Johann Christoph Bach (16 June 1671 – 22 February 1721) was a musician of the Bach family. He was the eldest of the brothers of Johann Sebastian Bach who survived childhood.
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John Eliot Gardiner: Bach's Habit of Imperfection
Transcription
I think there's been a slightly deplorable tendency amongst Bach's biographers to paint Bach the human being in a very complimentary light. To imply that great music requires a great man and a great human being and a great personality to be behind it. Well, of course great music requires a creator but it doesn't have to be a paragon -- he doesn't have to be a paragon of virtue. And Bach certainly wasn't. The more that one discovers about him, the more one discovers that he was a deeply flawed character. That even though we have very, very few family records and letters to go on there are incidents that keep cropping up in his life at almost a repetitive pattern of antagonistic behavior between him and authority -- the authorities for whom he worked. He was very combative. He really took them on. But I think we can trace it back really to his earliest times. All right he started off in a presumably very happy family situation with both parents living but he didn't go to school very often. We have a lot of records of truancy. Now, why? Why was he not at school? That's one big question. Then comes the double shock of both parents dying before he's ten. And his upheaval rooted as he was in Eisenach. He's now uprooted and he goes to live with his elder brother, Johann Christoph, a few miles away in Ohrdruf. And suddenly his grades shoot up, a reaction to his orphan hood -- who knows. But the more I've been able to delve into the circumstances and the context of his schooling, the worse it becomes. It looks as if the schools -- both the first two schools that he was involved in were prone to very modern sounding difficulties of, you know, overcrowding in classrooms, shortage of textbooks, hooliganism in the classroom, lobbing of bricks through windows, chasing of the girls, coming to school with daggers and spears and a good deal of unpleasant bullying and sadistic behavior. There was one particular schoolmaster of Bach's when he was in Ohrdruf and he was probably then only about 11 or 12 who was known as the bully and the sadist of the school. And eventually he got handed his cards and he left but not before inflicting God knows what damage on his pupils. And this is a theme that goes all the way through Bach's schooling and we can't say with assurance -- well, he was damaged. But it does come out in certain ways. For example, in his very first job that was when he was organist in Arnstadt. He gets into a quarrel with a bassoonist. He writes a piece of music with a rather difficult couple of riffs for the bassoon and the bassoonist obviously makes a complete mess of it, he can't handle it. So Bach swears at him and calls him something pretty rude and the guy reacts by setting upon him in the market square. He comes up to him with a cudgel and Bach draws his sword and defends himself. And there's tremendous fisticuffs which is only broken up by the onlookers. And Bach goes off to his employers and says, "What's all that? You know, you've got to protect me." And they don't. That leads to a feeling of suspicion of authority that runs right away through his life. And it comes up again and again and again. And that comes into the foreground when he's working in Weimar for the two dukes -- the Duke Wilhelm Ernest and his nephew who share the authority. And Bach is unhappy there. He feels he's been passed over for the succession to become Kapellmeister. He feels aggrieved. He looks for another job. He's appointed, and he doesn't get permission from the Dukes to leave. So they throw him into prison and for a month he's disgraced and imprisoned. It doesn't happen again as far as we know but he's picking fights pretty much all the way through his life and unnecessarily. Right towards the end of his life when he's achieved the most extraordinary quality of his output including, you know, the two passions, the Art of Fugue, The Well-Tempered Clavier, all the Brandenburg concertos, this fantastic body of cantatas -- he picks a fight which doesn't -- isn't even on his patch. It's down the road where a headmaster of a school says there shouldn't be too much music in this school of mine anymore. The emphasis should be on the academic curriculum. And Bach calls the headmaster which in German is rector. He calls him dreck ohr -- a very school boyish pun on words. And dreck ohr means dirty ear. Why did he get himself involved unnecessarily in all that. It's as though he couldn't resist it. So I think it would be a great mistake to try to align this concept of divine music and a divine human being behind it. And, in fact, I would say the opposite. The very fact that this music is so profound and so uplifting and the man is clearly not a saint makes it all the more interesting. It makes it much more human and makes it much more approachable.
