Bach: The Ways of a Dynasty

On 1 December 2001 a Lufthansa cargo plane from Kyiv landed in Frankfurt am Main. It had 40 wooden crates in the hold ; there were eight boxes in each crate, and every box contained a treasure trove. A good 200,000 pages of sheet music had travelled from the Ukraine to Germany, among them some 200 brittle, yellowed sheets with 20 pieces for singers and instruments that which continue to this day to puzzle musicologists as hardly any other collection does: the legendary »Altbachische Archiv« (Old Bach Archive) contains important insights into the development of the most famous musical family of all time. In this personal library of manuscripts, Johann Sebastian Bach preserved the best works written by his ancestors.

Just as the manuscripts were later preserved in the Ukraine. In a manner of speaking, the collection had been taken to Kyiv to safeguard it from the Germans and from Stalin. First of all, though, the collection of the Berliner Singakademie was evacuated to a castle in Silesia in August 1943, beyond the range of British bombers. It was discovered there in May 1945 by officers of the Red Army's Second Ukrainian Front, who in turn smuggled the music discreetly away from Moscow, the usual destination for wartime booty. In Kyiv the music was handed over to the Conservatoire, where music librarian Liubov Fainshtein set about compiling an inventory that left nothing to be desired. Years later, experts were amazed by the good condition of the papers. How did the news of this remarkable treasure become known to musicologists over the decades? And how did the archive manage to be repatriated to Berlin in a historically unique time window? The answers provide ample material for a thriller in its own right.

Even though the sheet music was already accessible in the form of old black-&-white photos, and some of the works from the collection were even printed back in 1935, only now was it possible to see by looking at the originals how Johann Sebastian Bach added wind parts to one of the old scores for a new performance in Leipzig, his handwriting shaky in his old age. Only now could one admire the title page that he rewrote years before for a work by the same ancestor, Johann Christoph Bach: J.C. Bach had entry no. 13 in the family tree written down by the Thomaskantor and entitled »Origins of the Musical Bach Family«, and Johann Sebastian noted next to his name: »A profound composer«.

Bach was well aware of what he owed this dynasty of composers that had its beginnings a century before him in Thuringia. And he also knew something that we have only come to understand in the last 20 years: men like Johann Christoph Bach and his younger brother Johann Michael were not just some »forerunners«, they were first-rate composers in their own right. He knew them in person and had heard and read their music, while his father Ambrosius had played a lot of it himself on the violin.

The deep expressiveness of Johann Christoph's music and the luminous balance of Johann Michael's also contain existential experiences of an earlier generation, and without this music Bach would have been a different person. The dense sound of that far-off time conveys the suffering and the deep piety of a family that was spared nothing in the turbulent course of the 17th century – from the increasing brutality of the Thirty Years War to several bouts of the plague, the last of which killed  as many as eleven members of the Erfurt Bach families in 1682/83 alone. Death was also onmipresent thanks to the high rate of infant mortality. The parents that Johann Sebastian lost one after the other at the age of nine had themselves lost four of their eight children.

Among the survivors was his much older brother Johann Christoph (no. 2, born in 1671), who took on the orphaned young Johann Sebastian in Ohrdruf as an apprentice musician. Though Bach had long since begun his training in the household of one Ambrosius, a member of the municipal wind band, and had music lessons at school on a level that makes their equivalent in the early 21st century seem nothing short of barbaric. In Bach's day, schoolchildren learnt to read music from the word go, and they sang in several parts; at the Ohrdruf grammar school, five of thirty hours' teaching were devoted to music alone!

Johann Sebastian had already had the chance to familiarise himself  with the organ when living with Johann Christoph (13) in Eisenach, and now he was able to extend his knowledge with his brother of the same name (22), who in turn had been apprenticed to Johann Pachelbel in Erfurt and was highly interested in all the music of his time. This interest prompted him to accumulate a repertoire of international standing, featuring newly-printed trio sonatas by the Venetian composer Tommaso Albinoni as well as Dietrich Buxtehude's chorale fantasy for organ »Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein«. The then 13-year-old Johann Sebastian wrote out a copy of the tablature that shows outstanding competence. It was nothing short of a sensation when these pages were found in 2006: they had survived the fire in Weimar's Anna Amalia Library because they had been wrongly filed and were stored in the cellar.

At the age of 15, we find Bach attending St. Michael's School in Lüneburg. He fulfilled the requirements for a scholarship as a pupil who had »no other means to live by, but possessed a good voice«, and so, to quote biographer Christoph Wolff, Bach found himself in »an academic and musical environment of the utmost standing«. Alongside the library of St. Thomas's, Leipzig, the choir library in Lüneburg was reputed to be the best in Germany; it contained 30 works by Heinrich Schütz as well as music by Monteverdi and other early 17th century Italian composers.

