Sources, repertory. 4 page

Nothing, unfortunately, is known about the programmes of the ‘ordinaire’ weekly concerts. But the surviving performing parts for such works as the orchestral suites bwv1066–8, the violin concertos bwv1041–3 and the flute sonatas bwv1030 and 1039 demonstrate that Bach performed many of his Cöthen instrumental works (some in revised form) as well as new compositions. The seven harpsichord concertos bwv1052–8, collected together in a Leipzig manuscript, also belong in this context. Bach often performed works by other composers as well, including five orchestral suites by his cousin Johann Ludwig, secular cantatas by Handel and Porpora and the flute quartets that Telemann wrote for Paris. Further, Bach’s many musical acquaintances from other places must have made frequent appearances, including his colleagues in the Dresden court orchestra (there is evidence of visits from J.A. Hasse, Georg Benda, S.L. Weiss, C.H. Graun and J.D. Zelenka). C.P.E. Bach’s remark that ‘it was seldom that a musical master passed through [Leipzig] without getting to know my father and playing for him’ must refer to performances of the collegium musicum, which took place on Wednesdays between 4 and 6 p.m. in the coffee-garden ‘before the Grimmisches Thor’ in the summer and on Fridays between 8 and 10 p.m. in Zimmermann’s coffee-house in the winter. In addition, there were ‘extraordinaire’ concerts, to mark special events; on these occasions, during the 1730s, Bach performed his large-scale secular cantatas. His activities with the collegium must have made heavy demands on him, and the reduction in his production of sacred music is easy to understand.

This does not, however, mean that his interest in sacred music was diminished (as Blume, G1963, claimed, with undue emphasis in the light of the revised dating of his works). Such a view is contradicted not only by the major ecclesiastical works written after 1730 but also by the simple fact that, throughout his period of office, Bach provided performances of his cantatas, a repertory largely completed before 1729, every Sunday at the two main Leipzig churches. His reference to the ‘onus’ of such undertakings, in connection with the performance of a Passion planned for 1739, might just as well have been made in the 1720s. Admittedly, his difficulties became particularly acute around 1730, as his important memorandum of 23 August 1730, dealing with the state of church music in Leipzig and outlining his remedies, testifies. His letter of 28 October that year, to his old friend Erdmann in Danzig, may be read in the same sense; sheer frustration that the memorandum had proved ineffectual drove him to consider leaving Leipzig. It would seem that his work with the collegium musicum had not yet brought about the intended equilibrium in his activities.

The situation had been aggravated by other, external factors. The old headmaster Johann Heinrich Ernesti had died in 1729 (Bach had performed a motet bwv226 at his funeral in October). During the subsequent interim in the Thomasschule’s direction the organization of school life was disturbed. Problems of space appear to have arisen too. It was in this context that complaints were made about Bach’s neglect of his school duties (the dropping of singing lessons, absence on journeys without leave); in August 1730 there was even a question of reducing his salary ‘because the Kantor is incorrigible’. It would appear that things were put right by J.M. Gesner, who took over the headship of the school in the summer, and who seems soon to have established friendly and familiar relations with Bach.

On Good Friday 1730 Bach apparently performed a St Luke Passion, not of his own composition. From 25 to 27 June the bicentenary of the Augsburg Confession was celebrated across Lutheran Germany, and Bach wrote three cantatas for the event (nos.190a, 120b, Anh.4a: all were parody cantatas). They are not untypical of his church compositions of this period, most of which were put together as parodies; and that is true also of the major vocal works like the St Mark Passion, the B minor Mass, the small masses and the Christmas Oratorio. The only sacred cantatas that Bach composed as entirely new works after 1729 are nos.117 (1728–31), 192 (1730), 112 and 140 (1731), 177 (1732), 97 (1734), 9 and 100 (1732–5) and 14 (1735).

