tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">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.

The musical faculty grew to ripeness more rapidly in the family of Heinrich Bach than in those of either of his brothers. Johann’s sons were of course musicians, but composition first appeared in a grandson, Johann Bernhard, a man of wide capacity. He was cembalist in the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach’s band, and of such distinction as an organist, that he was chosen to succeed to the post of his illustrious cousin, Johann Christoph, at the latter’s death. He holds an honourable rank as a composer, having written orchestral suites as well as the proper productions of his office, organ-chorales. The latter follow somewhat directly in the steps of the famous organist of Erfurt—afterwards of Nuernberg—Johann Pachelbel, whose influence is indeed paramount over all the Bachs of his time. The orchestral works, however, have overtures which are described as equal in power and energy to some of those to Handel’s operas and as only surpassed in genius and richness by Sebastian’s own. They have the peculiar interest of existing mostly in the autograph of the latter, who transcribed and esteemed them at the period of his greatest maturity when he was cantor at Leipzig.

Leaving the rest of the musician-posterity of Johann and Heinrich Bach—and hardly a place in Thuringia or even Saxony but claimed some of them whether as organists or cantors, or in the minor arts of town piper or fiddler—we return to the brother who stands between them in age, and who is the grandfather of Sebastian. Christoph Bach, who was born at Wechmar in 1613, is the most secular of the sons of Hans. He was simply and solely a player, first in the service—menial as well as musical—of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then at Prettin in Saxony, where he took to him a wife; and thirdly, when he was near thirty, in the Company of Musicians in the more