Johann Sebastian Bach (36 page)

Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in an engraving by Martin Bernigeroth (c. 1715)

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7.1. The Cöthen Court Capelle, 1717–23
¹⁷

In 1713, a unique opportunity arose for the court to hire at one stroke a substantial contingent of excellent musicians. This came about when Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, the “Soldier King,” rose to power in not-too-distant Berlin and dissolved his father's cherished court capelle. The young Prince Leopold, not yet of age and still on his grand tour, learned about the new Prussian king's act of cultural barbarism, through indirect channels or perhaps through relationships formed at the
Ritteracademie
in Berlin. In any case, he managed to persuade his mother to hire a core group of the Berlin virtuosos for the Cöthen capelle. Indeed, she proceeded so swiftly that around the beginning of 1713, six distinguished musicians moved from Berlin to the small residential town of the Anhalt-Cöthen principality, some hundred miles away: the capellmeister Augustin Reinhard Stricker and his wife, singer and lutenist Catharina Elisabeth Stricker; oboist Johann Ludwig Rose; violinists Joseph Spieß and Martin Friedrich Marcus; and bassoonist Johann Christoph Torlé. The cellist Carl Bernhard Lienicke rejoined his former colleagues in 1716, shortly after Leopold's accession to power, when the violinist and gambist Christian Ferdinand Abel was appointed as well (along with his brother Johann Christoph, a landscape gardener). Stricker now led a first-rate ensemble that, together with the
ripienists
—most of them recruited from among the local town musicians—formed a capelle of respectable size and even compared favorably, in both size and quality, with the musical establishments of much larger courts.

What made Augustin Reinhard Stricker, in his early forties, consider leaving such a favorable station after just three and a half years? One possibility is that Leopold simply dismissed him when the opportunity arose to hire Bach. Another relates to a move in 1716 by the electoral palatinate court to Neuburg on the Danube, Heidelberg, and Mannheim, where the versatile and productive musician Gottfried Finger was in the service of the new elector, Count Palatine Carl Philipp. Ten years earlier, Finger, Stricker, and Jean Baptiste Volumier had collaborated in composing the music for
Der Sieg der Schönheit über die Helden
, an opera performed in December 1706 at the marriage ceremonies of the future Prussian king, crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm. Stricker, primarily a singer (tenor) and composer, and his wife Catharina may have been lured away by Finger in the hope of reentering the world of opera, which had no place in Calvinist Cöthen. Indeed, Finger and Stricker collaborated again on stage works for Neuburg,
Crudeltà consuma amore
in 1717 and
L'amicizia in terzo
in 1718—the latter piece including as well contributions by Johann David Heinichen, who had given Prince Leopold music lessons in Rome.
¹⁵
Hence, a scheme hatched by Leopold and the increasingly influential Heinichen to accommodate Stricker's operatic aspirations and at the same time ease him out of Cöthen to make room for Bach seems quite plausible. Strangely, all traces of Stricker are lost soon after 1718, when he is last mentioned as electoral palatinate chamber composer.

At the end of 1717, when Bach took up Stricker's responsibilities in Cöthen, the court capelle numbered sixteen members (not including the capellmeister) and consisted almost exclusively of instrumentalists (Table 7.1). In both size and structure, then, the ensemble differed fundamentally from the Weimar capelle (Table 6.2), reflecting its very different functions. While performances of music at the palace church services, for example, played a major role in Weimar, sacred music was clearly of secondary importance at the reformed Cöthen court. Therefore, the Cöthen capelle never included a full complement of singers (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass), nor did it have any standing arrangements with a chorus musicus from the Latin school. Bach must have been particularly pleased to work with the core group of eight chamber musicians, well trained and distinguished virtuosi; five of them were former leading members of the Prussian court capelle, but the other three, Abel, Freitag, and Würdig, as well as the trumpeters and timpanist, would hardly have been inferior. Bach, as the ninth instrumental virtuoso, rounded out the group of soloists, which was complemented by at least five
ripienists
(including the copyist). Considering the small size of the town and the regularity of their professional collaboration, these musicians were bound to form a closely knit community. Bach apparently developed particularly warm and lasting personal relationships with some of his colleagues. So he became godfather in 1720 to Sophia Charlotta, daughter of the gambist Christian Ferdinand Abel (whose most famous son, Carl Friedrich, would become an associate of Johann Christian Bach in London and co-established the Bach-Abel concert series in 1765),
¹⁶
and served as godfather in 1728—five years after he had left Cöthen—to Leopold, son of the violinist Joseph Spieß.