In 1731 a collected edition of the six partitas appeared as op.1, under the title I.Teil der Clavier-Übung. From this form of words it is clear that Bach planned further ‘parts’ in a series of ‘keyboard exercises’, and these he now proceeded to produce. His new and continuing interest in publishing his own compositions is a clear sign of a new determination with regard to independent and freely creative activity. The first performance of the St Mark Passion, predominantly a parody work, took place on Good Friday of that year. At the end of June 1731 Bach and his family had to move to temporary quarters while rebuilding and extension work were being carried out on the Thomasschule. His residence must have become increasingly cramped, for his family was growing. In the early years in Leipzig Anna Magdalena had borne a child almost every year, but few of them survived infancy: Christiana Sophia Henrietta (b spring 1723; d 29 June 1726)
Gottfried Heinrich (48)
Christian Gottlieb (bap. 14 April 1725; d 21 Sept 1728)
Elisabeth Juliane Friederica (bap. 5 April 1726; d Leipzig, 24 Aug 1781)
Ernestus Andreas (bap. 30 Oct 1727; d 1 Nov 1727)
Regina Johanna (bap. 10 Oct 1728; d 25 April 1733)
Christiana Benedicta (bap. 1 Jan 1730; d 4 Jan 1730)
Christiana Dorothea (bap. 18 March 1731; d 31 Aug 1732)
Johann Christoph Friedrich (49)
Johann August Abraham (bap. 5 Nov 1733; d 6 Nov 1733)
Johann Christian (50)
Johanna Carolina (bap. 30 Oct 1737; d Leipzig, 18 Aug 1781)
Regina Susanna (bap. 22 Feb 1742; d Leipzig, 14 Dec 1809)

Joy and sorrow were everyday matters. But Bach’s family life must have been harmonious in more than one sense; in 1730 he reported, as a proud paterfamilias, that with his family he could form a vocal and instrumental concert ensemble. The family moved back into their refurbished apartment the next April. The school was reconsecrated on 5 June 1732 with a cantata, bwv Anh.18. In September 1731 Bach had been to Dresden for the first performance of Hasse’s opera Cleofide and to give concerts at the Sophienkirche and at court (there were enthusiastic reports in the newspapers). In September 1732 he went with his wife to Kassel for the examination and inauguration of the organ of the Martinskirche, where he probably played the ‘Dorian’ Toccata and Fugue in D minor bwv538.

With the death of Elector Friedrich August I of Saxony on 1 February 1733 a five-month period of national mourning began. However, the collegium musicum obtained permission to restart its performances in the middle of June, when a new harpsichord was introduced (possibly in the harpsichord concertos bwv1052–8). During the mourning period Bach composed the D major version of the Magnificat bwv243, which was probably first heard in Leipzig when the mourning was ended on 2 July (Visitation). Above all he worked on the Kyrie and the Gloria of the B minor Mass, which, in the hope of obtaining a title at the court Kapelle, he presented to the new Elector Friedrich August II in Dresden, with a note dated 27 July 1733, as a Missa in a set of parts. There is evidence to suggest that the Missa was performed at this time, perhaps at the Sophienkirche in Dresden, where W.F. Bach had been working as an organist since June 1733. Not until November 1736, however, was the title ‘Hofkomponist’ conferred on Bach, and even then only through the intervention of his patron Count Keyserlingk after a further letter of application. As a gesture of thanks, Bach paid his respects to the Dresden royal household and an enthusiastic public with a two-hour organ recital on the new Silbermann instrument at the Frauenkirche on 1 December 1736.

After the dedication of the Missa in July 1733, Bach kept the Saxon royal family’s interests in mind with his ‘extraordinaire’ concerts of the collegium musicum. On 3 August, the name day of the new elector, Bach began his remarkable series of secular cantatas of congratulation and homage with bwv Anh.12 (music lost), followed by Cantata no.213 (5 September, for the heir to the electorate), no.214 (8 December, for the electress), no.205a (19 February 1734, for the coronation of the elector as King of Poland; music lost), an unknown work (3 August, again for the elector), and no.215 (5 October, also for the elector, who was at the performance). Much of the festive music was performed in the open air with splendid illuminations, and according to newspaper reports the music benefited from a resounding echo. (On the day after the performance of no.215 Bach’s virtuoso trumpeter and the leader of the Leipzig Stadtpfeifer, Gottfried Reiche, died as a result of the exertions of his office.) During the following Christmas season Bach gave the people of Leipzig a chance to hear much of the music from his secular festive cantatas in modified form, as the Christmas Oratorio, which was heard in six sections between Christmas Day 1734 and Epiphany 1735 (and consisted predominantly of parodies of Cantatas nos.213–15).

