Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach – Die Kindheit Jesu / Die Auferweckung Lazarus

(b. Leipzig, 21 June 1732 – d. Bückeburg, 26 January 1795)

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795), known as ‘the Bückeburg Bach’, indicating the lifelong post at court there which he took up just upon his father’s death, was a son of Johann Sebastian Bach’s second marriage, to Anna Magdalena Bach. Though Bach did not play a central role in the immediate preservation and dissemination of his father’s music, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, reports that, according to his brother Wilhelm Friedmann Bach, ‘he was, however, the ablest performer of all the brothers and the one who played his father’s clavier compositions in the most finished manner.’ Taught music by his father, he may have studied law briefly in Leipzig before his appointment to Bückeburg (on the recommendation of his new patron Count Wilhelm of Schaumburg-Lippe) as harpsichordist. At the time the court was dominated by Italian musicians, reflecting the habitual dependence of secular German music on the Italian style, but the Konzertmeister Angelo Colonna and the court composer Giovanni Battista Serini (1715?-1765?) inexplicably left Bückeburg at the outset of the Seven Years War. Bach (who had married the court organist’s daughter in 1755) witnessed at first hand the upheavals of war that the Bückeburg court underwent and, during its temporary secession to Pinneberg between 1757 and 1758, applied for an organistship in a German church in the Danish-ruled Altona, before his appointment in 1759 as Konzertmeister of the Bückeburg Hofkapelle, a post that brought an increase in salary. Court life was normal once more from 1765 (though Bach again applied to leave, in 1767, this time in order to succeed Telemann in Hamburg, a post gained instead by his famous half-brother Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach). Giving twice-weekly concerts, the Hofkapelle’s ensemble comprised about 15 musicians, sometimes assisted by outside performers including those from military bands. Bach composed or sourced the works for these concerts and directed their rehearsals, according to the taste of his patron Count Wilhelm (who relished secular Italian vocal music and played the keyboard and perhaps the flute).

In the 1760s Bach wrote orchestral and chamber instrumental music, and vocal music to Italian texts (particularly Metastasio), together with the substantial cantata Cassandra. From 1765 also there was the opportunity of hearing Protestant sacred music, following Count Wilhelm’s marriage to his new Countess Marie Barbara Eleonore zur Lippe-Biesterfeld (in the lineage of George I of England – the Hanoverian dynasty), who encouraged this musical practice. It was from this impetus that the oratorios Die Kindheit Jesu (billed on its title page as ‘a biblical painting’) and Die Auferweckung Lazarus were composed. They were products of Bach’s several collaborations with none other than Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), one of the most learned and prolific writers of the German Enlightenment and early Romanticism, who was appointed to Bückeburg as court preacher and pastoral superintendent from 1771 until he left for Weimar in 1776. Bach’s patrons died in quick succession around the time of Herder’s departure, and Count Philipp Ernst zu Schaumburg-Lippe-Allverdissen became his new master. The Bückeburg court became more open to visitors, holding open concerts that made the Kapelle (according to Forkel) one of the high points of German culture. This was another cultural change initiated by an influential female patron, this time Count Philipp’s new (second) wife Princess Juliane zu Hessen-Philippsthal, who was steeped in the fine arts. Sometime between March and November 1778, Bach, having obtained leave, visited his brother Johann Christian (‘the English Bach’) in London, taking with him his son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst, whom he left with Johann Christian in London for further musical training and who survived as a composer into the nineteenth century. Some think he may also have visited England again years later. Bach’s string quartets and keyboard concertos that date from this brief visit show his ready assimilation of the cosmopolitan styles that characterized London, the European capital of music in the latter eighteenth century, and he returned to Bückeburg with an English pianoforte in tow. With an increase in prominent keyboard students from the late 1770s, it is not surprising that some of Bach’s keyboard works have clear didactic value, for example, Sechs leichte Clavier-Sonaten (1784), dedicated to his pupil Princess Juliane. …

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