Sex, Death, and Minuets

Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks

David Yearsley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226617848
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music—long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening—has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity.
Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject—at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow—and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks' more idiosyncratic entries—like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality—against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying.

CHAPTER ONE

Magdalena Mania

Those familiar with the known and authenticated facts of Bach’s life will realize that certain episodes in this book are imaginary.—ESTHER MEYNELL, The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach, 1925

Reanimated by History

If, as is likely, Anna Magdalena Bach died at home, it is perhaps fitting that she would be reborn there as a historical presence of global reach and lasting cultural significance. She must have lived her final years mostly in isolation, making music, when she did, probably in her room in a Leipzig inn, alone or together with her two youngest daughters, the remnants of her once large Leipzig family. Anna Magdalena’s afterlife as a symbol, indeed purveyor, of the supposedly timeless family values fostered by musical domesticity elevated her to the status of the most beloved of the Bachs. In ways both enriching and fraught, her historical persona has exerted a tremendous, if often unacknowledged, influence on the musical lives of millions. Enshrined in history as the selfless soulmate of Johann Sebastian Bach, she became synonymous not just with spousal love and maternal sacrifice, but also with the intimate music of wives and of children—of those who sing and play in the home. The fascination with Anna Magdalena was ignited by musicological scholarship that made her 1725 Notebook available to a wide public in the first years of the twentieth century. The manuscript’s first owner was in turn brought to life in novels, the most famous of which was marketed as non-fiction. Over the last one hundred years, a range of female writers found in Anna Magdalena not just a compelling historical character, but also a symbol of familial devotion. Anna Magdalena became the most famous wife of a great composer; through her Notebooks and through fictional and semifictional accounts of her, many came to believe that they knew her as a friend.

One can perhaps sense Anna Magdalena slipping from historical memory on the cover of the 1725 Notebook (see again td>), when, as we’ve seen, her stepson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, on taking possession of the Notebook probably after her death, filled in the gaps between the initials with her full name (although he didn’t have room for all the letters of Magdalena). The most reliable archivist of the Bach family manuscripts inherited from his father (and, in this case, stepmother),1 Emanuel poignantly ensured that her full name was securely established for subsequent generations to see right on the cover. Any fears he may have harbored about the longevity of her legacy—and the obviousness of what the letters A. M. B. stood for—were probably not misplaced. Anna Magdalena was referred to only once in print during her lifetime, in her husband’s obituary of 1754, whose information on the deceased’s family was written by Emanuel; from him we learn of Anna Magdalena’s status as his father’s second wife, the year of their marriage, her own parentage, the musical occupation of her father, a list of her children, and the fact that she is not yet dead:

Johann Sebastian Bach took for his second wife, in Cöthen, in the year 1721, Miss Anna Magdalena, youngest daughter of Mr. Johann Caspar Wülken [Wilcke], Court Trumpeter to the Duke of Weissenfels. Of thirteen children, namely, six sons and seven daughters, whom the latter bore him, the following six are still alive: 1) Gottfried Heinrich, born in 1724. 2) Elisabeth Juliane Fridrike, born 1726 and married to the Organist of St. Wenceslas’s in Naumburg, Mr. Altnikol, a skilled composer. 3) Johann Christoph Friedrich, born 1732, now Chamber Musician to the Imperial Count of Schamburg-Lippe. 4) Johann Christian, born 1735. 5) Johanna Carolina, born in 1737. 6) Regina Susanna, born 1742. The widow is still living.2

There is no acknowledgment of Anna Magdalena’s own musical accomplishments: her father’s title is mentioned, but the more prestigious one she held between 1721 and 1723 as a court Sängerin in Cöthen is not. The professional standing of her only married daughter’s husband is similarly established. As one would expect, the Bach women appear only as the progeny and property—essentially the same thing—of men.