On 21 November 1734 the new headmaster of the Thomasschule, Johann August Ernesti, was greeted with a cantata, bwv Anh.19 (Gesner had moved to the newly founded University of Göttingen as its first dean). Bach’s dealings with the directors of the school had been untroubled for four years, thanks to his friendly relations with Gesner; but with Ernesti he experienced the most violent controversies of his entire period as Thomaskantor. A dispute flared up in August 1736 over the authority to nominate the choral prefect, in which the interests of the Kantor and the headmaster were diametrically opposed. With his neo-humanist educational ideals, which placed priority on high academic standards, Ernesti showed little appreciation of the musical traditions. The tendency at the Thomasschule, at least from the start of Bach’s period of office, had been to restrict musical activities, or at any rate to reduce their proportions; Bach, on the other hand, demanded the best-qualified pupils to assist him, and certainly he must often have overburdened them (with music copying, rehearsals and so on). Against what were to some extent unfair arguments on the headmaster’s part, his struggles were doomed to failure. The grievances arising from the nomination of the choir prefect were taken before the courts in Dresden; the affair, which led to Bach’s having disciplinary difficulties with his pupils, was settled early in 1738 (the precise outcome is not recorded). The prefect in question, Johann Gottlob Krause, whom Bach refused to acknowledge, had already left the Thomasschule in 1737.

Among the more important events of 1735 was the appearance of the second part of the Clavier-Übung at Easter. In the context of Bach’s activities as a publisher it should also be mentioned that by 1729 he was also involved in the distribution of musical publications by other authors and kept a stock, including Heinichen’s book on figured bass, Walther’s Lexicon and keyboard works by Hurlebusch, Krebs and his own sons. On 19 May the Ascension Oratorio (Cantata no.11) was first performed; probably the Easter Oratorio (a revision of Cantata no.249a) was heard on the preceding Easter Sunday. In June he travelled to Mühlhausen, where he had spent part of his early career, to appraise the rebuilt organ in the Marienkirche, where his son Johann Gottfried Bernhard (47) had just been appointed organist. During Advent 1735, when no music was performed, and Lent 1736 Bach was probably engaged on the revision of the St Matthew Passion and in making a carefully laid-out fair copy of the new version. In this form, characterized by its writing for double chorus (with two continuo parts), the work was performed in the Thomaskirche on 30 March 1736, with the cantus firmus parts in the opening and closing choruses of part 1 played on the ‘swallow’s nest’ organ. Also at Easter the Schemelli Hymnbook, on whose tunes and figured basses Bach had collaborated, was published.

In summer 1737 Bach temporarily resigned the direction of the collegium musicum. For the last ‘extraordinaire’ concert on 7 October 1736 he had written the congratulatory Cantata no.206 on the birthday of the elector. Only two further works of homage are known from 1737–8 (bwv30a and Anh.13), which indicates that Bach was occupied primarily with the other things for which he had time after his release from the work associated with the collegium. He now turned to keyboard music, working on the second part of Das wohltemperirte Clavier, and on the third part of the Clavier-Übung, the largest of his keyboard works. This collection of organ pieces, some freely composed, some based on chorales, with large-scale works for a church organ and small-scale ones for a domestic instrument, appeared at Michaelmas 1739.

Bach obviously also devoted himself more than previously to private teaching in the late 1730s. Between 1738 and 1741, for example, J.P. Kirnberger and J.F. Agricola were studying with him in Leipzig – probably the most important and influential of all his pupils except for his own sons. Over the years Bach had something like 80 private pupils; among them were C.F. Abel (c1743), J.C. Altnickol (1744–8), J.F. Doles (1739–44), G.F. Einicke (1732–7), H.N. Gerber (1724–7), J.C.G. Gerlach (1723–9), J.G. Goldberg (c1740), G.A. Homilius (1735–42), J.C. Kittel (1748–50), J.G. Müthel (1750), J.C. Nichelmann (1730–33), J.G. Schübler (after 1740), G.G. Wagner (1723–6) and C.G. Wecker (1723–8).

