OHRDRUF, 1695–1700
IN THE CARE OF HIS OLDER BROTHER
Johann Sebastian turned nine in March 1694, and shortly thereafter began in the quarta of the Latin school. But just about three weeks after Easter (which fell on April 11), his mother died at the age of fifty. We do not know the cause of her death, or whether it was preceded by illness. The plain entry in the death register (“May 3, 1694. Buried, Jo-hann Ambrosius Bach’s wife—without fee”),1 the sole reference to the end of Elisabeth Bach’s life, does not even remotely hint at the gravity of the emotional responses or the wider implications of this catastrophic event for either Ambrosius Bach’s family in general
187/1905
or its youngest member in particular. Am-brosius himself, forty-nine years old, be-reaved of his wife of twenty-six years and left with three young children, surely found him-self in desperate straits. Just one year earlier he had lost his twin brother, Christoph (12), court and town musician in Arnstadt. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s annotation in the family Genealogy, based on what he must have heard from his father, gives a touching account of the close relationship between the twins:
These twins are perhaps the only ones of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely. They looked so much alike that even their wives could not tell them apart.
They were an object of wonder on the part of great gentlemen and everyone who saw them. Their speech, their way of think-ing—everything was the same. In music, too, they were not to be told apart: they played
188/1905
alike and thought out their performances in the same way. If one fell ill the other did, too.
In short, the one died soon after the other.2
Ambrosius may well have believed that after the deaths of his brother and especially his wife, his own end would not be far away.
Nevertheless, as other sorely afflicted mem-bers of the family had done before, he found a pragmatic way out of his misery. He re-membered Barbara Margaretha, the thirty-five-year-old widow of his first cousin Jo-hann Günther Bach (15) of Arnstadt and daughter of the Arnstadt burgomaster (may-or) Caspar Keul. Left pregnant with their daughter, Catharina Margaretha, Mar-garetha Bach had remarried in 1684. With her second husband, Jacobus Bartholomaei, deacon at the New Church in Arnstadt and her senior by almost thirty years, she had an-other daughter, Christina Maria, in Septem-ber 1685. But Bartholomaei died only three
189/1905
years later, and Margaretha, widowed again, was now left with two young daughters.3 Ambrosius Bach, always keeping close ties with his many Arnstadt relatives, proposed and was accepted. The wedding ceremony was performed in Eisenach on November 27, 1694, though not in the church but at the home of the widower,4then a common prac-tice for remarriages. Johann Sebastian would follow the same tradition when he remarried in Cöthen.
The family of Ambrosius Bach now in-cluded Margaretha’s two daughters, ages twelve and ten. In the meantime, Elisabeth Bach’s twelve-year-old step-grandson, Jo-hann Nicolaus Bach, who had lived with Am-brosius’s family for many years and spent four years in the sexta,5 left Eisenach in 1694, probably soon after Elisabeth’s death.6 The timing of Ambrosius’s second marriage was such that he and his new wife with their two sets of children—Marie Salome, Johann
190/1905
Jacob, Johann Sebastian, Catharina Mar-garetha, and Christina Maria—could look forward to a Christmas season that would help draw the reconstituted family more closely together. Yet there was hardly any time to establish a normal life, as Ambrosius soon fell seriously ill and died on February 20, 1695—just two days before his fiftieth birthday and “twelve weeks and one day,” as Margaretha put it, into their marriage. We learn from the widow’s petition for a bounty that there were hefty expenses for medicine and drugs, suggesting that Ambrosius may have suffered from a protracted illness. He was buried four days after his death.7
We can imagine how this sudden turn of events must have devastated Margaretha, who at age thirty-six had now lost three hus-bands within thirteen years, and the chil-dren, especially the two nine-year-olds, Se-bastian and Christina Maria. There was little time for despair, however; among other
191/1905
things, the widow was responsible for keep-ing the town music company gokeep-ing for the next six months (the period in which a new director would be chosen); during this time, she received Ambrosius’s full salary, out of which she had to pay his two journeymen and two apprentices. She also received col-legial help: her petition for a bounty, for ex-ample, was written on behalf of “the sorrow-ing widow and the poor fatherless orphans”
by Andreas Christian Dedekind, cantor of St.
George’s School.8 The petition reveals that Ambrosius’s employees, two journeymen and two apprentices “who could already pass for journeymen,” were able to fulfill the scheduled obligations for the town and church music. It also shows that the widow worried about the waning of musical talent in the Bach family, six of the nine grandsons of Hans Bach (see Table 1.1) having died between 1682 and 1695. Count Anton Gün-ther of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt had
192/1905
supposedly asked the widow of Ambrosius’s twin, Christoph, “whether there was not an-other Bach available who would like to apply for [ Johann Christoph’s] post, for he should and must have a Bach again.” Margaretha’s comment in her petition sounds utterly hopeless: “But this was not to be, for the dear God has caused the springs of musical talent in the Bach family to run dry within the last few years.” Understandably, her own experi-ence during the previous twelve years made the future look bleak and made her com-pletely blind to the younger generation, among them the greatest talent ever pro-duced by this extraordinary family—her stepson Sebastian.
Within the span of a few months, Am-brosius Bach’s family broke apart, but the broader and well-tested family support structures immediately went into effect. Am-brosius’s considerations for needy members of his extended family were now
193/1905
reciprocated, to the benefit of his own sur-viving dependents. After selling the Eisenach house, Margaretha Bach seems to have moved with her two daughters back to her parental family in Arnstadt, where we lose their tracks. Marie Salome, eighteen years of age, left to join her mother’s relatives, the Lämmerhirts in Erfurt. And her two little brothers, Jacob and Sebastian, were wel-comed into the household of their oldest brother, Johann Christoph, newly estab-lished organist at St. Michael’s in Ohrdruf.
