Tabloid Tuesday: Johann Sebastian Bach

For the next two weeks we’re going Baroque! No, not like the pun on bankruptcy which I have tried with all my will to suppress – instead we’re going back to the 1700’s. I’ll be featuring two composers who we are not playing the music of this year, but who are greatly influential and important composers. We’ll be starting off with Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach is the most prominent Baroque composer, and one of the most recognized composers generally. He led a life tied very strongly to his home country of Germany. Though he moved around quite a bit at the beginning of his career he always remained within a few hundred mile radius of his home town, Eisenach. This meant that much unlike those who followed in his legacy, he never left Germany.

Bach lived in an exciting time of innovation, change and genius. He had such contemporaries as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and John Dryden.

At the age of 14 he won a scholarship to St. Michael’s school for choral studies. He was exposed to wider European culture there, even though it was close enough to his home to make the journey on foot. He spent two years there and was able to experiment with the organ and harpsichord at the school.

In 1706 he married his second cousin Maria, and they had seven children together, four of whom lived into adulthood.

In 1720, Bach’s wife suddenly died. The same year he met a gifted young soprano, Anna, who was 17 years his junior, and they married VERY shortly afterwards. They had thirteen more children together, only 6 of whom survived into adulthood, of whom three became significant musicians.

Bach was appointed Cantor of Thomasschule in Leipzig in 1723, and he held this position for 27 years until his death.

After his death, his reputation as a composer declined for a while. Though he was popular during his life as an organist and teacher, this began to fade for a number of years. But then in the early nineteenth century, his popularity became restored as famous composers at that time began to recognize his work. These composers included such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. Beethoven even described him as “the original father of harmony.”

Perhaps one of the most interesting bits to pull from the story of Bach’s life is the number of children he lost. Out of twenty children fathered a mere 50% survived. At the time that Bach lived, infant mortality was huge.

It was only actually 20% on average for the German population (which by our modern standards is ludicrously high; for context Canada's infant mortality rate as of 2012 is 0.005%), but his family just set a bad example (his stats also included his deceased offspring who made it out of infancy, but passed away in childhood).

He was living in a time in which the prevalence of the urban centre was on the rise. More people were moving out of the country and into towns where slums quickly erupted, and it became difficult to keep sanitary conditions in check. This meant the spread of disease.

And of course, with a lot of people in close quarters, and many of those people rapidly dying, there was a problem with disposal of the dead, which added even more to the stench, decay and diseases.

But it wasn't all bad; this movement also gave birth to some wonderful things. For instance, just before Bach’s time the City Comedy was a staple in London life before it was banned (see Ben Johnson, first Poet Laureate of Britain  for example)

As much as it assaults our twenty-first-century sensibilities with grief to imagine having that many children die, it was not regarded as such at the time Bach lived. Death of children was seen as more of a natural and regular occurrence. Yes, it was sad, but such were the living conditions that families – especially those in poverty – could not afford to spend a great deal of time mourning the loss of a child.

There were more important things to worry about for lower-class families. There were also more instances of death from disease and undernourishment in the impoverished populations that the death of a fragile young one was hardly shocking.

But in the Bach family, their patriarch was in a good position socially and financially.

Upon doing a bit of research on mourning customs of the 18^th century, I was surprised to find that it was such a big deal– excessive showy mourning is usually ascribed to the middle to upper classes in Victorian England. They went so far as to have people who couldn’t attend the funeral of a loved one send an empty carriage to follow the procession to make it look like there were more people.

One can imagine now the narrow streets festooned with the rotting corpses of the impoverished and sickly, a constant reminder of the horrors of the plague only centuries before. The endless line of darkened carriages of the wealthy which signify the death of one of their own pass by the stinking filth; ornate ceremonies for rich deceased with not a half-penny to spare for their social inferior’s dinner, though they barely cling to the last thread of life.

But it seems that people in the time of Bach also had some excessive funeral practices, though notably I found none for infants and children. It was only a tragedy, it seems, when an adult passed away – quite contrary to our modern perception of death.

Bach may have been of the class to have a formal funeral and mourning period for his family and friends, but his children may not have received quite the same ceremony.

As morbid as this post has been, the customs of funerals and mourning are enlightening if the time in which Bach lived. Even about the music and art produced in this time is informed by the social practices and customs, so a greater understanding of these aspects of the lives of Baroque artists can lead to a greater appreciation of the artists.