In October 1737 Bach’s nephew Johann Elias (39) came to live with the family, as private secretary and tutor for the younger children; he remained until 1742. The surviving drafts of letters he prepared give a lively picture of Bach’s correspondence in these few years – and cause for regret that no other period is similarly documented. At this period Bach gave especially close attention to the study of works by other composers. He was a subscriber to Telemann’s Parisian flute quartets of May 1738; but more typical is his preoccupation with Latin polyphonic liturgical compositions. The stile antico tradition seems to have held a particular fascination for him. In the first place he owed his knowledge of this repertory, to which he marginally contributed by making transcriptions (works by Palestrina, Caldara, Bassani and others), to his connections at Dresden. His knowledge of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater of 1736, which he reworked during the 1740s as a setting of Psalm li, Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden bwv1083 is also surprising; the earliest trace of Pergolesi’s work north of the Alps thus leads to Bach – a sign of the latter’s remarkable knowledge of the repertory. His interest in Latin liturgical music also relates closely to the composition of the short masses (Kyrie and Gloria) bwv233–6. These may have been written for the Protestant court services in Dresden, but that would not exclude performances in Leipzig.

On 14 May 1737 J.A. Scheibe, in his journal Der critische Musikus, published a weighty criticism of Bach’s manner of composition. This seems to have come as a severe blow to Bach. Evidently at his urging, the Leipzig lecturer in rhetoric Johann Abraham Birnbaum responded with a defence, printed in January 1738, which Bach distributed among his friends and acquaintances. The affair developed into a public controversy, the literary conduct of which, at least, was suspended only in 1739 after further polemical writings by Scheibe and Birnbaum. Scheibe acknowledged Bach’s extraordinary skill as a performer on the organ and the harpsichord, but sharply criticized his compositions, claiming that Bach ‘by his bombastic and intricate procedures deprived them of naturalness and obscured their beauty by an excess of art’. Birnbaum’s not particularly skilful replies fail to recognize the true problem, which lies in a clash of irreconcilable stylistic ideals. Nevertheless, his discussion of naturalness and artificiality in Bach’s style, and his definition of harmony as an accumulation of counterpoint, make some important statements about the premisses and unique character of Bach’s compositional art, and Bach himself must have been involved in their formulation. This is clear above all in the way in which ‘the nature of music’ is represented, with references to biographical details (such as the challenge to Marchand) and express mention of composers and works in Bach’s library (Palestrina, Lotti and Grigny). The controversy smouldered on for several more years. Mizler, too, shook a lance, pointing to ‘the latest taste’ in Bach’s cantata style (‘so well does our Kapellmeister know how to suit himself to his listeners’). In the end Scheibe climbed down, with a conciliatory review (1745) of the Italian Concerto in which he apologized handsomely (‘I did this great man an injustice’).

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach

Leipzig, 1739–50.

In October 1739 Bach resumed the direction of the collegium musicum, which had in the meantime been in the charge of C.G. Gerlach (organist at the Neukirche and a pupil of Bach). A composition for the birthday of the elector (7 October; the music is lost) dates from this time, but it would seem that Bach’s ambitions and activities in connection with the ‘ordinaire’ and ‘extraordinaire’ concerts were considerably diminished. There were few performances of congratulatory cantatas, and these were probably all repeats of earlier works. There are no signs, however, that Bach’s interest in instrumental ensemble music slackened; if anything, it underwent a certain revival and he continued to produce chamber music steadily throughout the 1730s.

Bach withdrew from the collegium musicum again in 1741. With the death of the coffee-house owner Gottfried Zimmermann (30 May 1741) the collegium had lost its landlord and organizer, and without him it could not long continue, at least as it had been run hitherto. Signs of reduced activity can be traced until 1744, and it is possible that Bach still presided over performances from time to time until that year. The collegium had made an important contribution to musical life in Leipzig for 40 years, both with and without Bach’s leadership, and even its demise was not without consequences for the future. In both its function and its membership it served to prepare the ground for a new focal point in civic musical life, the Grosses Concert, founded in 1743 on the lines of the Parisian Concert Spirituel and destined to be the immediate predecessor of the Gewandhaus concerts.

In August 1741 Bach went to Berlin, probably to visit Carl Philipp Emanuel who in 1738 had been appointed court harpsichord player to Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia (later Frederick the Great). In the two previous years Bach had made brief journeys to Halle (early 1740) and Altenburg (September 1739; he gave a recital on the new Trost organ in the castle church). In November 1741 there was a further journey, this time to Dresden, where he visited Count von Keyserlingk. In the same year, probably in the autumn, the ‘Aria with 30 Variations’, the so-called Goldberg Variations, appeared in print. Bach’s visit to Dresden may lie behind the anecdote related by Forkel, according to which the variations were commissioned by the count as a means of ameliorating sleepless nights, but the lack of any formal dedication in the original edition suggests that the work was not composed to a commission. It is conceivable, on the other hand, that after publication the count received a copy of the work for the use of his young resident harpsichord player Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who was a pupil of both J.S. and W.F. Bach. In his own copy (which came to light only in 1975) Bach added a series of 14 enigmatically notated canons on the bass of the Aria (bwv1087) in about 1747–8. They place a special and individual accent on the canonic writing that occupied him so intensively at that period.