 

The membership of the capelle fluctuated quite a bit during Bach's tenure, but the musicians who died or quit were replaced, leaving the overall size of the group stable. The net loss of one musician over Bach's entire Cöthen period is insignificant, especially if we consider that qualified musicians could always be found among the court personnel, from the town, and from the so-called
Expectanten
, that is, people who served in the expectation of future possible employment.

One of the first decisions Bach had made as the newly appointed concertmaster in Weimar was to relocate the rehearsals of the capelle from capellmeister Drese's apartment to the castle church, in order to exercise greater control over the ensemble. For essentially the same reasons, he held the Cöthen capelle rehearsals at his own house—convenient for the musicians, since they all lived in town—and collected from the court an annual rent subsidy of 12 talers for this purpose throughout his tenure as capellmeister. In a report of 1722, the cantor of Cöthen's St. Jacobi Church extolled Bach's regular rehearsal practice: “The princely capelle in this town, which week in week out holds its
Exercitium musicum
, makes an example that even the most famous virtuosi rehearse and exercise their things together beforehand.”
¹⁸
This regular rehearsal schedule suggests a weekly or even more frequent program of courtly performances. In keeping with practices at other courts, musical soirées and other forms of musical entertainment must have been an integral part of courtly life at Cöthen, even though we lack specific information and, even more regrettably, most of the actual music made on those occasions. The repertoire would have consisted primarily of instrumental music for larger and smaller ensembles, concertos and sonatas in particular, as well as solo pieces such as keyboard and lute suites.
¹⁹
Nevertheless, we can be sure that at least Bach's instrumental compositions whose extant primary sources can be securely dated to the Cöthen years, such as the
Brandenburg Concertos
, the
French Suites
,
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, and the Suites for solo cello (even if some of them may be of earlier origin), were performed at various courtly functions.

The only specific information we have on regular performances at the Cöthen court, however, pertains to two annual events in close proximity: Prince Leopold's birthday on December 10 and New Year's Day. Both occasions were filled with a great deal of music making that included vocal soloists, and the published texts of some congratulatory pieces survive. The librettist hired by the court for these events was Christian Friedrich Hunold (alias Menantes), at the time one of Germany's most acclaimed poets, who taught poetry and rhetoric at Halle University. Hunold had made a name for himself by writing librettos for the Hamburg and Brunswick operas, set by Reinhard Keiser and Caspar Schürmann; he also wrote the text for Keiser's 1705 Passion oratorio “Der blutige und sterbende Jesus.” Hunold provided texts for three congratulatory cantatas presented on Leopold's birthdays in 1718, 1719, and 1720—the term
Serenata
in the titles suggesting evening performances—for a sacred cantata performed on Leopold's birthday in 1718, and for a secular cantata performed at the New Year's Day celebration in 1720 (see Table 7.2). Bach's music has survived for only two of the works, BWV 134a and 173a (we have the autograph score for both, also the original performing parts for BWV 134a). For all the other texts, the musical sources are either incomplete (BWV 66a, 184a, and 194a) or entirely lost, although the compositions reappeared in later reworkings as sacred cantatas. This picture extends, unfortunately, to works on texts by authors, mostly anonymous, other than Hunold (who died in 1721).

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7.2. Vocal Works Composed for Cöthen