MEINE FREUNDIN, DU BIST SCHÖN / GOTTES ZEIT IST DIE ALLERBESTE ZEIT

Whenever the name of Bach is mentioned today, we immediately think of Johann Sebastian Bach. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, however, there was a great chance that the question "Which Bach?" would immediately follow. The obituary that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote after his father’s death in 1750 begins with the words "Johann Sebastian Bach belonged to a family, all of whose members seemed to have received a love of and talent for music as gifts of Nature". Music was the Bach family’s profession: almost every male member of the family either composed or built instruments or was an organist or instrumentalist or Kapellmeister; the Bach family name was simply another word for musician in Thuringia at that time. Johann Sebastian Bach himself was highly conscious of belonging to a long family tradition; he drew up a document entitled Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie in 1735 in which he laid out his family’s genealogy, tracing the roots of the family back to his great-great-grandfather, the baker and miller Veit Bach (d. 1619), and mentioning some fifty musicians, his own sons included.

J.S. Bach would definitely have been pleased when he received a number of manuscripts of works by earlier family members in that same year. The collection included sacred cantatas by Johann Michael and Johann Christoph Bach as well as motets by Georg Christoph Bach, Johann Bach, Adam Drese and a few anonymous composers. This gift, later to be known as the Altbachisches Archiv, was more than welcome, given its contents. The feverish activity with which Bach began his career as Cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1723 and during which he had composed a new cantata every week for more than two years had long since quietened down; new music to be performed was more than welcome. Bach soon had several of the cantatas performed in Leipzig; he did not need to have any worries about their quality, for they all bore the hallmark of the Bach family.

The Altbachisches Archiv contains a cantata by the composer and family member whose talents Johann Sebastian valued the highest of all the musicians and composers who comprised the Bach family: his father’s cousin Johann Christoph Bach (1642-1703). This Johann Christoph spent his whole life in Eisenach, where he fulfilled a double position as city organist and harpsichordist to the local court. His career did not always proceed smoothly, for he believed that he was underpaid for the work that he did and often wrangled with the city fathers about this. The cantatas by Johann Christoph in the Archiv contain the greatest number of annotations of J.S. Bach himself; this is a clear sign of his great interest in them and of their revival. Carl Philipp Emanuel also praises Johann Christoph in Johann Sebastian’s obituary, stating that he had a talent for the creation of fine musical thoughts and the expression of words.