In Lüneburg, the young Bach also encountered the organist and composer Georg Böhm, the most virtuoso keyboard player that he had met up to that point. Böhm introduced the highly talented pupil to new worlds and to Johann Adam Reinken, the legendary organist in Hamburg. Bach travelled to Hamburg frequently, and at a meeting with Reinken he also heard Lübeck organist Dietrich Buxtehude, whom he admired greatly, play for the first time. After this, he relocated several times: to Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, Köthen, Leipzig, and at the age of 45 even to the distant dream city of Danzig!

The Bachs had travelling and departing for new shores in their blood, as we can see from the branch of the family that emigrated from Andisleben and posed for a photograph in 1887 Minnesota as the proud »Bach Band«: farmer Reinhold Bach on the double bass with his seven sons, who played the trumpet, the clarinet, the flute, the violin and drums.

The history of the Bach clan goes back to around 1590, when Veit Bach, a baker from Pressburg (then in Hungary, now the capital of Slovakia and known as Bratislava), journeyed a hundred miles northwards to settle in the Thuringian town of Wechmar, where he had family roots. The musicians in the Bach family were pretty mobile – and we have to remember that distances that we cover quickly by train or car nowadays were a lot more time-consuming in the 17th century. The trip from Wechmar to Suhl is not even a 50-minute drive, whereas it would take at least five hours on horseback. The music of this era was written not only against a fundamentally different social background, but also with an entirely different perception of time and distance. We shouldn't see all the Bach musicians as too settled, nor should we see what was then the Duchy of Thuringia as too comfortable.

The generation of Johann Sebastian's grandfathers likewise embarked on long and sometimes puzzling journeys. Johann Bach, born in 1604, apparently earned a living as a mercenary after his apprenticeship with the Suhl town band (»Stadtpfeifer«) before he founded the Erfurt branch of the family and wrote the touching motet »Unser Leben ist ein Schatten«. Christoph (b. 1613), who was later to father Ambrosius and Johann Christoph (another Bach with the name, but this one was no. 12), travelled to Prettin in Saxony, where he presumably worked at the court of a Danish princess and intellectual. Heinrich, the youngest, was born in Wechmar in 1615, and walked many miles as a boy to hear organs played – at a time when armed forces were regularly marching through Thuringia.

As an older man and organist at the Oberkirche in Arnstadt, Heinrich travelled so often to be with his two gifted elder sons, Johann Christoph (13) and Johann Michael, that he incurred the displeasure of his royal employer. With Heinrich at the latest, the Bachs began to discover themselves as a composers' collective that lasted several generations. Johann Christoph Bach's motet »Lieber Herr Gott, wecke uns auf« of 1672 impressed Heinrich so much that he copied out his son's work in his best handwriting. And this is the score to which Johann Sebastian Bach added wind parts and then performed in Leipzig, much to the astonishment of his contemporaries – just as his son Carl Philipp Emanuel did in Hamburg, long before the sheet music for this and many other works set out on its odyssey to the Ukraine.

We don't need to travel very far to find whole generations of Bachs assembled at one location. One promising option is to attend one of the concerts in the series »Ways to Bach«. But an alternative idea is a trip to Erfurt, where we board the no. 350 bus for the 45-minute journey to Arnstadt. We alight in the north of the little town and walk past the church on the market square, where Johann Sebastian became organist at the age of 18, walking another 100 steps southwards to reach the Oberkirche.

In this rectangular Gothic building, Heinrich Bach worked as the organist for half a century, a calming influence in the family during turbulent times. When he was laid to rest here on 12 July 1692, the superintendent spoke of a »joyous day«: at 77, Heinrich had reached an age that only one man in a hundred lived to see in those times. Among the crowds who attended the funeral there were probably some 60 members of the Bach family from all over the place, including without a doubt the seven-year-old Sebastian, who now had the chance to hear music composed by Heinrich's eldest sons.

It's quiet in the church now, but there's still something we haven't seen. A picture. It was already hanging in the chancel when Heinrich took up his position in 1641, and it hangs there to this day, almost as if the paint had only just dried. At the feet of Christ on the Cross we see His mother sunken in the lap of another woman. The Virgin Mary sleeps beneath her crucified Son, her limbs relaxed, perhaps in the certainty that heaven is now open to receive mankind. The bodies are connected by flowing lines whose warmth is palpable, and all the faces are drawn with a strength of expression that leaves no one untouched.

The picture has been hanging in the Oberkirche since 1594, so that it was seen by generations of Bachs. They may have been unaware that it was painted circa 1550 by Frans Floris, a pupil of Michelangelo's. For us today, it is a unique opportunity to see what they saw. The certainty of redemption, solace and the innate beauty of life: these are things that the music of the Bach family convey to us directly and vividly.

Author: Volker Hagedorn. English translation: Clive Williams