Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

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Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (born June 21, 1732 in Leipzig , † January 26, 1795 in Bückeburg ) was a German musician and composer from the Bach family and the third of Bach's four composing sons . It is often referred to as "the Bückeburger Bach" for identification.

Life

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach's life began like that of his brothers: He received training at the Leipzig Thomasschule and musical lessons from his father. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach , Johann Sebastian Bach's eldest son, considered (according to Nikolaus Forkel ) the half-brother to be the “strongest player” of the four brothers, who “played his father’s most accomplished piano compositions”. Friedrich began studying law at the University of Leipzig at the age of seventeen, but broke it off again soon after, before his father's death, and at the turn of the year 1749/50, when he was just eighteen, followed the call of "Hochgräflich Schaumburg-Lippischer Cammer-Musicus “To enter service at the court in Bückeburg. Wilhelm Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe , who had succeeded his father as regent of the small territory in 1748, was very impressed by the royal court music at the court of Frederick II in Potsdam and had firm plans to emulate this model in his residence.

At the Bückeburger Hof, the two Italians Giovanni Battista Serini were currently employed as director of the court orchestra and Angelo Colonna as court composer. It was through her that Bach got to know the style of Italian opera and cantata, as vocal music was performed in the "Concerts" that took place at least twice a week and were usually given late in the afternoon. In addition, the court orchestra had a singer, Lucia Elisabeth Münchhausen, daughter of the court musician Ludolf Andreas Münchhausen, who was introduced to Italian singing culture through the lessons of concertmaster Serini.

At the beginning of 1750, Bach received the post of court musician in Bückeburg, where he was able to acquire the style of the music played at court. Dated compositions from this time by his hand have not yet survived.

On January 8, 1755, Bach married the court singer Münchhausen, the two Italians left the court in 1756 at the beginning of the Seven Years' War , and Bach now took over her duties. In addition to leading the concerts, he was responsible for purchasing and composing new music. At the Count's instigation, he also contacted musicians from other aristocratic courts to request sheet music - Count Wilhelm had the ambition to follow the latest developments in musical taste in his music library. From October 1757 to April 1758, during the Seven Years' War, the Count and some members of the court, including Bach, retired to his seat in Nienstedten on the Elbe. During this time, Bach successfully applied as an organist at the main Protestant church in Altona . Count Wilhelm did not allow him to take up this position, but officially appointed him concertmaster on February 18, 1759.

In 1759, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst , the eldest son of the couple's eight children, was born, whose sponsorship the Count took over at Bach's request. Wilhelm was the last musician in the direct descendants of Johann Sebastian Bach. When Georg Philipp Telemann died in Hamburg in 1767 , Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach made his only documented attempt to swap his position in Bückeburg for a better one, and applied as music director in Hamburg; however, when the position was awarded, his older and better-known half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel was preferred to him. However, this did not lead to a clouding of the fraternal relationships, but rather increased contact and exchange of suggestions and compositions developed.

For Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, an intensive creative phase began. In addition to many chamber music works and piano music, he composed his first oratorios The Pilgrime on Golgotha (text: Justus Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae ) and The Death of Jesus in the second text version by Karl Wilhelm Ramler (1760), the first version of which was already Carl Heinrich Graun (1755) and around 1769 Telemann (1756) had successfully set to music. The first ten of his twenty symphonies also date from before 1770 ; ten more were created in a later phase between 1792 and 1794.

The appointment of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) as court preacher and consistorial councilor to Bückeburg in 1771 led to fruitful collaboration and friendship between the poet and the composer. The oratorios The Childhood of Jesus and The Resurrection of Lazarus (1773) as well as some cantatas and the dramatic works Brutus and Philoctetes (both 1774) come from their joint work , whereby the critical Herder evidently put his music-aesthetic views into practice in close collaboration with Bach saw implemented. This spiritually stimulating time for Bach ended in 1776 when Herder was appointed to Weimar.

When Count Wilhelm died one year after the Countess's death in 1776, who had represented the center of cultural life at court, Bach was evidently looking for new ideas for his work. He found this during his only major trip in early summer 1778, which took him together with his son - via a stopover in Hamburg to Carl Philipp Emmanuel - to Johann Christian Bach in London, where the young Wilhelm was to receive his further education. In London, Friedrich learned in the concerts of his brother a. a. Know works by Gluck and Mozart , which from then on greatly interested and influenced him.

Bach continued to dedicate himself to the court orchestra and made it so well respected that in 1782 Forkel awarded the Bückeburg court orchestra fourth place among the best orchestras in Germany. Piano music was also the focus of his compositions. Horstig, the author of his necrology , describes how he spent days “[a] uch if nobody heard him [...] on his English pianoforte, which he had brought with him from London [fantasized]” .

After the death of Count Philipp Ernst in 1787, Countess Juliane took over the government as guardian of the two-year-old hereditary prince. The music-loving regent gave Bach the necessary respect and recognition in his final years. Juliane received daily piano lessons and also took part in oratorio performances as a singer.

The last years of Bach's life once again showed him to be very hardworking and productive. In 1787/88 he published a selection of easy works in four volumes under the title Musical Ancillary Lessons . It contains numerous piano works and chamber music, but also piano reductions of secular cantatas. Spurred on by his colleague and later successor Franz Christoph Neubauer , he wrote ten symphonies and two piano concertos in less than three years, most of which are still awaiting editions and re-performances today.

On January 26th, 1795 Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach died "of a severe chest fever" in Bückeburg, where he was buried on January 31st in the Jetenburg cemetery . Bach's widow was also buried there in 1803. His son Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach carried on the tradition of composing in the family.

