A visit with Prince Leopold to Karlsbad in 1720, was sadly memorable to Bach. For while he was on his way home and no news could reach him, his wife suddenly fell sick and died. He arrived only to learn that she was already buried. How deep a grief this was to the family—the mother was but thirty-five—we know from the recollection of it which the second son, Philipp Emanuel, then a child of six, bore more than thirty years later. His tender, flexible nature reflected hers closely, as his elder brother Friedemann’s robust vigour did that of his father. And the fact that the two most striking figures, as also the most musical, among Bach’s twenty children sprang from this marriage may be taken in evidence of the near sympathy subsisting between the parents. Else we know nothing of Maria Barbara, and one is apt to depreciate her by comparison with the more gifted woman whom Bach chose for his second wife.
His care was now mainly for the children, four of his seven alone surviving their infancy. The eldest was a daughter, Katharina Dorothea, whom we shall hereafter meet again as helping with her voice in the family concerts; then came three sons, the two already mentioned, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard.[24] It was Wilhelm Friedemann, now a lad of ten, who claimed his father’s most anxious attention; and never was a charge fulfilled with greater love and willingness. In later life Bach’s relation to him was one of intimate friendship; already the promise of his musical skill aroused the keenest hopes of his father. He showed afterwards that he had all the characteristics of Sebastian accentuated: stolid independence was carried into wilful obstinacy, hotness of temper into a confirmed irascibility, morose when not violent. At present he was only the hopeful eldest son, for whose sake Bach developed a complete scheme of musical training, beginning with a Clavier-Büchlein of easy pieces, as early as January, 1720. There is an air of tenderness for the small fingers he loved, and longed to educate, in the ladder of difficulties he so carefully constructed, and in the little preface, in nomine Jesu. This was followed by Inventions in two and three parts, designed to cultivate an equable strength and free motion in all the fingers. The title was apparently chosen to indicate that beyond this he sought to teach in these pieces the elements of musical taste, invention in the scholastic sense being a compound of just disposition of the members and appropriate expression.[25] The third stage in the course of instruction was constituted by the preludes and fugues of the Wohltemperirte Clavier, in which technical execution is combined with beauty of form and expression, each in its finest development. One of the points on which Bach insisted was that the practice of the clavichord should from the outset go hand in hand with composition. He assumed that no one should learn to play who could not think musically, as he expressed it; and he never allowed a pupil to compose at the instrument. He would not, he said, have him to be a piano-hussar, a taunt that might well be taken to heart by some of our modern composers. A parallel system of training for the organ was also primarily intended for Friedemann; and both alike shew the clearness and penetration with which Bach understood the functions of a teacher.
In after-years the rector of his school at Leipzig, between whom and Bach there was no love lost, said of him that he was a bad teacher and could not keep order in class. The latter is likely enough, and the former may not be without foundation in the particular case. A man of Bach’s extreme sensibility would certainly appear at his worst in the irritating surroundings of a rude schoolroom. That he could teach, however, and teach better than any man of his time, is proved by the string of distinguished names that appear among his scholars and by the unbroken succession of pupils whom he had in his house from his marriage almost to his death, the applicants increasing in his later days until he was continually forced to turn them back. To his chosen pupils he was kind and genial, and full of encouragement. You have five as good fingers on each hand as I have, was his answer to complaints of difficulty. He never set himself up as a model to which others could not attain: I was obliged, he would say, to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed as well. From these glimpses of his bearing we may readily conceive the love and enthusiastic reverence which he aroused in his pupils, and as for his irritability, the common failing of great artists, experience shews that at least it does not make a man a bad teacher in private, however much it may militate against his success in a school.
Bach did not remain long a widower. The tradition of his ancestors contained no law requiring a year of mourning; indeed his father married again in seven months. Sebastian was more patient, waited nearly a year and a half, and chose wisely. His new wife, Anna Magdalena Wuelken, held a position as singer at the Coethen court; her father was trumpeter in that of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels. She was twenty-one, fifteen years younger than her husband.
The marriage, which took place on the third of December, 1721, was entirely happy. Anna Magdalena proved herself no mere hausfrau, but a real companion to Bach in all his tastes, a helper in work and a sharer in all his pleasures. She had a fine soprano voice, for which her husband delighted to arrange songs and recitatives. Often she copied them out for herself, and besides this her clear well-formed hand, closely resembling Bach’s, occurs constantly in the collections of his manuscripts. On his side he helped her to master the clavichord. Two Clavier-Büchleins, written for her, exist in his autograph, and to judge by their handsome bindings and the inscriptions in them, were intended as gifts to her, one just after their marriage, in 1722, the other in 1725. She used and added to them afterwards as a sort of album. They contain a great part of what we now know as the French suites, with a variety of preludes, arrangements of airs from his cantatas, &c., and also a set of rules for thorough-bass. It is plain that if the one was an indulgent teacher, the other was a ready and diligent pupil.
The beginning of Bach’s new happiness was soon attended with an unexpected drawback. Prince Leopold married a week after his capellmeister, and from this time forth his interest in music declined. His wife, so unlike Bach’s, cared nothing for music the concerts were still attended, but no longer listened to, and Bach’s work became more and more irksome to him. He had no outside public to take the place of the now indifferent court. He continued, however, for a year, until the death of Kuhnau, the learned and original cantor of the Thomasschule at Leipzig, offered to him an opportunity of returning to that work in the service of the church for which he must have longed all these years. He left Coethen in the summer of 1723, having first composed two church cantatas, as evidence of his fitness for the post. It is probable that, in the hope of the election taking place before Easter, he wrote the S. John Passion Music to grace his arrival, as though to prove that the divorce from sacred music which he had supported for so long a time had made his fertility and creative force only the more abundant. But the delay of the Leipzig authorities postponed the production of this masterpiece. By a coincidence the Princess of Coethen, the determining course of Bach’s removal, died just before he left. Perhaps for the moment he regretted the step he had taken: to us that step is the most fortunate act in his life and the herald of his greatest triumphs.
As we considered the Weimar time as representative of Bach’s career as an organist, so Coethen is the scene of his most extensive production for the clavichord, for the chamber, and for the orchestra. We may therefore here enumerate the compositions that belong to these classes, reserving for the present the great collections of fugues contained in the Wohltemperirte Clavier, of which the second half falls under a later date when the first was alone entirely rearranged and partly rewritten, and the Kunst der Fuge which was the achievement of Bach’s last years.
The clavichord works admit of a double classification. On the one hand we have independent compositions, of which the idea is mostly derived from the organ-style; on the other stand the suites, or sets of pieces in dance-measures, which are moulded upon Italian models. Both alike are adapted by Bach to the clavichord in such a manner that they are completely naturalised in their new-found country. To the former class belong the following works arranged in conformity with Dr. Spitta’s critical results; the numbers refer to Peters’ cheap edition:—