The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1

been in the habit of marrying at least two or

r. Their wives, it is said-horresco referens!-could not tell them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom he said he had discussed matrimony with and exchanged rings with, but tired of. The Con

ld, but with Bachic haste his father remarried; the new wife was a widow and seemed to be in the habit of it

still. While they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with h

era. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assumin

is, at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice may signify that in him the highest summit of a

ll he got a better post. This was not till three years had passed and then his salary was onl

most respectable Herr Ambrosius Bach, the famous town-organist and musician of Eisenach, was married to the virtuous maiden Maria

t to the Grand Duke of Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with the Prince of Anhalt-K?then. In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he stood over the grave of the woma

abased," shows a larger grasp of resource and power. In the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the high praise of the eminen

ed after seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer. Bach waited from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six

twenty-one years old while Bach was thirty-six. They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and tog

her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, "They are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form a conce

begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife. There are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, "

, werthe Ju

e zur heut

e that others must be taught orally, and there is a love-song for soprano, which he must have written for her, to judge from the words, "Willst du dein Herz mir schenken." Upton declares this song to have been written during and for thei

later he was stricken with apoplexy and a high fever that gave him only ten more days of life! At his death-bed stood his wife, his daughters, his youngest son, a pupil, and a son-in-law. An old chorale of his was, as Spitta says, "floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and perfect it." The original name had been, "When we are in the

ather of music. The woman who had made his life so happy and aided him with hand an

ow, now fifty years old. Her husband's salary was continued half a year longer, but the sons all went away to other towns, some of them to considerable success. T

the public school children, who were forced by the custom of the day to follow to the grave the body of the very poor. In 1801 Bach's daughter Regina was st

y the great revival and the apotheosis of his genius. In that apotheosis some radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her