Historical evaluation and scientific appraisal of the work

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach worked for 45 years in Bückeburg, a rather small court despite all the artistry of the regents, which lay in the musical penumbra. His work, which did not provide sufficient nourishment for the emerging cult of genius of his time, as well as his modest life, which attracted as little attention outside of Schaumburg-Lippe as his music, may have contributed to his long standing as the most insignificant of the four composing Bach- Sons was judged. Typical of this is an early testimony from Carl Friedrich Cramer , in which he explains about the sons of JS Bach: “He had three of them: Christian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Friedemann Bach; (I do not include the fourth in Bückeburg; because it is not actually one of the ... Bachs). ” More recent research since Hansdieter Wohlfahrth and Ulrich Leisinger also see Friedrich Bach as a bridge builder between the fading baroque and the emerging classical period.

After the First World War , the members of the Princely Institute for Musicological Research in Bückeburg , which was founded in 1917 shortly before the end of the war, gathered at his grave in the Jetenburg cemetery in Bückeburg , under the leadership of the former Bückeburg court conductor Richard Sahla : among them was Georg Schünemann , who was was the first to deal intensively with the life and work of the son of Bach before the war. His study is the basis and starting point for any preoccupation with the composer, because Schünemann still had the Bückeburg court library available for this purpose, despite difficulties caused by the war in obtaining more distant source material. The holdings of the musicological institute in Bückeburg were forcibly brought to Berlin in 1934 and relocated to Silesia in the last years of the war. From there it came to the Soviet Union as looted art . Only a small part has meanwhile made it back to Berlin via Moscow, but not one of Bach's autographs . According to this, the catalog raisonné published by Hannsdieter Wohlfahrth, which was created in connection with an extensive study of Bach's instrumental music, had to state that many autographs that Schünemann had had as lost. After Wohlfahrth's publication, the Bückeburger's lost works were found. In connection with an exhibition in Bückeburg on the 200th anniversary of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach's death , the Leipzig Bach Archive then compiled a new catalog raisonné that provides a new overview of his currently known work and the new sources.

Works

He wrote oratorios and operas, a total of twenty symphonies (12 of which are lost), eight piano concertos, as well as chamber music and sacred songs.

The reception of his musical work has not yet reached the same level as that of his brothers. This impression may be related to the imperfect tradition and unclear sources of his compositions.

literature

  • Carl Friedrich Cramer: Human Life . Kiel October 26, 1793; quoted here from document no. 973 in: Bach documents , vol. 3, ed. by Hans-Joachim Schulze [Suppl. to NBA]. Kassel etc. u. Leipzig 1972
  • Forkel, musical almanac for Germany for the year 1782 . Leipzig 1781, p. 130
  • Horstig, [Nekrolog] "Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach" . in: Friedrich von Schlichtegroll, musician-necrologist . new ed. by Richard Schaal, Kassel a. Basel [no. J.], p. 10
  • Georg Schünemann: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach . In: Bach-Jahrbuch 11 (1914), pp. 46–167
  • Georg Schünemann: Friedrich Bach's correspondence with Gerstenberg and Breitkopf . In: Bach-Jahrbuch 13 (1916), pp. 20–35
  • Georg Schünemann: Thematic directory of the works of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach . In: Monuments of German Tonkunst I. Series, Vol. 56 , ed. by G. Schünemann, Leipzig 1917; New edition ed. by Hans Joachim Moser, Wiesbaden a. Graz 1956
  • Wilibald Gurlitt:  Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 483 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hannsdieter Wohlfahrth: New directory of the works of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach . In: Die Musikforschung 13 (1960), pp. 404-417
  • Hannsdieter Wohlfahrth: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach as an instrumental composer . Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1968; again ud T .: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. A composer in the run-up to classical music . Bern u. Munich 1971 (New Heidelberg Studies in Musicology; 4.) [Contains revised list of works.]
  • Beverly Jung Sing: Sacred vocal compositions between baroque and classical. Studies on the cantata poems by Johann Gottfried Herder in the settings of Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach . Baden-Baden 1992. (Collection of musicological treatises; p. 83.)
  • Thomas Gebhardt: Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach . In: Concerto (1995)
  • Peter Wollny:  Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 1 (Aagard - Baez). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1999, ISBN 3-7618-1111-X  ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
  • Ulrich Leisinger (Ed.): Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. Letters and documents. (Leipzig contributions to Bach research 9, edited by the Leipzig Bach Archive) Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, etc. 2011, ISSN  0947-8655 , ISBN 978-3-487-14337-8 .
  • Ulrich Leisinger (editor): Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. Thematic-systematic directory of musical works (BR-JCFB) . (Bach repertory. Catalogs of works on the Bach family of musicians, published by the Leipzig Bach Archive, Vol. IV) Carus-Verlag Stuttgart, 2013, ISBN 978-3-89948-183-9 . review
  • Thomas Buchholz (Ed.): Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. Allegretto con Variazioni. for piano. Urtext edition. with a detailed introduction to the work. Edition Gravis Verlag Berlin, ISMN 979-0-2057-1634-9 (search in the DNB portal) .

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ a b c d Ulrich Leisinger 2013, p. 10.
  2. ^ Christoph Wolff and Ulrich Leisinger:  Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
  3. ^ Review by Ingeborg Allihn on info-netz-musik, June 30, 2014; Retrieved September 17, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German musician and composer, son of Johann Sebastian Bach
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1732
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1795
Place of death Buckeburg