Johann Sebastian Bach (38 page)

It is hard to measure objectively if this attempt at accounting for something that Bach could otherwise not explain has any legitimacy. Besides, the princess died before Bach left Cöthen. (Her death on April 4, 1723, would also have called for a work by the court capellmeister, but no such funeral piece has turned up.) Clearly measurable, on the other hand, is a drop in the court's budget for musical activities (see Table 7.4).
³⁶
After a noticeable increase in expenditures for the first two fiscal years (July to June) after Bach's appointment, appropriations decreased for 1720–21, remained flat for another year, and decreased again for 1722–23, Bach's last year in office. The development is anything but dramatic, as the average music allotment amounted to only 4 percent of the entire court budget.
³⁷
Incidentally, music represented the last expense category within title 1, the princely family's personal expenses and the largest item of the court budget. Titles 2–13 consisted of expenses (listed here in order of size)
³⁸
for general costs (title 13); building maintenance and construction (4); the palace kitchen (5); court and country administration (2); the palace wine cellar (6); the palace gardens (3); the princely stables (7); messenger and mail service (9); the printing office (10); debt service (11); personal asset and property service (12); and charity (13)—embarrassingly, the prince's lowest priority.

T
ABLE
7.4. Music Budget of the Cöthen Court, 1717–23

Although the court consistently ran a small surplus (see Table 7.4), there was virtually no financial leeway, especially since after the small principality's redistricting in 1715 the income from two of the four districts was transferred to the prince's mother upon her retirement from her regency.
³⁹
Moreover, after the prince's marriage in 1721, the princess received an annual allowance of 2,500 talers, a sum within title 1 that exceeded the entire music budget. At about the same time and also within title 1, Leopold established a palace guards regiment of fifty-seven soldiers whose budget reached 2,688 talers by 1723–24. Typically, the palace guard served no apparent purpose, and only whimsical, absolutist demeanor could have been responsible for such a (hardly affordable) pseudo-military extravaganza. In early 1723, when Princess Friederica Henrietta asked her brother, Prince Victor Friedrich of Anhalt-Bernburg, for a cash payment of 1,000 talers, he suspected “a minor emergency” because “he had heard from a Cöthen individual that the prince [Leopold] wanted to borrow 2,000 talers, but nobody was willing to lend him any money.”
⁴⁰

The change in the overall financial situation could hardly have escaped capellmeister Bach. Although from a global perspective the music budget showed little variance, the results in absolute terms were more than alarming. The membership of the capelle decreased—mainly by deaths and attrition—from seventeen salaried musicians in 1717–18 to fourteen in 1722–23. After Bach's new hires, Vetter and Fischer, left in 1720, no proper replacements were made (see Table 7.1). Two years later, in June 1722, the court flutist and director of the town pipers, Johann Gottlieb Würdig, also left the capelle—probably not voluntarily, for it looks as though Bach had to fire him. Würdig's salary had previously been reduced three times for disciplinary reasons, once because he chose not to show up for the New Year's music in 1719 and twice for irregular rehearsal attendance. Again, Bach was apparently prevented from replacing Würdig. Instead, Johann David Kelterbrunnen, not a musician, was hired by the court as dancing master. There being no evidence of Bach's advocacy for such a position, might this have been a sign (or interpreted by Bach as such) of the influence of the
amusa
princess? At the beginning of his capellmeistership, Bach was able to add members to the capelle and, by 1718–19, to achieve a net gain, yet now he had to preside over net losses. The period of modest growth for the Cöthen capelle was indeed short, and even though the budget for the court music showed no real downturn until 1721–22, Bach must have seen the handwriting on the wall, or else he would not have considered, in late 1720, the organist post at Hamburg's St. Jacobi Church as a possible alternative. A period of genuine financial and personnel retrenchment at the court began in 1721, coinciding, in Bach's perception, with the end of his patron's bachelorhood.

There is another way of looking at the financial picture of the Cöthen court music, from a perspective that was certainly not Bach's. At the beginning of his tenure, Bach's salary of 400 talers represented almost exactly one-fifth of the music budget, while the salary of the next-highest paid musician, Joseph Spieß, amounted to one-tenth of the budget (the chamber musicians' salaries were all around 150 talers, and the other capelle members earned a mere fraction of that, down to an annual pay of 32 talers). Considering that the personnel costs represented the bulk of the musical expenses and that toward the end of his residential period as Cöthen capellmeister the combined salaries for Bach and his wife (700 talers) made up as much as a third of the entire budget, we must ask whether Bach may have miscalculated the financial flexibility of his revered patron. The princely singer Anna Magdalena Bach was not only the first full-time female member of the capelle, she was also the highest paid court musician after the capellmeister, earning twice as much as the chamber musicians. Her salary of 300 talers would easily have funded two or three highly qualified instrumentalists, and had Bach chosen to follow that course, he would have maintained the original personnel strength of the capelle. Perhaps he gambled that Anna Magdalena's appointment would not adversely affect the personnel budget. He certainly would not have realized that this appointment exhausted Leopold's financial latitude within the narrow margins he had for indulging in personal inclinations (of which music was but one),
⁴¹
as well as displays of Baroque courtly splendor. Leopold also faced family pressures and intrigues, involving particularly the princess mother Gisela Agnes (who survived Leopold by more than eleven years) and, increasingly, his younger brother and successor, Prince August Ludwig.
⁴²

