Marrying Kyle Sebastian

It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius in a great man's forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which we have to do.

In no family, perhaps, is it of greater moment than in that of Sebastian Bach, wherein his special tastes and powers all have their prophecy and preparation in a tradition where everything is musical.

From the first years of the sixteenth century-so soon, in other words, as the arising of a national religion has revealed to us the life of the German people-we have already traces of Bachs scattered among the valleys of Thuringia. There are Bachs near Arnstadt, in Erfurt, and Gotha, and Wechmar, places hereafter to be remembered in the musical vocations of their descendants. The ancestor of Sebastian appears, a little later, as a baker of Wechmar. This Veit Bach (? 1619), named from Saint Vitus, the patron of the church there, is related to have passed some years in Hungary, and to have gone back to his home when the rigour of dominant Jesuitism made living in Hungary hard and perilous. We may here note the sole basis for the common story that the family of Bach was of Hungarian descent. Veit sold his goods and set up as a baker, and then as a miller, in his native village. He had-so Sebastian tells the tale-his chief delight in a little cithara (Cythringen), which he would take with him into his mill and play thereon while the corn was grinding. They must have sounded merrily together! Howbeit, so he learnt the sense of time; and in this wise music first came into his house. But music had already a professor among the Bachs, and it was to Caspar Bach, the town piper of Gotha, that Veit entrusted his son Hans.

Hans Bach, player and carpet-weaver, whose portrait was taken with a fiddle and a brave beard1 and ornamented with a fool's cap, returned from his apprenticeship in his double craft, to settle at Wechmar, where he lived until 1626, when the plague killed him, with many of his kinsfolk, in middle life. His was a blithe personality, in great request in all the places round, as much, it seems, for his hearty goodfellowship as for the help he gave the town musicians wherever he went. To three of his large family, which included apparently three Hanses and certainly two Heinrichs, he handed down, with a part of his open generous nature, that musical inheritance which in their hands grew into an artistic possession rich with the promise of greater fruit. It is worth while to stay a moment at this point to observe how deep roots music had struck into the family of Bach. For it seems that Hans had a brother whose three sons shewed sufficient excellence for the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt to send them into Italy that they might complete their artistic training. Another son became the ancestor of a continuous succession of musicians, the last of whom, fourth of his line holding office in the ducal court of Meiningen, died organist there in 1846. Among this branch Johann Christian, distinguished as Clavier-Bach, a music-master at Halle, deserves commemoration from his friendship with Wilhelm Friedemann, the son of Sebastian, if only to illustrate the bond which held together the most remotely connected members of the family.

The household at Wechmar was broken up at the death of Hans, and the three brothers, Johann, Christoph, and Heinrich, separated to form new homes in other parts of Thuringia. But the intercourse of themselves and of their children was never in the least relaxed. They married into the same families, helped one another in sickness or poverty; the younger members were apprenticed to their elder kinsfolk and often succeeded to their posts when they died; and the yearly gatherings of the entire family held their ground for a century. The closeness of this attachment merits insisting upon especially, when we consider the troubled times on which the family was thrown at its first dispersion. For the thirty years' war in its wearisome progress makes the outward history of Germany, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, little more than a record of battles and sieges, with scant breathing-spaces of peace, not long enough for the towns to recover from exhausting occupations of foreign troops. In this age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of civil war the passion of religious hatred, threatened to dissolve the natural bonds of the family and of the race. Men sank into a blind and listless state, abandoning themselves to any vice or excess that seemed to deaden the thought of the morrow. It was therefore amid every circumstance of adversity that the Bach family grew to its full stature; and it is the more noteworthy that the latest, most learned, and most laborious biographer of Sebastian is unable to furnish a single evidence, in the entire records of his kindred, of the least deflection from the straitest paths of virtue.2