On 30 August 1742, on the Kleinzschocher estate near Leipzig, a ‘Cantata burlesque’ (known as the Peasant Cantata, no.212) was performed in homage to the new lord of the manor, Carl Heinrich von Dieskau; this work is unique in Bach’s output for its folklike manner (except perhaps for the quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations). The thoroughly up-to-date characteristics of parts of the work show that Bach was not only intimately acquainted with the musical fashions of the times but also knew how to adapt elements of the younger generation’s style for his own purposes (as he also did in the third movement of the trio sonata from the Musical Offering).

Alongside this work, apparently his last secular cantata, Bach’s only vocal compositions of the 1740s were isolated sacred works (including Cantatas nos.118, 195, 197 and 200), some new, some refashioned. There is evidence, on the other hand, that he gave numerous performances of works by other composers, some newly arranged or revised. These included a German parody of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater (Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden bwv1083, c1745–7), a Latin parody after the Sanctus and ‘Osanna’ from J.C. Kerll’s Missa superba (Sanctus in D bwv241, c1747–8), Handel’s Brockes Passion (c1746–7 and 1748–9) and a pasticcio Passion after C.H. Graun (with inserted movements bwv1088 and ‘Der Gerechte kömmt um’ bc C 8). Bach also often repeated his own earlier sacred works. Evidence does not exist to form a complete picture, but they included revised versions of the St Matthew and St John Passions; the latter was performed for the last time during Bach’s lifetime on Good Friday 1749.

The only new vocal composition of any size was the Credo and following sections of the Mass, which, when added to the Missa of 1773 (bwv232^I), produced the B minor Mass – a continuation of Bach’s preoccupation with Latin figural music during the late 1730s. No specific reason for the composition of the B minor Mass, and no evidence of a projected or actual performance, has so far come to light. One of the most plausible hypotheses is that the composition of the work (which is described in C.P.E. Bach’s Nachlass as ‘the large Catholic Mass’) was connected with the consecration of the Catholic Hofkirche in Dresden, planned for the late 1740s and then postponed (building started in 1739). All that is known for certain is that the expansion of the 1733 Missa by the addition of a Credo, a Sanctus (1724) and the movements from ‘Osanna’ to ‘Dona nobis pacem’ and the fusing of the various sections to create a unified score (see also §14) were done in the last years of Bach’s life – more precisely, between August 1748 and October 1749.

Instrumental music, however, once again came to the fore during the 1740s. Bach had begun to sift through his older organ chorales about 1739–42, probably following completion of Clavier-Übung III. Some of the Weimar pieces were extensively reworked and gathered into a new manuscript collection (the ‘18’, bwv651–68). These revisions may have been undertaken with a view to the subsequent appearance of the chorales in print, as happened with the six chorales on movements from cantatas (the ‘Schübler Chorales’) about 1748. Apparently Bach was still engaged in work on the chorales in the last months of his life. The copying from dictation of the chorale Vor deinen Thron bwv668, later the subject of legend, was in fact probably confined to an improvement of an existing work (the chorale bwv641 from the Weimar Orgel-Büchlein).

Bach retained his interest in organ building to the last. In 1746 alone there were two important examinations and inaugurations of organs: on 7 August in Zschortau and on 26–9 September in Naumburg. Bach’s appraisal of the large Hildebrandt organ in the Wenzelskirche, Naumburg, was one of his most important. He customarily subjected instruments to the most searching examinations, both of their technical reliability and of their tone quality. He had also taken a critical interest in the pianos that Gottfried Silbermann was building during the 1730s, proposing alterations in the mechanism which Silbermann evidently adopted. At all events, Bach praised Silbermann’s later pianos and promoted their sale (a receipt for one sold to Poland, dated 6 May 1749, survives). On his visit to Potsdam in 1747 he played on a range of Silbermann pianos of the newer type which had been purchased by the Prussian court.

