EVERY ARMY HAD its camp followers of prostitutes, hustlers, procurers, and freelance impresarios, ready to whip up a party for their restive military clientele, and so among the followers of every camp were musicians. This was not a time when one could be fussy about jobs. As a result, among the less significant casualties of the Thirty Years War was the reputation of musicians, who had, as it were, accompanied the mayhem and, as the coarseness of what they saw took its toll on them, had taken their share in it. Thus was born the College or Union of Instrumental Musicians of the District of Upper and Lower Saxony and Other Interested Places, a formal musicians’ guild, whose bylaws give some hint of just how disreputable musicians were then held to be. The member was enjoined to “conduct himself decently … abstain from all blasphemous talk, profane cursing and swearing” and not to “divert himself by singing or performing coarse obscenities” or “give attendance with jugglers, hangmen, bailiffs, gaolers, conjurors, rogues or any other such low company.” The drafters further felt the need to say that at private parties “nothing shall be stolen from the invited guests.”
Sebastian Bach’s grandfather, born in 1613, lived through the worst of the Thirty Years War as an adult. After serving for a time “waiting on the Prince” in Weimar, he married the daughter of a town musician. (Such marriages inside the trade were common. Guild rules specified eight years’ training before a musician could hire himself out as a master, but marrying a master’s daughter cut two years from the mandatory time.) He no doubt suffered from the generally low opinion of musicians in his role as a town musician in Erfurt and later in Arnstadt, where his younger brother had secured the coveted post of chief organist to the court and churches. The brother too had married by then, a step that was a precarious act of faith, as Philipp Spitta pointed out in his magisterial nineteenth-century biography of Bach: During the war, men could guarantee neither the safety of their wives and children nor the security of their income. Despite his distinguished position in Arnstadt, which he held for fifty years, this Bach remembered that during the privations of the war, all the salary he received from the war-bankrupted court he had “to sue for, almost with tears.”
Spitta reported of Sebastian’s grandfather, perhaps diplomatically, that he found “no record to show that [he] stood forth as a pattern of moral worth,” but said he was pretty sure about his brother, since the preacher at his funeral praised his piety. “There may be conditions under which it seems to be no particular merit to be called a pious man,” Spitta observed,
but there are times, too, when piety is the … sole guarantee for a sound core of human nature. The German nation was living through such a period … The mass of people vegetated in dull indifference or gave themselves up to a life of coarse and immoral enjoyment; the few superior souls who had not lost all courage to live, when a fearful fate had crushed all the real joys of life around them, fixed their gaze above and beyond the common desolation, on what they hoped in as eternal and imperishable.
THREE YEARS BEFORE the end of the war, in the winter of 1645, Sebastian’s father Johann Ambrosius and his twin brother Johann Christoph were born in Erfurt, the largest city in Thuringia. According to a note made by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in the family genealogy, Ambrosius and his brother were “perhaps the only [twins] of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely [and] 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 thinking—everything was the same.” This is good to know, because while little is known directly about the character of Ambrosius, his twin left a trail.
When the boys were eight or nine, the family moved from Erfurt eleven miles south to Arnstadt, where their father joined the town band and began to concentrate in earnest on the musical training of his sons. He died when they were in their teens, however, and their education was undertaken by his brother, who by then had been the Arnstadt organist for a dozen years. After their apprenticeship and years as an assistant were over, the twins moved back to Erfurt, where they had secured jobs in the town band (thanks to their cousin, its new director).
Ambrosius soon married, and married well, into the family of Valentin Lämmerhirt, an affluent furrier and an influential citizen. The Lämmerhirts were a devout Anabaptist family, which was saying something. The Anabaptists were zealous even by the standards of their onetime leader Zwingli, who espoused a Christianity more ascetic than Luther’s but finally denounced the Anabaptists for extremism. The Anabaptists were best known for denouncing infant baptism (at a time when theology had become so narrow and poisonous that baptizing an adult who had been christened in childhood was a capital offense), but their differences with mainstream Protestantism were comprehensive. They renounced all physical adornments, they refused to swear oaths or bear arms, and each member was expected at a moment’s notice to give up home and family to take up the life of a missionary. The Lämmerhirts did not live by every tenet of this faith, but merely to remain identified with it in orthodox Lutheran Erfurt was a sign of great commitment. In the bizarrely charged atmosphere of dueling Protestant sects that pitted Lutheran against Lutheran, not to mention Lutheran against Calvinist, both Lutherans and Calvinists had sentenced Anabaptists to the stake. Sebastian Bach’s mother came from strong-minded people who were dead serious about religion.
A bit less serious about religion perhaps (most of the Bachs before Sebastian were secular musicians for the courts and towns rather than the churches), the Bachs were no less strong-minded. After Ambrosius’s marriage, his twin Christoph moved back to Arnstadt, where we find him in the records of the town consistory fighting off a young woman named Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who came before them, with her mother, to accuse Christoph of breaking his promise to marry her. The consistory was the ecclesiastical body responsible for hearing such disputes, among other supervisory duties, and given the clerk’s matter-of-fact record of the hearing, it was not the first of its kind.
Both parties appeared before the Consistory, and Anna Cunigunda confessed that she had promised to marry Bach, and he her … They had done no less than give each other rings in pledge of marriage, which they still had … and it was now on Bach’s conscience whether he thought he could withdraw from her under these circumstances without injuring her …
Christoph Bach confessed, indeed, that he had offered marriage to Anna Cunigunda, but they had merely considered the matter provisionally, and he had not in any way considered himself bound … He had given her a ring … but not in pledge of marriage … Besides, Anna Cunigunda has asked for her ring back again …
After Bach had withdrawn from her and his affection had died out, she had desired to have her ring back, on these conditions: she put it to his conscience that if she were not good enough for him, and if he only meant to make a fool of her, he should return her the ring and answer for it in his conscience before God … He, in answer, had sent her word that he had no fear of punishment from God on that account.
The dispute went on for more than a year, when finally the consistory ruled that Bach should marry the girl. That was predictable, given current practice. What was not predictable was that Christoph Bach promptly took the matter over the heads of officials in Arnstadt by appealing to the authorities in Weimar. At this point, according to the records, he “hated the Wieneren so that he could not bear the sight of her.” After more weeks and months of appeals, the officials of Weimar overruled Arnstadt and lifted his obligation to marry.
By the time it was over, the affair had lasted more than two years, Christoph Bach had made enemies of his hometown consistory, which comprised its most influential citizens, and he had indeed made a fool of Anna Cunigunda Wieneren, who had become the talk of Arnstadt. But he had done what it took to get his way, and when we try later to interpret some of the more intemperate behavior of his nephew Sebastian, including his own even more severe problems with the consistory of Arnstadt, this antecedent will be worth remembering.
IN THE FALL OF 1671, Ambrosius