Johann Sebastian Bach (8 page)

In the absence of public social and welfare programs, family and self-reliance played a major role in managing all kinds of hardships, and through several generations the extended Bach family was exemplary in this respect. When Ambrosius moved from Erfurt to Eisenach, he took along his youngest sister, Dorothea Maria, then nineteen and in need of intensive care because she was seriously handicapped, both physically and mentally.
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The family was also joined by Eva Barbara Lämmerhirt, Elisabeth Bach's widowed mother, who left her Erfurt home perhaps in order to provide a helping hand to her daughter and her growing family, but perhaps also because she needed help herself. She died just one year after the move, in 1673, and Dorothea Maria did not live much longer either; she was buried in 1679. Three years later, two of Ambrosius's cousins, Christian
(7)
and Nicolaus
(9)
, fell victim to the plague that swept through Erfurt in 1682–83 and diminished the city's population by almost half; their colleague and friend Johann Pachelbel lost his wife and baby son as well. To escape the plague, Christian's son Johann Jacob (b. 1668) moved to Eisenach and became an apprentice and then journeyman to Ambrosius. He remained with his uncle for almost ten years, but died of an unknown cause in 1692—for young Sebastian, the second death at home within a year.
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From July 1683, Ambrosius and Elisabeth Bach also took care of the orphaned one-year-old Johann Nicolaus, who was born shortly after his father, Nicolaus (9), had died of the plague in July 1682. When the boy's mother died almost exactly a year later, it fell to Elisabeth to provide a home for her stepsister's grandson. Johann Nicolaus later went to school together with his younger cousin Sebastian and left Eisenach for Erfurt only after Elisabeth Bach's death in 1694.
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T
ABLE
1.2. Maria Elisabeth and Johann Ambrosius Bach's Children

The Eisenach Bachs' house was always full, populated not only with children and relatives, but also with the apprentices. This meant that the house ordinarily had to accommodate three additional people between fifteen and twenty years of age, assuming that the fourth of the town piper's consorts was a journeyman who provided his own accommodation. Clearly, the need for adequate living quarters for the director of the town band cannot be underestimated. At first, Ambrosius rented an apartment in the house of the ducal head forester, Balthasar Schneider, near the Frauenplan (site of today's Ritterstrasse 11). After Ambrosius and his family acquired citizenship in Eisenach in 1674, they purchased a home. (This house, however, in which Sebastian was born, no longer stands.)
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Situated at the Fleischgasse (the site of today's Lutherstrasse 35) in the center of town, the house was registered in Ambrosius Bach's name from 1675 to 1695. Among his later neighbors on the same street were his cousin Johann Christoph Bach
(13)
and the cantor Andreas Christian Dedekind. When Ambrosius purchased the house, he probably used funds left by his mother-in-law, Eva Barbara Lämmerhirt. Since the Lämmerhirts ran a successful fur business in Erfurt (from which Johann Sebastian later received a generous inheritance), town councillor Valentin Lämmerhirt's widow had not been left without means; before joining her daughter's household in Eisenach, she had sold her Erfurt house to Johann Bach for 120 florins.
¹⁴
In general, there was no serious financial trouble in Ambrosius Bach's household—quite the opposite of the rather desperate economic situation in which, for example, his Eisenach cousin and companion, the town organist Johann Christoph (13), constantly found himself.
¹⁵

In early 1684, Ambrosius was offered the directorship of the town music company in Erfurt, a post that had been vacant since the death of Johann Christian Bach
(7)
in 1682 and that had remained unfilled while the plague was still raging. His native Erfurt, three times the size of Eisenach, made Ambrosius an attractive offer that compared favorably with his present situation. He wrote to the Eisenach town council describing the financial burden of providing for a family with six children and of employing three journeymen and an unspecified number of apprentices, the abatement of additional income resulting from frequent public mourning periods, and the constant quarrels with the “beer fiddlers” (freelance musicians), who were interfering with his business—in short, he explained that conditions in Erfurt would permit a more cost-efficient and pleasant life.
¹⁶
Though neither the Eisenach town council nor the ducal court consented to his request for dismissal, they did agree to pay him an indemnity of 1 florin during public mourning periods. Johann Sebastian would have been born in Erfurt had his parents left Eisenach then, but as it was, he grew up in the town below the Wartburg, in an environment that significantly shaped his talents, character, and outlook.

I
N THE
A
MBIENCE OF
H
OME
, T
OWN
, C
OURT
, S
CHOOL, AND
C
HURCH

Johann Sebastian Bach's baptism in 1685 took place in the immediate vicinity, within a diameter of no more than an eighth of a mile, of the four institutions that formed the foundation of seventeenth-century musical culture in Germany: town, court, school, and church. All four would not only play an essential role in Bach's later career, they also influenced the boy's formative years from the very beginning: the town hall with its music ensemble, the civic organization chiefly responsible for official and public musical events; the ducal castle with its court capelle, the center of aristocratic musical patronage; St. George's Latin School with its
Chorus musicus
, the primary domicile of high-level musical education; and St. George's Church with its organ and choir loft, the principal home of sacred music.
¹⁷
Church, castle, and town hall faced the market square in the city's busy center, and the little boy Sebastian must often have gone from one establishment to another, first at his father's side, watching him perform his duties, later fulfilling minor chores (perhaps as assistant stage manager, page turner, or the like), and eventually as a student at the Latin school and as a choirboy. It all began at home, of course, and was brought back there as well—the house of a town piper, though not an institution as such, nevertheless served as a central establishment of professional music making. Sebastian could not have realized that everything he experienced amounted to a concrete preview of his later activities, but he must have understood and probably never questioned that this was, indeed, his world and always would be. Throughout his life, he remained truthful to his Eisenach background and loyal to his Eisenach citizenship, the only one he ever carried. Later, and surely with pride, he often added his place of origin to his name: “Johann Sebastian Bach Isenacus” or “
Isenacensis
,” or in the abbreviated form “ISBI.”