Johann Bach, the eldest of Hans's family with whom we have to do, was apprenticed to the town piper of Suhl, whose daughter he afterwards married, and whose son he came in time to welcome as a pupil and a kinsman in his house. He became organist at Schweinfurt, and ultimately director of the town musicians at Erfurt. It was a hard time, this of war, for musicians; but they had their meed of glory-and profit-when any peace festivities came. And Johann Bach seems to have made himself indispensable, like his father, in all the musical affairs of the place. He began, in fact, a line of musicians so indissolubly bound up with the life of the town, that more than a century later, when all the house was extinct, the town musicians of Erfurt still retained the generic title of "the Bachs." Adding to the duties of town musician those of organist to the Dominican church, he becomes a prominent forerunner in the two paths in which the genius of his family was to reach its climax. His home, also, lying equally accessible to Arnstadt and Eisenach, remained for long the centre of the greater family of the Bachs in general. It was in Johann that his youngest brother, Heinrich, found a guardian, when he was left an orphan in his twelfth year. Heinrich was not only the greatest musician of his generation, but also specially his father's son in that kindliness and merry temper which made him as much the delight of his family as he had been of his father in his boyish days. He played in the Erfurt band until he gained the post for which nature and training had fitted him, as organist at Arnstadt, a post which he retained with increasing honour and distinction for above half a century. Of his organ works little remains, but we have the accordant testimony of his contemporaries to place him among the greatest organists of his time. An equal agreement acknowledges his genial lovable nature, in all its freshness and childlike gaiety, which it was beyond the power of adversity to embitter or to corrupt.

Johann and Heinrich married sisters. Both had to pass through their times of misfortune, and Heinrich's first years of marriage were also years of great poverty. The pittance allowed him by the town of Arnstadt was irregularly paid, or not paid at all, in consequence of the immense drain upon the resources of Germany made by the continued-it seemed, the endless-war. Heinrich had to sue as a beggar to the Count of Schwarzburg. But no trouble made either of the brothers waver in their warm-hearted generosity to their kin or in their earnestness in their calling. They lived in the honourable esteem of the Thuringian towns wherein they dwelt, and left behind them a new generation to carry on and to exalt their fathers' art and name. Each left two sons; and, by a curiously repeated custom, each of these pairs of brothers married sisters. Renown first came to the younger branch, and the skill and learning with which the sons of Heinrich were informed remains a monument of their father's powers, as distinct and certain as if he were still known to us as a composer. Johann Christoph and Johann Michael are an astonishing phenomenon in this mid-time of national depression. Their writing has a freshness and vigour which seems to carry us back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the spirit of Germany was strong and creative, or forward to the age following, when the people had again recovered its strength. Of the greater achievements of the latter time the work of Johann Christoph and Michael appears as a prelude. In the pedigree of Sebastian Bach they fade to a comparative obscurity; viewed by themselves they are luminaries of signal brilliance. Johann Christoph was more than a complete master of the musical science of his day; he was also one of the first who ventured to deviate from the rigid rules of the early contrapuntists, to make them freer, more flexible, and more significant. He is a link between ancient and modern music, blending the old church modes with the modern tonality of major and minor. Besides this, he marks an important step in the growth of dramatic music. His Michaelmas piece, The Fight with the Dragon, follows in the track of those Germans who had invented the idea of setting to music scenes from Biblical history, Schuetz and Hammerschmidt; but it goes far beyond them in command of the orchestral body, and in the genius of dramatic utterance. The sacred drama is, in his hands, clearly on the road which leads to the perfected oratorio of Handel or the no less perfected Passion music of Sebastian Bach. But the permanent interest of Johann Christoph Bach lies, even more than in his historical significance, in the beauty of his melodies and the expressiveness3 with which he wrought them. It was Sebastian, his cousin in the next generation, who first knew how to appreciate his great predecessor. Contemporaries, however, were attracted rather by Johann Michael. But, excellent musician as he was, and gifted with a fine artistic sense, Michael failed specially in that power of expression which signalized his brother. The motets by which he is best known are deficient in symmetry. The ideas they contain are irregularly worked, and appeal to us by isolated beauties rather than by the unity of their spirit. The performance lags behind the conception. Of the instrumental works of the two brothers, works principally for the organ, and also for clavichord, there is not space to speak here. It is enough to have indicated in bare outline their general position. Their external history need only so far detain us as to notice that the elder was organist at Eisenach, the younger at Gehren near Arnstadt, and that Michael's daughter became the wife of her cousin Sebastian.