During the early vogue of the café in Paris, a chanson, entitled Coffee, reproduced here, was set to music with accompaniment for the piano by M.H. Colet, a professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. Printed in the form of a placard, and put up in cafés, it received the approbation of, and was signed by, de Voyer d'Argenson, at that time (1711) lieutenant of police. The poetry is not irreproachable. It can hardly be attributed to any of the well known poets of the time; but rather to one of those bohemian rimesters that wrote all too abundantly on all sorts of subjects. It is the development of a theory concerning the properties of coffee and the best method of making it. It is interesting to note that the uses of advertising were known and appreciated in Paris in 1711; for in the chanson there appears the name and address of one Vilain, a merchant, rue des Lombards, who was evidently in fashion at that period. The translation of the stanza reproduced is as follows:
If you, with mind untroubled,
Would flourish, day by day,
Let each day of the seven
Find coffee on your tray.
It will your frame preserve from every malady,
Its virtues drive afar, la! la!
Migrain and dread catarrh—ha! ha!
Dull cold and lethargy.
The most notable contribution to the "music of coffee," if one may be permitted the expression, is the Coffee Cantata of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) the German organist and the most modern composer of the first half of the eighteenth century. He hymned the religious sentiment of protestant Germany; and in his Coffee Cantata he tells in music the protest of the fair sex against the libels of the enemies of the beverage, who at the time were actively urging in Germany that it should be forbidden women, because its use made for sterility! Later on, the government surrounded the manufacture, sale, and use of coffee with many obnoxious restrictions, as told in chapter VIII.
Napoleon and the Curé—Lithograph by Charlet
Bach's Coffee Cantata is No. 211 of the Secular Cantatas, and was published in Leipzig in 1732. In German it is known as Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Be silent, do not talk). It is written for soprano, tenor, and bass solos and orchestra. Bach used as his text a poem by Piccander. The cantata is really a sort of one-act operetta—a jocose production representing the efforts of a stern parent to check his daughter's propensities in coffee drinking, the new fashioned habit. One seldom thinks of Bach as a humorist; but the music here is written in a mock-heroic vein, the recitatives and arias having a merry flavor, hinting at what the master might have done in light opera.