Eisenach, a town of some six thousand when Bach was born, lay well positioned on the so-called Hohe or Ober-Straße—at the time a major east-west trade and post route in Germany—between Leipzig and Frankfort-on-the-Main or, viewed on a larger scale, between Warsaw and eastern Europe on the one hand and the Rhineland, northern France, and the Netherlands on the other. Like almost everywhere else in central Germany, Eisenach had been hard hit by the Thirty Years' War, and by the time Ambrosius Bach arrived, the town had barely recovered from its turmoils. Hence the year 1672, when the city became the capital of an independent principality, marked an important turning point that basically coincided with the beginning of Ambrosius's tenure of office. The new political status of the town, whose population by 1710 would grow to around nine thousand, had a direct impact on its economy and culture and, by implication, on the musical scene at large, with the latter serving primarily but not exclusively the purposes of the court. For example, the mere fact that the dukes moved their official residence to the city made the principal church of the town the court church, a situation that affected in particular the feast days of the liturgical year. (For the Lutheran Church calendar, see Appendix 4.)

The town piper's house on the Fleischgasse also served as a base for Ambrosius's professional activities. As a result, Sebastian absorbed from the very beginning an atmosphere dominated by music and musicians, involving the entire family and almost all who lived with them. Ambrosius typically employed four assistants, of which two or three were apprentices; they were entitled to room and board in the town piper's house in exchange for services. An apprentice learned to play all types of musical instruments and generally stayed with his master for five to six years, by which time he reached the status of journeyman. After traveling and working with different masters or staying on with the original master and gaining more experience, a journeyman could then apply to fill vacant posts in the town music company. These salaried positions were usually available in two categories, art fiddlers and the higher-ranked town pipers; in Thuringia, the head town piper was usually called
Hausmann
, a traditional term deriving from his original function as the tower guard, who was also responsible for winding the public clocks.

When Sebastian was three years old, his second-oldest brother, fifteen-year-old Balthasar, having reached a certain level of musical proficiency, began to apprentice with his father. Sebastian could thus observe both his father and his big brother at work. The numerous musical activities of family members and apprentices that penetrated domestic life at the town piper's house consisted not merely of teaching, practicing, rehearsing, and performing, but also of collecting and copying music, repairing and maintaining musical instruments, and other endeavors related to an extended music-business establishment. There is no question that in an age when child labor was a mere matter of course, the sons of Ambrosius Bach became involved in their father's activities from early on, whether carrying music or instruments, cleaning brass, or restringing fiddles. They would also have assisted in performances by playing various instruments according to the level of proficiency they had acquired, versatility counting among the most fundamental and useful musical virtues.

Ambrosius's duties as director of the Eisenach town music company included, according to his contract,
¹⁸
two primary obligations. The first was performing twice daily, at 10
A.M.
and 5
P.M.
, with a band of five at the town hall. This
Abblasen
(literally “blowing off”) of so-called tower pieces, mostly for shawm or sackbut ensembles (usually sonatas, intradas, dances, and chorales), normally took place on the balcony of the town hall and rang out over the entire marketplace. The second duty was performing at worship services in St. George's Church on all Sundays and feast days, before and after the sermon and also at the afternoon Vespers, as directed by the cantor. All additional activities were undertaken for separate fees, resulting in supplementary income that typically exceeded Ambrosius's annual salary by a considerable margin. They included playing at such civic events as town council elections and receptions for out-of-town dignitaries, and at weddings, funerals, and other private occasions.

Eisenach citizens needing musical services were required to hire the members of the town music company. Beer fiddlers could serve only if the town musicians were unavailable or needed reinforcement; in such cases, the guild regulations specified that the town musicians were to collect the regular fee, while the beer fiddlers would receive just a gratuity. These regulations naturally led to constant quarreling over the exclusive, jealously guarded rights of the town musicians; they were often violated as well by townsfolk seeking specially discounted services at weddings, and Ambrosius complained more than once about pointed disagreements and unpleasant relationships with the beer fiddlers.

Shortly after taking up his post in October 1671 as Hausmannin Eisenach, Ambrosius became an affiliated member of the ducal court capelle, an ensemble of modest size established under dukes Johann Georg I (r. 1672–86) and Johann Georg II (r. 1686–98) of Saxe-Eisenach.
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When in 1672 Johann Georg I moved to Eisenach, the violinist Daniel Eberlin and four trumpeters came along from Marksuhl, the previous ducal residence, and formed the nucleus of a new court capelle; they were joined by the violinist and dance master Jean Parison and the lutenist Louis Parisel. Eberlin, who dedicated to the duke his principal published instrumental opus, a set of trio sonatas,
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received an official appointment as court capellmeister (leader of the court musicians) and master of the pages in 1685, a position he occupied for seven years. (His future son-in-law, Georg Philipp Telemann, served as court capellmeister from 1708 to 1712.) In addition to the few full-time members, the capelle drew on part-time musicians, who functioned as lackeys and filled court service positions of various kinds. They were also regularly joined by the town musician Ambrosius Bach and his cousin the town organist Christoph Bach (13), who both held court appointments. According to his contract, Ambrosius was required “always to perform with his people [the town music company] in the court capelle.”
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