Anna Magdalena does receive her own entry in Ernst Ludwig Gerber’s 1790 biographical dictionary of musicians. The dictionary includes, as Gerber put it, information on the lives of both professionals and dilettantes; it is presumably under the latter category that she is praised as an “outstanding soprano” (vortrefliche Sopranistin), for he writes that “she died in 1757 [sic] without ever having made public use of her outstanding talent.”3 Gerber puts her death three years too early. The entry counts as the single published reference to Anna Magdalena’s musical talent from an eighteenth-century source: only posthumously was she publicly praised as a singer in her own right. Gerber’s father, Heinrich Nicholas, had studied with Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, and as long as the personal connections built on student-teacher ties continued, her memory was kept alive. From Gerber’s wording we might infer that his father could have heard Anna Magdalena sing during his time in Leipzig from 1724 to 1726, just after she gave up her court post in Cöthen; Gerber would then have reported this to his lexicographer son, who could have assumed that her singing took place exclusively in the domestic setting. In his dictionary Gerber cited every musician he found listed in the catalog of C. P. E. Bach’s voluminous portrait collection, which included the now-lost painting of Anna Magdalena Bach; Emanuel referred to her as a Sopranistin (the same term used by Gerber) and as “J. S. [Bach’s] second wife” (J. S. zweyte Frau).4 An assiduous historian, Gerber would have consulted all the relevant sources available to him in order to find out information about her performances; since none was to be found, he assumed she never sang in public in Leipzig, although she may well have done so, and had of course been a court singer.5 A note inserted into the front of the 1725 Notebook by Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, which had acquired the volume by around 1811, related that Anna Magdalena “is said to have sung very well.”6 Zelter must have learned of this talent from Gerber’s dictionary; he glossed the reference to Anna Magdalena found there in a note he wrote inside the cover of the Notebook: “Anna Magdalena, J. Seb. Bach’s second wife, whose name adorns [ziert] this book, is said to have been an outstanding singer [treffliche Sängerin].” Zelter also mooted the notion that the aria “Willst du dein Herz mir schenken” (If you want to give me your heart; BWV 518) found in the Notebook was a memento of the Bachs’ engagement, a testament to Johann Sebastian’s “love life” (Blüthenleben). In the Notebook the song is preceded by its own title page calling it the Aria di Giovannini; Zelter hypothesized that this was the Italianized name adopted by Johann Sebastian in his self-styled role as amorous shepherd; Zelter also surmised (again, wrongly) that it was “in the hand of the beloved” (von der Hand des Liebchens), since the script was “girlish enough” (mädchenhaft genug) to be Anna Magdalena’s. Zelter thought she had written out the music and had also sung it: her presence was to be felt in the song and in the Notebooks, even if her husband, the supposed author, was the real focus of Zelter’s historical attentions.

In light of the importance of Gerber’s book as a reference tool for historically minded Bach devotees such as Zelter, it is surprising that the founding document of Bach scholarship, Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s On Bach’s Life, Art, and Work (1802), makes no mention of Anna Magdalena at all, nor of Johann Sebastian’s first wife (and second cousin) Maria Barbara Bach.7 Forkel relied heavily on his correspondence with Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, Anna Magdalena’s two stepsons; perhaps neither passed on information about the Bach women to Forkel. To discuss the wives might have been at cross-purposes—or perhaps merely irrelevant—to the larger aim of Forkel’s project to present an image of Johann Sebastian Bach as fiercely independent, his genius needing no intellectual reinforcement—never mind logistical support—from the women of the family. The explanatory note that Zelter inserted into the 1725 Notebook was a response to Forkel, especially to the claim that Johann Sebastian harbored no interest in love songs; for Zelter, “Willst du dein Herz mir schenken” provided proof to the contrary. Whereas Anna Magdalena was of little interest to Forkel, she seems to have been an alluring figure for Zelter; more important, however, than her association with the piece and her ownership of the Notebook was what the aria divulged about the man of feeling who, as Zelter believed, wrote it.

Anticipating the later spate of novels about her by female writers in the twentieth century, Anna Magdalena’s first significant reappearance came, fittingly, in a scenario dreamed up by a woman. In the story “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God) by the prolific Elise Polko, first published in 1850 and subsequently in no fewer than fifty-two further editions before 1890 (and many more after that), Anna Magdalena is presented as a doting wife prone to emotional outbursts: industrious, reverent, beautiful, and beside herself with worry when her husband decides to accept an invitation to play an organ concert in Dresden at the behest of the Saxon elector.8 After introducing us to the great man’s sons, Polko turns to the lady of the house: “At the right side of the cantor sat his wife, a powerful figure with clear, good features and pious eyes in a snow-white bonnet and brilliant neckerchief [Busentuch].”9 When Bach returns after his journey to the place she had previously decried as a “city of sin” (Sündenstadt), she runs into his arms, tears streaming down her cheeks. The title of Polko’s collection Märchen, Phantasien und Skizzen (Fairytales, Fantasies, and Sketches) makes no secret of the fact that the contents are fictional: in her first appearance in a book since the eighteenth century, Bach’s second wife is still a long way from being treated with the kind of attempts at historical verisimilitude made in later fiction involving her. Polko doesn’t even know the wife’s name, shackling her instead with the sturdy Germanic “Gertrud.”

