For musicians of the Baroque Era, the ability to teach and attract students was essential to establishing their reputations, supplementing their incomes, and helping them to fulfill their myriad duties in church, city, or court positions. In Germany, the teaching tradition is well illustrated by Johann Pachelbel, whose treatise Deutliche Anweisung verifies his position in the long line of Lehrmeister, or master teachers, that began in the seventeenth century with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and continued with Pachelbel’s colleagues Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reinken and successors Johann Heinrich Buttstett, Johann Christoph Bach, and Georg Böhm. This impressive chain of pedagogues...

In 1735 Johann Sebastian Bach turned fifty. During the course of that year he drew up a family tree delineating six generations of male members of the Bach family and prepared an annotated family genealogy to accompany the family tree.² In addition, at around the same time he began to assemble the musical compositions of his most gifted forebears into a collection: the so-called Old Bach Archive. All three endeavors attest to his deep connection to the Bach clan, nearly all of whom were musicians, and his commitment to preserving their musical legacy.

The reason for Bach’s systematic documentation of...

In his volume Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff admirably summarizes Bach’s principal goals as he embarked on the regular composition of cantatas shortly after his arrival in Leipzig on May 22, 1723:

What clearly emerges . . . are two aims: first, to provide himself with a working repertoire of substantial size that he would be able to draw on later; to set certain goals for the individual cycles that would enable him to explore the flexible cantata typology as widely as possible, to leave his own distinct mark, and—as in other areas of compositional activity...

One of the most striking textures in J.S. Bach’s ensemble vocal music is unison choral writing, in which four (or more) parts join in singing the same melodic line.¹ Passages scored this way (Table 1) stand out from their musical surroundings, and we might well ask why Bach turned to this device when he did. There is no single answer, but we can identify several motivations for his use of this distinctly un-polyphonic kind of writing, including signification of quotation, reference to the sound of instruments or voices, and allusion to liturgical music. Some instances are connected with instrumental material...

In Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the final words uttered by Jesus read, in published librettos and scores:¹

Jesus: “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?”

Evangelist: Das ist: “Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?”

However, nearly all of the myriad translations of this passage into English read:

Jesus: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” [emphasis added]

Evangelist: That is, “My God, my God, Why hast Thou forsaken me?”²

This conflict raises numerous questions, among them: Did Bach write asabthani or sabachthani? What textual source did he use? Why do English versions of the Passion text read differently from Bach’s? How...

Based on the latest diplomatic source studies, all but perhaps two of the twenty-seven movements in Bach’s B-Minor Mass can now be considered to be parodies,¹ and virtually all of the nine arias fall into this category. So far, however, a concrete model has been pinpointed for only one of the arias: the “Agnus Dei,” an aria for alto, violins, and continuo that shares its music with the aria “Ach, bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben” from the Ascension Oratorio, BWV II. Both appear to be derived from the aria “Entfernet euch, ihr kalten Herzen” from the lost wedding cantata Auf!...

Absent from Hans Löffler’s groundbreaking compilation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s students¹ is the name of the Göttingen organist, university music director, and city cantor Johann Friedrich Schweinitz (1708–1780). Apparently Löffler had not encountered Georg Linnemann’s earlier research on the music history of the city of Celle, in which Schweinitz is referred to in a testimonial by the Göttingen University professor and former rector of the Leipzig St. Thomas School Johann Matthias Gesner as “a disciple of the famous Herr Bach in Leipzig.”² Gesner’s letter of recommendation for Schweinitz came at a moment when two important musical posts in Celle...

Among the members of the Bach family, Johann Christian (1735–1782) enjoyed the widest renown during the eighteenth century. Far more traveled than his father and brothers, he became the principal figure of a “Bach tradition” outside of Germany before the nineteenth century. This can be credited to his associations with important musical centers such as Milan, Naples, London, Mannheim, and Paris, and the broad dissemination of his music through prints and manuscripts. This chapter examines a single aspect of this tradition as an illustrative example of the diverse nature of Christian’s sphere of influence: It investigates a group of...

To my knowledge, the first detailed examination of the engraving in the original edition of J.S. Bach’s Art of Fugue was carried out by a graduate seminar conducted by Christoph Wolff at Columbia University in 1971.¹ On the basis of a detailed analysis of the engraving, a student in that seminar, Richard Koprowski, differentiated between five main notational styles, which he lettered A through F.² His determination of these styles was based on the notation of symbols such as half-note stems, whole rests, clefs, and common time/alla breve time signatures. It is clear that for Koprowski, these notational styles reflected...

The only extant references, either directly or indirectly, to basso continuo or basso continuo performance in surviving Bach documents from the composer’s lifetime are the following:

1. Christoph Ernst Sicul, reporting in an entry of October 17, 1727, in his Leipzig Chronicle, that Cantata 198, Laß dich Fürstin, laß dich einen Strahl (“Trauerode”), was accompanied “with Clave di cembalo [harpsichord], which Mr. Bach himself played.”¹

2. Georg Heinrich Ludwig Schwanenberger, after hearing Bach play the organ, remarking in a letter to Johann Daniel Bähre in Braunschweig dated November 12, 1727: “I must completely change my whole style of playing ....

As it is well known, Bach led the University Collegium Musicum ensemble in Leipzig from 1729 to 1737, and then once again from 1739 to at least 1741. During his tenure, the group performed once per week for two hours throughout the year: in summer on Wednesdays, from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., in Gottfried Zimmermann’s Coffee Garden in the Grimmischer Steinweg outside the east gate of the city; and in winter on Fridays, from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., in Zimmermann’s Coffee House in the Catharinenstrasse in the center of town. During the three annual trade fairs—New Year’s,...

Over the course of his long career in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach saw seven editions of his works into print (Table 1). Each of these publications generated several hundred exemplars,¹ most of which were sold to colleagues, friends, students, and the general public (often at the three annual Leipzig trade fairs) or given away as special gifts. Each time Bach issued a publication, however, he seems to have kept a certain number of prints for himself, at least one of which served as his personal copy, or Handexemplar, of the work. Into these prints he often entered, by hand, corrections...

A performance-practice convention among classically trained musicians holds that metric accentuation in tonal and post-tonal Western music is qualitative rather than quantitative in nature. Accentuation of strong beats is clarified primarily by stress accents—dynamic inflection and articulation—although where applicable it can be aided by additional expressive devices such as arpeggiation or ornamentation. Stylistic exceptions to this principle that take the form of lengthening accented beats, such as French Baroque inégalité or the “shuffle” inequality of jazz performance, are deemed to apply foremost to rapid or flowing note values at the bottom of the metric hierarchy.¹ Metrical units occurring...

In the early weeks of Lent, 1814, the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, London, presented a concert featuring Part I of The Creation, “composed by Dr. Haydn.”¹ It was followed by “Two Grand Miscellaneous Acts” consisting of arias and choruses by various composers. Although the choice of the word “Acts” for Parts II and III of the program on the title page of the libretto suggests a dramatic performance, nothing about the sequence of numbers constitutes a thematically consistent—much less dramatically unified—musical experience. A number of the selections in Parts II and III of the program were drawn...

For much of the year 1845, Robert Schumann was occupied with the composition of his Six Fugues on the Name B-A-C-H, op. 60. For some critics, this retrospective shift to a rigorous genre from the early eighteenth century seems symptomatic of a new pursuit of classicist control, one that marks the climactic point in Schumann’s journey from the fantasy of the piano miniature and the poetic Lied to the mastery of larger, more self-contained works. Others interpret the B-A-C-H fugues as manifestations of a particular subtype of the character piece, for Schumann had regarded the fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier...