Learning the Craft of a Church Musician

Home , Gotha (district), Johann Christoph Bach, Johann Pachelbel, Ohrdruf

chapter 1 Learning the Craft of a Church Musician

1 Bach’s Schooling

At the age of eight, in 1693, Bach was enrolled in the second year of the Eisenach Latin School.1 Following the death of their father Johann Ambrosius Bach (1645–1695), two years later, his older brother Johann Jakob and he joined the household of their oldest surviving brother Johann Christoph Bach (1671–1721), then the organist, later also a school master, at Ohrdruf.2 The local Lutheran Latin School that Bach attended next, the Ohrdruf Lyceum Illustre, provided as rigorous a Lutheran academic environment as Eisenach.3 By July 1695, the two Bach brothers had joined their new school: there, Sebastian completed the fourth [Tertia], fifth [Secunda] and, aged 14, part of the final year [Prima] of secondary school, ‘a full four years below the average of that class’.4 It was the newly-appointed cantor at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, Elias Herda, himself a recent alumnus of St Michael’s School in Lüneburg, who suggested that Sebastian complete his studies at his own alma mater.5

1 BD 2, no. 2, NBR no. 6; Helmbold (1930), p. 54. 2 BD 2, no. 2, NBR no. 6c; Helmbold (1930), p. 55: Johann Jakob Bach entered the school the same year as his younger brother Johann Sebastian and joined the same class as his brother, though Sebastian was three years younger. Their older brother Johann Christoph Bach had been a student at the Latin School from 1681–1685 and left after the fourth year of secondary school to be educated at Erfurt by Johann Pachelbel the following year. He took up his appointment as organist of St Michael’s Ohrdruf in 1690. For Johann Christoph Bach, see: Hans-Joachim Schulze, ‘Johann Christoph Bach (1671–1721), “Organist und Schul Collega in Ohrdruf”: Johann Sebastian Bachs erster Lehrer’, Bach-Jahrbuch 71 (1985), pp. 55–81, including reflections on Christoph’s tutelage under Pachelbel, p. 70. 3 For Bach’s enrolment at the Lyceum, see: BD 2, no. 4, NBR no. 8a; Alfred Oertel, ed., Erstveröf- fentlichung der Matrikel des Lyceums illustre Ordruviense: Urkunden aus Johann Sebastian Bachs Ohrdrufer Schulzeit, 1695–1700. Im Auftrag des Bachausschusses der Stadt Ohrdruf, Bei- trag der Stadt Ohrdruf zum Bachjahr 1950 (Erfurt: Ohlenroth, 1950). 4 BD 2, no. 4, NBR no. 8; Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician (Oxford: University Press, 2001), p. 57, suggests that ‘even though he had completed half the first year of the prima at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, whose academic year began in the fall. Bach most likely started over again in the prima at St Michael’s [Lüneburg in 1700], where the academic year began at Easter’. 5 For Elias Herda (1674–1728), see: BD 1, no., 23n.

In 1700 Bach joined the final year at St Michael’s School Lüneburg. While the Principality of Lüneburg followed a slightly different Lutheran curricu- lum than that of Saxe-Gotha, many of the elements of Bach’s education at St Michael’s remained the same as at Eisenach and Ohrdruf.6 In the schools Bach attended, Lutheran doctrine was taught through a typical example of orthodox seventeenth-century doctrinal teaching: by ‘reciting the questions’ from Leonhard Hutter’s Compendium Locorum Theologicorum (1610).7 Hutter’s Latin Compendium used questions and answers to communicate the princi- pal tenets of Lutheran doctrine, enabling the advancement of both ‘language acquisition and theology’.8 It provided a structured approach to a specifically Lutheran understanding of Scripture, doctrine, church and world order which, the 1695 Ordinances of St Michael’s School emphasise, centred in particular on key Lutheran such as ‘election, good works, penance, the ministry and the church’.9 In an educational system that laid such great store on the study of Scripture by school students, it does not surprise that Hutter’s first question and answer also centred on the nature of Scripture:

Quid est Scriptura sacra? What is Holy Scripture? —Est verbum Dei. —It is the Word of God.10

The Ordinances of St Michael’s School further show that in addition to ‘reciting the questions’ of Hutter’s Compendium, in the final three years of secondary

6 For Bach’s attendance at St Michael’s and his membership of the Mattins-Choir (Metten- chor), see: NBR, no. 11. 7 Stadtarchiv Lüneburg, Michaelisarchiv F99, No. 5, no pagination: ‘Compendium Hutteri recitantur quaestiones’. For Hutter’s Compendium Locorum Theologicorum, see: Wolfgang Trillhaas, ed. Compendium Locorum Theologicorum: Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Trill- haas (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1961); see also: Reinhard Kirste, ‘Theologische und spirituelle Ermöglichungsansätze für Bachs Werk unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verständ- nisses von Wort und Geist bei Leonhard Hutter und Johann Arnd’ in: Martin Petztoldt, ed. et al., Bach als Ausleger der Bibel: Theologische und musikwissenschaftliche Studien zum Werk Johann Sebastian Bachs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1985), pp. 77–95, especially pp. 79–82. 8 Martin Petzoldt, ‘“Ut probus & doctus reddar”: Zum Anteil der Theologie bei der Schu- lausbildung Johann Sebastian Bachs in Eisenach, Ohrdruf und Lüneburg’, Bach-Jahrbuch 71 (1985), pp. 7–42, p. 37. 9 Stadtarchiv Lüneburg, Michaelisarchiv F99, No. 5, unpaginated entry: ‘De Electione, Bonis Operibus, Poenitentia, Ministerio et Ecclesia’. 10 Trillhaas (1961), p. 1.