hath heretofore made sundry perplexing variations and imported divers strange harmonies, in such wise that the congregation was thereby confounded. In the future, continues the Minute, when he will introduce a tonus peregrinus, he is to sustain the same and not to fall incontinent upon another, or even, as he hath been wont, to play a tonus contrarius. A witness added that the organist Bach hath at the first played too tediously; howbeit, on notice received from the superintendent, he hath straightway fallen into the other extreme and made the music too short. Evidently he had brought things into a bad way, for the next charge is, that he refused to train the choir. Bach retorted by demanding a conductor. He was allowed time to consider whether he would comply with the order of the Board or leave them to appoint some one to fill his place. Under the circumstances it shows a surprisingly gentle temper in the consistory, possibly a just appreciation of their organist’s great, however capricious, excellence, that they waited near nine months before they repeated, with some severity, the demand for an explanation. Bach agreed to furnish one; but the document has unfortunately not been preserved. It is evident, however, from the indifference with which he treated the consistory, as well as from his unwillingness to fulfil the conditions of his post, that he had already decided to resign it on the first opportunity.

The opportunity was not long coming: before the end of the year the organist’s place at S. Blasius’ Church, Muehlhausen, fell vacant. A succession of distinguished musicians and the various eminence of the last holder of the post, Johann Georg Ahle—perhaps also the fame of the poet’s crown with which the Emperor had decorated him—made the office an exceptionally coveted one. Among the various candidates, however, it was adjudged apparently without debate to Bach, who was even requested to make his own terms as to the salary he should receive. He modestly stipulated the same sum as he had been allowed at Arnstadt—it was indeed considerably in excess of Ahle’s salary—together with the accustomed dues of corn, wood, and fish, to be delivered without charge at his door. He asked also for a cart to bring his goods to his new house.11 These trifling details are oddly characteristic of the man, and remind us of a letter he wrote long after to a relative, thanking him for a cask of wine, but quoting the expense of carriage, and begging that the costly present might not be repeated. Just at present he had a special reason for thrift. He left Arnstadt by the end of June, 1707; in the following October, the 17th, he was married at a village near Arnstadt, to his cousin Maria Barbara, daughter of the great Gehren organist, Johann Michael Bach. A single year after his appointment he accepted the more ambitious post of organist in the Ducal Chapel at Weimar.

His short stay at Muehlhausen had been pleasant and useful to him. He entered upon his work, which was purely that of organist, with ardour, and—in contrast with his lax performance of his duties at Arnstadt—even took a share in the training of the choir, although there was a cantor as well. The only drawback was that the pastor of his church was a strenuous pietist, one of those puritans who found, not a spiritual gain, but a worldly intrusion upon the sacredness of divine worship, in those church cantatas which it was Bach’s work to create anew. The organist held to a close friendship with his pastor’s hot antagonist at the Church of S. Mary, and seems to have gone into the neighbouring villages whenever he wished to produce music upon which he could not venture in his own church. This can hardly have been, however, the principal reason of his leaving Muehlhausen so quickly as he did. The charges of married life made his stipend barely a maintenance, even without a family. He had had enough of the subordination of a town organist. But most of all he must have been stimulated by the renown of the music at Weimar, with which he had become acquainted in an inferior capacity four years before, and the wide field it promised for the cultivation of his art in all its departments. On the 25th June, 1708, he respectfully submitted his resignation to the consistory. Their answer, requesting that his departure should not hinder his continuing to supervise the repair of the church organ with which they had entrusted him, is evidence of the good terms on which they separated.

For the next fifteen years Bach stands in a circle of greater honour, removed from the small troubles of a town official. His return to a burgher’s life in 1723—and at Leipzig he was never free from the harass of the wiseacres of his consistory—may surprise us, unless we conclude that the experience of his intervening years had taught him that if the delights of life came more liberally in the atmosphere of a court, a great town was after all the place for him who would live laborious days.

CHAPTER III.

Passing from Muehlhausen to Weimar was to Bach as the step from school to a university. The nine years of his life there produced works in which almost any other musician might glory as the perfect consummation of his powers; but when we range them beside the performance of Bach’s middle life, we see that all this time was still a period of preparation. Wonderful indeed is this strenuous preparation, carried on with increasing earnestness to his thirty-second year; this prelude to a life-long study—the index of the faithful artist—which was never relaxed until sight and strength forsook him. And no less wonderful is the growth of his genius—when we look back upon his earlier performances—revealed in rapid stages from the beginning of his sojourn at Weimar. But it was not only the years that had come upon him, but also the opportunity they brought with them, that make this change so marked an epoch in his life. Little as we know of the court of Weimar, there are some facts about its condition at this time which let us see that its intellectual atmosphere could not have been without its excitement and inspiration to Bach.

The Duke, Wilhelm Ernst, was a man of naturally grave and religious character. It is told of him that at eight years old he preached a sermon before his parents and their company; and in later life his chief pleasure and occupation lay in building churches, organizing religious schemes, and founding schools. In the troubles of an unhappy marriage and the approach of a childless age, his serious temper deepened into austerity. But, if always averse from gaiety or the least approach to the wonted dissipations of a court, he was a good friend to arts and letters; and the forty-five years of his rule began the tradition of culture which led up to the historical era in the annals of Weimar a century later. He founded the library, had a collection of coins, and—what is more to our purpose—took a strong and pious delight in hearing and fostering the music in the castle chapel.

The strict and sombre discipline which the Duke imposed upon his homely court—it went to bed, we are told, at eight in winter, and only an hour later in summer—was relieved by the brighter influence of his brother, Johann Ernst, the prince with whom Bach had taken service as a violinist in 1703. He died in 1707, but his son, also Johann Ernst, inherited his father’s taste for the chamber-music of France and Italy, and showed himself in his short life a composer of promise. The boy liked to be surrounded by