peculiar interest of existing mostly in the autograph of the latter, who transcribed and esteemed them at the period of his greatest maturity when he was cantor at Leipzig.

Leaving the rest of the musician-posterity of Johann and Heinrich Bach-and hardly a place in Thuringia or even Saxony but claimed some of them whether as organists or cantors, or in the minor arts of town piper or fiddler-we return to the brother who stands between them in age, and who is the grandfather of Sebastian. Christoph Bach, who was born at Wechmar in 1613, is the most secular of the sons of Hans. He was simply and solely a player, first in the service-menial as well as musical-of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then at Prettin in Saxony, where he took to him a wife; and thirdly, when he was near thirty, in the Company of Musicians in the more familiar town of Erfurt. His last years were spent in the band of the court and town of Arnstadt, where he died at the age of forty-eight, on the 14th September, 1661, his widow following him on the 8th of the next month.

Georg Christoph, his eldest son, of whom a concerted piece of church music was long preserved in the family, retreated in middle life from the immediate circle of the Bachs; he became cantor at Schweinfurt, and founded the Franconian branch of the continually expanding house. Next to him came two sons, twins, Johann Ambrosius and Johann Christoph, born on the 22nd of February, 1645. The coincidence of their birth was, in their case, accompanied by an almost unique identity of physical nature, character, and taste. The brothers were so alike that their own wives could not tell them apart: both adopted the family profession, and both the same instrument, the viol. Their strange psychological affinity subjected the one with the other to the same illnesses; and the elder survived the younger by little more than a year. Johann Christoph is the subject of one of the few detailed narratives which we encounter in the history of the Bachs before Sebastian; and this, if it does not seriously damage his reputation, equally does not credit him with the prudence that is characteristic of his kin. It appears that an indiscreet though innocent friendship with one of the Arnstadt maidens, accompanied, most rashly, with an exchange of rings, brought upon the young fiddler a prosecution at the hands of his would-be mother-in-law. The consistory, it is presumed, urged amends by the marriage of the parties; but Bach was firm-this is a family trait-and appealed to the higher consistory at Weimar, from which at length he obtained release from his difficulty. An experience of this sort made him hesitate before he finally decided to take a wife; and, after his marriage, misfortune-not of his own making-followed him for some years more. His place in the Arnstadt band was harassed by the jealous persecution of the principal town musician. The Bachs of Erfurt and Arnstadt combined in a memorial in his favour, but nothing came of it. In the end the Count dismissed the entire band for indolence and disunion. Christoph, in his poverty, still helped his uncle Heinrich in the Sunday music of his church; but this brought no subsistence to his household. He was fain to go to Gehren, if he might but do some service with quiet music, whereby to support himself and his family in their need. The death of the Count at last brought them rescue, for his successor restored Bach to the posts of court musician and town piper. From this time, 1682, the musician lived in peace; but his death eleven years later left a legacy of new troubles to his widow and her five children, the eldest just ten years of age. They had a long time of poverty and sickness to struggle with, though the boy, Johann Ernst, did his best to gain a living for them in the family craft. But he was a poor musician, and fortune kept him waiting. Ultimately he got the organistship at Arnstadt vacated by Sebastian, who, himself ill-provided and on the point of marriage, left Ernst the arrears of his salary and ended his kinsman's days of trouble.

Johann Ambrosius, the brother of the unlucky Christoph, has a meagre record. He was attached to the town band of Erfurt, afterwards of Eisenach; and married twice. His first wife, Elisabeth, daughter of Valentin Laemmerhirt, a furrier of Erfurt, gave him eight children, of whom six were sons. Three of these only grew to man's estate; the youngest is the subject of the present study. Ambrosius' second marriage was followed in two months by his death, in January, 1695. Of his character we have but one solitary notice, when a funeral sermon on a weak-minded sister gave occasion to the preacher to mark the contrast with her two brothers: whom we see to be men of a good understanding, endowed with art and skill, who are well seen and heard in churches and schools, and in the common life of the town, in such wise that the work praiseth the Master. A portrait of Ambrosius, which looks down upon the precious reliques of his son in the Berlin library, is notable not only for its likeness to Sebastian but also for the simplicity of its manner. There he is, not sprucely dressed out for the occasion in wig and powder, but in plain working clothes, with brown hair and moustache. There is a certain pride in this disdain of outward decoration.

Before closing the recital of the genealogy of the Bachs, a word of notice is claimed by the Companies of Players that existed in Germany in their time, and with which they necessarily stood in close relation. The regulations of these fellowships are in some cases preserved, and are interesting memorials of the pious care which their framers took to guard against the abuses to which the musician's craft was peculiarly exposed, to inflict the sternest penalties on profligate or irreligious conduct, and to exclude the singing or accompanying of any but virtuous music. It does not appear, however, that any of the Bachs belonged to such a company. Many of them held a better worldly position, most were better educated than the common town player. It is a plausible inference that their number alone served to constitute them an informal guild by themselves, of which the name was that of their family, and the only regulation that which sprang from the generosity of their nature and the close ties which knit the kin together in a common pride and emulation in their common art. Emanuel Bach, Sebastian's son, has left us a genial picture of how the kinsmen would gather all together, at Erfurt, or Eisenach, or Arnstadt, once in the year, and there make merry. First they sang a chorale; and, this duty ended, soon turned to a medley of secular songs. The climax was reached in the quodlibet, when all joined in a sort of comic chorus. The music consisted of any scrap, no matter whether sacred or profane, that occurred to any of the assembled company. It was an improvised catch. Each man in turn gave his own part or refrain, all different and all in harmony. The words were as incongruous as the music, and every one added his own quip or jest to the general jollity. Such was the homely festival that held its place in the family life of the Bachs as late as the middle years of Sebastian's career.

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