It fits well into the picture of an economizing Prince Leopold that he declined to appoint a new capellmeister after Bach departed for Leipzig in May 1723; nor was the court singer Anna Magdalena Bach replaced. Instead, engagements of outside musicians increased significantly, reaching a level higher than ever before: eleven guest performances in 1724 and nine in 1725. The court capelle was now led by Bach's longtime deputy, Joseph Spieß, who kept the title
Premier Cammer Musicus
but was not promoted to concertmaster. In a formal sense, Bach remained the actual princely Cöthen capellmeister and officially continued to bear the title—more than a mere token of the high esteem in which he was held by Prince Leopold. Indeed, the prestige and reputation of the sovereign of a minor principality might well have profited from the fact that the new cantor and music director at St. Thomas's simultaneously carried the title of princely Anhalt-Cöthen capellmeister in the city of Leipzig. The warm personal relationship between Bach and his assiduously musical patron appears not to have changed, nor was the capellmeistership just a title. Not only was Bach prominently represented among the later guest performers, he continued to write works for Cöthen; on a more personal level, he dedicated a copy of his first printed keyboard work, the Partita in B-flat major from the
Clavier-Übung
, BWV 825, to the princely family at the birth on September 12, 1726, of the firstborn to Prince Leopold and his second wife, Charlotte Friederica Wilhelmine of Nassau-Siegen, and included a poem in honor of Emanuel Ludwig, the princely baby.
⁴³

Bach first returned to Cöthen in July 1724 for a performance that also involved Anna Magdalena for which the two together received 60 talers; also engaged for the guest performance was the organist Johann Schneider of Saalfeld and the tenor Carl Friedrich Vetter, once a member of the Cöthen capelle.
⁴⁴
The next documented visit, again with Anna Magdalena, relates to the birthdays in December 1725 of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold, at which “the Leipzig Cantor Bach and his wife…gave a number of performances.”
⁴⁵
In all likelihood, the capellmeister returned to his former place of work at least once a year, but the only other known visit took place in January 1728, apparently in conjunction with the New Year's Day festivities. It was probably the last time Prince Leopold heard Bach perform, for he died on November 19 of that year, a few weeks before his thirty-fourth birthday.

Nearly five years after having left the Cöthen court service, Bach paid his beloved former patron final honors when he composed and performed—with Anna Magdalena, son Wilhelm Friedemann, and musicians from Halle, Leipzig, Merseburg, Zerbst, Dessau, and Güsten—the music for the state funeral that took place four months after the prince's death, on Wednesday and Thursday, March 23–24, 1729. The two compositions have not survived, but the court records specify that the first piece (BC B21)—described as lasting “a considerable time”—was performed at the 10
P.M
. service on Wednesday in the illuminated reformed town church and cathedral St. Jacobi, whose walls were veiled in black.
⁴⁶
The music began on the arrival in the church of the funeral procession, following the horse-drawn hearse with the princely casket, but nothing is known about its genre, scoring, or character. After the performance, the short service continued with a prayer, the congregational hymn “Nun lasset uns den Leib begrab'n,” the entombment in the family crypt, and the benediction, followed by another hymn, “Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr.”

The libretto for the second and apparently larger work, “Klagt, Kinder, klagt es aller Welt,” BWV 244a (BC B22), performed the following morning at the memorial service in the same church, was written by Bach's Leipzig poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, alias Picander. It describes an elaborate work of twenty-four movements divided into four sections, to be integrated into the lengthy memorial service, at the center of which stood a sermon on Psalm 68:21, “Wir haben einen Gott, der da hilft, und einen Herrn, der vom Tod errettet” (We have one God of salvation and one Lord, who rescues us from death), a verse Bach also set as the opening to section II of his funeral music. The lost music borrowed two movements from the 1727
Tombeau
, BWV 198, for Christiane Eberhardine, saxon electoress and queen of Poland, as well as seven arias and two choruses from the
St. Matthew Passion
, BWV 244, of the same year. Although we have no information on the changes incorporated by Bach in reworking the borrowed music, the parody models provide a reliable sense of the work's general scale and character. And that Bach turned to the greatest work he had composed till then, the
St. Matthew Passion
, shows his desire to pay homage to his revered prince with the best music of which he was capable.

T
RAVELS AND
T
RIALS

Cöthen's location within the mostly rural territory of the small principality and a good distance away from any city of size would certainly have created a sense of isolation and narrowness for anyone. Even for Bach, who by 1717 had had only short brushes with larger cities such as Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Hamburg, and Lübeck, Cöthen was much smaller and more remote than either Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, or Weimar. However, as the principal mail-coach line from Hamburg to Leipzig via Magdeburg led through the little princely residential town, often mockingly dubbed “Cow Cöthen,” residents could see an inviting and convenient prospect for escape. Bach must have welcomed the opportunity to travel more than ever before; in any case, he took more trips while in Cöthen than he did in any other five-year period of his life. His professional travels, both in the service of the court and on his own, contributed to his musical, social, and cultural experience while they also expanded his political and geographic horizons (see Table 7.5). A survey of his travels readily illustrates that Bach's life, lived within narrow geographic confines, was very different from that of the cosmopolitan Handel, for example, his compatriot of the same age. Yet the strictures did not foster an attitude of provincialism on Bach's part, especially when it came to the requirements of his “trade,” musical performance and musical science. On the contrary, just as he was ready to face any challenge by Louis Marchand, he was even more curious and eager to meet George Frideric Handel.