Life
Johann Christoph was born in Erfurt in June 1671, a few months before the family moved to Eisenach, where Johann Sebastian was born fourteen years later as the last child.[1] In 1686 Johann Christoph was sent to Erfurt to study under Johann Pachelbel for the next three years.[2] By the end of his apprenticeship he was organist in the St. Thomas church in that town for a short time, followed by some months at Arnstadt where several Bach relatives lived.[2]
In 1690 Johann Christoph became organist at the Michaeliskirche at Ohrdruf. In October 1694 he married Dorothea von Hof.[3] His mother Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt had died earlier that year, and his father Johann Ambrosius Bach died in March the next year. Two younger brothers, Johann Jacob and Johann Sebastian, who up till then had been living with their father in Eisenach, came to live with Johann Christoph's family in Ohrdruf. At the time, Johann Jacob was thirteen, and Johann Sebastian not even ten. Johann Christoph's five sons were born between 1695 and 1713.[4]
Johann Christoph became his youngest brother's keyboard teacher, or, at least, Johann Sebastian "laid the foundations of his [own] keyboard technique" under the guidance of his eldest brother.[5] An anecdote is told by Johann Sebastian's early biographers:[6]
The most renowned Clavier composers of that day were Froberger, Fischer, Johann Caspar Kerl, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Bruhns, and Böhm. Johann Christoph possessed a book containing several pieces by these masters, and [Johann Sebastian] Bach begged earnestly for it, but without effect. Refusal increasing his determination, he laid his plans to get the book without his brother's knowledge. It was kept on a book-shelf which had a latticed front. Bach's hands were small. Inserting them, he got hold of the book, rolled it up, and drew it out. As he was not allowed a candle, he could only copy it on moonlight nights, and it was six months before he finished his heavy task. As soon as it was completed he looked forward to using in secret a treasure won by so much labour. But his brother found the copy and took it from him without pity, nor did Bach recover it until his brother's death soon after.[7]
The brother had however not died "soon after".[8][6] Having stayed with his brother for five years Johann Sebastian left Ohrdruf, joining the choir of St. Michael's Convent at Lüneburg.[9] Around the time Johann Sebastian left Lüneburg a few years later he composed a Capriccio in E major in honor of his eldest brother, BWV 993.[10] In the years that followed Johann Christoph copied several compositions by his younger brother, such as those in the Andreas Bach Book, kept by one of his sons, and the Möller Manuscript.[11]
All of Johann Christoph's sons became musicians, three of them at Ohrdruf.[4] He died, aged 49, in Ohrdruf.
References
- ^ Spitta 1899, p. 174–175
- ^ a b Spitta 1899, p. 183–184
- ^ Malcolm Boyd: Bach, pp. 7–8, ISBN 0-19-514222-5
- ^ a b Forkel/Terry 1920/2011, Table V p. 307
- ^ "Nekrolog" of Johann Sebastian Bach by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach and Johann Friedrich Agricola in Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek, Volume 4. Leipzig, 1754
- ^ a b Spitta 1899, p. 186
- ^ Forkel/Terry 1920/2011, pp. 10–11
- ^ Forkel/Terry 1920/2011, footnotes 57 and 58 p. 11
- ^ Forkel/Terry 1920/2011, footnotes 59 and 60 pp. 11–12
- ^ Spitta 1899, pp. 249–250
- ^ Stephen A. Crist. "The early works and the heritage of the seventeenth century", p. 75 ff. in The Cambridge Companion to Bach. edited by John Butt. Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN 9780521587808
Sources
- Charles Sanford Terry. Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work. Translated from the German of Johann Nikolaus Forkel. With notes and appendices by Charles Sanford Terry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. 1920.
- Philipp Spitta. Johann Sebastian Bach: His Work and Influence on the Music of Germany (1685–1750), translated by Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller Maitland. Volume I, 1899.
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This page was last edited on 13 March 2023, at 23:13