(For Sebastian, no alternative refuge existed, as his godfather Sebastian Nagel had died in 1687.) The estate of Ambrosius Bach was presumably distributed to his surviving chil-dren, who were principal heirs. The sale of the Eisenach house would have generated cash that all of them could use, the younger ones in particular for educational purposes.
There was furniture to be disposed of, house-hold goods, books, music, and especially
194/1905
musical instruments. Considering the usual extent of a town piper’s standard equipment, each of the three sons must have inherited a basic stock of string, wind, and keyboard instruments.
Ambrosius’s eldest son Christoph had studied for three years (1686–89) with Jo-hann Pachelbel in Erfurt and, while only sev-enteen and still a student, had briefly held the post of organist at St. Thomas’s in Erfurt (1688–89).9 There, according to an autobio-graphical note, he found “both the remuner-ation and the structure of the organ—the lat-ter being my principal concern—to be poor.”10 He then left Erfurt for Arnstadt, where he had been called to assist his ailing uncle Heinrich (6), Ambrosius’s last surviv-ing brother, in his various duties as organist of three churches, Our Lady’s Church and at the so-called Upper Church, which primarily served the court. Heinrich Bach, in Arnstadt since 1641, had been in poor health since the
195/1905
early 1680s; he was first assisted by his youngest son, Johann Günther (15), and then after Günther’s death by his son-in-law, Christoph Herthum, who in 1671 became Christoph’s godfather. So close connections were there, but Christoph could provide tem-porary help to his uncle for only a year—in 1690, he accepted the position as organist at St. Michael’s, the principal church in nearby Ohrdruf.
Ohrdruf, a small town at the foot of the Thuringian Forest, twenty-five miles south-east of Eisenach, was the site of an ancient settlement. In 727, a group of Scottish-Irish missionary monks under Boniface had estab-lished a small Benedictine monastery with a chapel, St. Michael’s, by the Ohra River. This structure, the oldest house of God in all of Thuringia, became the foundation on which a larger church was built in the early 1400s, a century before Ohrdruf accepted the Lutheran Reformation in 1525. Little is left
196/1905
of the historic church; on November 27, 1753, a devastating fire swept through the town, and St. Michael’s fell victim to the flames. In the late seventeenth century, Ohrdruf had about 2,500 inhabitants and, with its Ehrenstein Castle (see illustration, p.
32)—a four-winged, sixteenth-century struc-ture near St. Michael’s in the center of town—served as the secondary residence of the counts of Hohenlohe-Gleichen (whose main landed property lay around Öhringen in southern Germany). Wechmar, the place Veit Bach (white-bread baker from Hungary and progenitor of the family of musicians) once settled and the hometown of his son, Hans Bach (2), seven miles northeast of Ohrdruf, belonged to the same county, an enclave engulfed by the duchy of Saxe-Gotha. So by moving in 1690 to Ohrdruf, Christoph Bach in a sense returned to his family’s place of origin, although until then no musician from the Bach family had ever
197/1905
served in the town. Only the wife of Am-brosius Bach’s twin brother, Christoph had come from there, and Heinrich Bach’s (6) daughter Anna Elisabeth was married to the Ohrdruf cantor Johann Heinrich Kühn.
The organist post at St. Michael’s was a re-spectable one, for the church, which con-tained two organs, was both the town’s and the county’s main house of worship. The in-cumbent was obligated to play at the Siech-hofskirche, the hospital chapel, too, and most likely at the chapel of Ehrenstein Castle whenever members of the ruling family were in town and private services were held for them. Johann Christoph’s initial annual salary amounted to forty-five florins, plus in-kind compensation (grain and wood). In 1696, his salary was increased to seventy florins, and further in-kind payments were added in light of his having declined an at-tractive offer from Gotha to succeed his former teacher Pachelbel as town organist.
198/1905
The larger of the two Ohrdruf organs (with twenty-one stops on Oberwerk, Rückpositiv, and pedal), built only in 1675 and expanded in 1688,11 was relatively new and must have appeared quite alluring to the eighteen-year-old organist upon his appointment.
However, the instrument, built by Heinrich Brunner of Sandersleben, was incomplete and suffered from serious defects, and the necessary repairs were delayed for years, despite the Ohrdruf town council’s threat to seize the organ builder’s assets. Pachelbel, visiting from Gotha, provided a detailed port on the organ’s unsatisfactory state of re-pair in February 1693. Three years later, the organ builder Christian Rothe of Salzungen wrote an expert evaluation, but it took an-other ten years to finish the repairs. (An ap-prentice to Rothe at the time, Heinrich Nic-olaus Trebs, would later become a close col-league of Bach in Weimar.) In sum, St. Mi-chael’s instruments required considerable
199/1905
attention by the organist to be kept in play-ing condition. That this should be the case precisely during Sebastian’s Ohrdruf years was important, for the boy, who clearly had a knack for musical instruments and their technology, was given an ideal opportunity to gain firsthand experience in organ building.
On October 23, 1694, Johann Christoph had married Johanna Dorothea Vonhoff, daughter of an Ohrdruf town councillor. The Eisenach cantor Andreas Christian Dedekind reported that he, along with Pachelbel, Am-brosius Bach, and AmAm-brosius’s cousin Jo-hann Veit Hoffmann, performed at a wed-ding in Ohrdruf in the fall of 1694—surely Christoph’s, and the only occasion for the young Sebastian to have seen his elder brother’s master teacher. The musical pro-gram at the ceremony conceivably included the Eisenach Johann Christoph Bach’s (13) wedding piece “Meine Freundin, du bist
200/1905