The visit to the court of Frederick the Great in May 1747 is one of the most notable biographical events in Bach’s otherwise unspectacular life. The invitation probably came about through Count Keyserlingk, who was then in Berlin. Bach’s encounter with Frederick began on 7 May at the palace of Potsdam during the chamber music which was a feature of every evening of court life there. Bach’s execution on the piano of a remarkable improvisation on a theme supplied by the king met with general applause. The next day Bach gave an organ recital in the Heiliggeistkirche in Potsdam, and during chamber music that evening he improvised a six-part fugue on a theme of his own. He also visited the new Berlin opera house, and possibly went to look at organs in Potsdam and Berlin. On his return to Leipzig, probably in the middle of May, he worked industriously on an ‘elaboration of the King of Prussia’s fugue theme’, beginning with writing down the fugue he had improvised (a three-part ricercare), which, while in Potsdam, he had announced that he would print. But he now decided on a larger project and under the title Musikalisches Opfer (‘Musical Offering’) he prepared a work in several movements dedicated to Frederick the Great; this work was printed in its entirety by the end of September (Michaelmas) 1747. The royal theme serves as the basis for all the movements (two ricercares, in three and six parts, for keyboard; a trio sonata for flute, violin and continuo; and various canons for flute, violin and continuo with harpsichord obbligato).

In June 1747, after some hesitation, Bach joined the Correspondirende Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften founded by Lorenz Mizler. It was probably in 1747 that he submitted, as a ‘scientific’ piece of work, his canonic composition on Vom Himmel hoch bwv769. At the same time he sent the members an offprint of the six-part canon from the series on the bass of the Goldberg Variations. He seems, however, to have taken no further interest in the society’s affairs as (according to C.P.E. Bach) he thought nothing of the ‘dry, mathematical stuff’ that Mizler wanted to discuss. Besides his long acquaintance with his pupil Mizler, Bach’s most likely reason for joining the society was that prominent colleagues such as Telemann and Graun were fellow members.

The beginnings of his work on Die Kunst der Fuge (‘The Art of Fugue’) seem to date from around 1740, or before. It is impossible to give an exact date as the original composing score is now lost. However, what must be a first version survives in an autograph fair copy containing 14 movements (12 fugues and two canons) and dating from 1742 at the latest. Thereafter Bach expanded and revised the work in readiness for printing. He himself supervised the printing to a large extent, and the process was probably largely complete by about the end of 1749 (in other words, before his son Johann Christoph Friedrich, who had helped to correct the proofs, left to join the court at Bückeburg in January 1750). But Bach was not to see the entire work (eventually comprising 14 fugues and four canons) in print; his sons, probably C.P.E. in particular, took charge of the publication and the work appeared posthumously in spring 1751. Bach had been unable to complete the fair copy of the last movement, a quadruple fugue, and so the fugal cycle ends with an unfinished movement. The editors decided to mitigate the effect of that by adding the organ chorale bwv668, Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, at the end; the revision of this had been the last piece of work to occupy Bach.

In his final years Bach suffered from increasingly severe trouble with his eyes, seriously restricting his ability to work and leading eventually to total blindness. He probably composed nothing after autumn 1749. The last known examples of his handwriting, which give an impression of increasing irregularity, clumsiness and cramping, go up to October 1749 (parts of the score of the B minor Mass). Other documents to which he put his signature date from as late as spring 1750. The cause of the eye disease seems to have lain in untreated (and untreatable) diabetes, which may also have caused neuropathy and degenerative brain disease, evidence of which is found in the dramatic change in his handwriting in manuscripts of 1748–9. He gave a performance of the St John Passion on Good Friday 1749 without completing the revision of the work begun in about 1740. His health must have been very poor by spring 1749 at the latest; otherwise the Leipzig town council would surely not have been so tactless as to submit J.G. Harrer, a protégé of the Dresden prime minister Count Brühl, to examination for the post of Kantor on 8 June 1749. Out of consideration for Bach the cantata performance was in a concert hall rather than one of the churches. The town chronicle reported that the authorities expected Bach’s death. When his grandson Johann Sebastian Altnickol (his pupil Johann Christoph Altnickol had married Elisabeth Juliane Friederica Bach) was baptized on 6 October 1749 in Naumburg Bach was unable to make the short journey to stand godfather in person.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 705