In A. E. Brachvogel’s fantastically ahistorical novel Friedemann Bach, published in 1858, she is at least called Anna Magdalena, appearing in the book to make peace between the austere father and his volatile son, or to decorate the Christmas tree in a classroom of the Thomasschule while next door in the Bachs’ living room Sebastian rants to Friedemann that he will not stoop to composing popular operas, since he aspires only to create great art.10 In Polko’s story Anna Magdalena does not sing, and in Brachvogel’s novel she does so only at home and to the accompaniment of her husband. The Aria di Giovannini is used as a courtship song for one of the Bach daughters and as a sign of Friedemann’s impulsive romantic urges and general mental instability.11 After the mid-nineteenth century the song was available from several presses and had established itself as a favorite in the drawing room and, as we shall see in a moment, in the concert hall.12 Clearly, Brachvogel was capitalizing on the aria’s widespread appeal in his novel; the song was the first big hit from the 1725 Notebook, but in print and performance no mention was made of its origins in Anna Magdalena’s personal repertoire. The aura of the piece had to do with its attribution to Johann Sebastian and the way it could be heard to illuminate the tender side of this German genius. There was as yet no strong interest in, or particular attachment to, the original owner of the Notebook from which the song came.

With the growing interest in her husband, however, Anna Magdalena began to appear in print with increasing frequency, though always at Johann Sebastian’s side or in his shadow. The Prussian statesman and music historian Carl Heinrich Hermann Bitter’s two-volume Bach biography, which appeared in 1865, shows an affecting fondness for Anna Magdalena. Bitter devotes a dozen pages to her and her Notebooks. After mentioning her marriage in 1721, Bitter praises the “young wife” because “she vigorously contributed her share to the works and activity of her famous husband.”13 Anna Magdalena’s vital role as copyist is lauded for the first time, and the Notebooks are treated with touching intimacy. For Bitter, her manuscripts’ importance lay chiefly in the access they provided to her husband’s “legacy of love and sincere affection toward his wife.”14 Yet Anna Magdalena also appears full of desire for her spouse and the music she receives from him: the songs of the 1725 Notebook are the result of “the personal relationship between the two” expressed “in the most tender manner.” Given the popularity of the Aria di Giovannini, it is not surprising that Bitter reflects on the song’s biographical and emotional significance, suggesting there was more to it than the naive musical charms that had made it a German favorite.15

The song’s text prompted Bitter to wonder, as Zelter had before him, whether the song could be a testament to the courtship between “the youthful singer” and “the strict contrapuntalist”;16 the nineteenth-century thinking was that the romance would have been conducted clandestinely, since Johann Sebastian had only recently been widowed.17 The four strophes are all sung to the same disarming melody, the first stanza setting out the perilous thrill of furtive affection:

If you want to give me your heart,

then begin secretly,

so that our thoughts

can be guessed by no one.

The love we share must

at all times be concealed,

so lock the greatest joys

up in your heart.

Willst du dein Herz mir schenken,

so fang es heimlich an,

daß unser beider Denken

niemand erraten kann.

Die Liebe muß bei beiden

allzeit verschwiegen sein,

Drum schließ die größten Freuden

in deinem Herzen ein.

Though Bitter’s biographical scenario founders on philological grounds (the copy is not in Anna Magdalena’s hand, but in that of an anonymous scribe), the song’s story of love proved an appealing one that many readers and subsequent writers have been happy to believe in. Bitter agrees with Zelter’s identification of the handwriting of “Willst du dein Herz mir schenken,” seeing Anna Magdalena’s copying-out of the piece as a reaffirmation of the pair’s loving bond and its covert origins.18 For Bitter, the music in the Notebook connects us to a previously ignored world of feeling: “The entir...