A Composer for All Seasons (But Especially for Christmas)

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Passed over for the job of court conductor at Weimar, Bach landed a similar position with Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen; the defection so angered Duke Wilhelm that Bach was clapped in the Weimar jail for a month. Once he arrived at Cothen, Bach devoted five placid, productive years to superb keyboard and chamber pieces, including the French Suites for harpsichord, the unaccompanied music for cello and violin, and the six Brandenburg Concertos. This period is usually labeled Bach's secular phase, though he was not fussy about the distinction between sacred and secular. Bach often borrowed from his secular music for sacred occasions, just as Martin Luther had used love songs and barrack ballads for some of his chorales. He even turned out such mundane pieces as a song on the joys of pipe smoking or a cantata about the glories of coffee. But the attitude behind all of his music was, as he noted in his manuscripts, "Deo soli gloria" (to God alone the glory).

His fortunes declined at Cothen after Prince Leopold married an unmusical wife. In a monumental miscalculation, Bach accepted the post of choirmaster at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church. The salary and social status were lower, the living conditions drearier, and the duties more onerous. Besides being responsible for the music in two Leipzig churches, Bach had minor chores at two others, even had to teach catechism and act as proctor to choirboys. His family obligations were increasing too. After the death of Barbara, he had married a professional singer named Anna Magdalena Wilcken in 1721; she became stepmother to the four surviving children, and was to bear him another 13 herself. Beyond all this, he found himself entangled in drawn-out quarrels with the church rector and the municipal council.

Teacher and Technician

Somehow, over the next 15 years or so, he managed to pour out Masses, passions, oratorios and a large share of the 350 cantatas he is believed to have written (of which 224 survive). Yet Bach's listeners remained unimpressed. At the first performance of his St. Matthew Passion, one puritanical woman in the congregation cried out in dismay: "Heaven help us! It might be an opera!"

In his later years, Bach gradually turned away from church composition and developed an even more austere and adventurous secular idiom, seemingly for his own satisfaction. He had always been a teacher, first to his children and then to paying pupils. He was one of the first keyboard instructors to introduce the use of the thumb and to advocate playing with curved rather than straight fingers. He told his composition students that contrapuntal lines should be like people in a conversation—each speaking grammatically, completing his sentences and remaining silent when he had nothing to add. Now, in the compositions of his 50s and 60s, Bach became more than ever a teacher. He produced collection after collection summing up the accumulated skill of a lifetime: the Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, the Catechism Preludes for organ, the unfinished The Art of Fugue.