Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

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Portrait miniature by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (born November 22, 1710 in Weimar , † July 1, 1784 in Berlin ) was a German composer from the Bach family , who is sometimes referred to as Hallescher Bach .

Life

Memorial plaque on Markt 18 in Weimar
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (authenticity of the portrait disputed)
Memorial plaque on the house, Oberwallstrasse 9, in Berlin-Mitte

Wilhelm Friedemann was the eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach . From his birthplace in Weimar, he came to Köthen with his family in 1717 , where he attended Latin school. From June 1723 he attended the Thomasschule in Leipzig , took violin lessons from Johann Gottlieb Graun in Merseburg in 1727 , was enrolled as a law student at the University of Leipzig in 1729 and studied law, philosophy and mathematics. In 1733 he became organist at the Sophienkirche in Dresden. Here Johann Gottlieb Goldberg was one of his pupils, and he cultivated the acquaintance of Dresden court musicians such as Johann Adolph Hasse , Johann Georg Pisendel and Silvius Leopold Weiss . In April 1746 he became music director and organist at the Marienkirche in Halle (Saale) . Therefore it is also known as the Hallesche Bach . His former apartment is now a museum. In Halle he taught among others Friedrich Wilhelm Rust . He also directed the Stadtsingechor zu Halle and was in contact with the Halle book printer Johann Justinus Gebauer , who owned a collection of his piano works, and with Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg , whose treatise on fugue 13 contains his canons. He had three children with his wife Dorothea Elisabeth Georgi (1721–1791), Wilhelm Adolf (1752–1752), Gotthilf Wilhelm (1754–1756) and Friederica Sophia (or Friederike Sophie) (1757 – after 1797). In 1763 he was appointed Kapellmeister of Hessen-Darmstadt. He did not take up the position in Hessen-Darmstadt as the successor to Christoph Graupner , but he was allowed to use the title.

In 1764 he gave up his office in Halle. Since then he has lived without a permanent job and tried to earn a living through concerts, lessons and compositions. In 1770 he moved to Braunschweig and in the spring of 1774 to Berlin. In the decade between 1764 and 1774 he made numerous trips, including to Göttingen (zu Forkel ), which, however, did not result in a permanent position, as did his applications as an organist at St. Katharinen (Braunschweig) and the Wolfenbüttel city ​​church . In Berlin he gave several successful organ concerts, which earned him the support of Princess Anna Amalia , the sister of Frederick II . In 1778 or 1779 she withdrew her favor after he had been accused (unexplained) of having intrigued against Anna Amalia's composition teacher, the Prussian conductor Johann Philipp Kirnberger .

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach died poorly in Berlin in 1784, but at the time of his death he seems to have been well known, as the obituary in Carl Friedrich Cramer's Magazin der Musik shows:

"In him Germany lost its first organ player and the musical world in general lost a man whose loss is irreplaceable."

He was buried in the Luisenstadt churchyard next to the Luisenstadt church . The churchyard was leveled after the Second World War. Today a stele in the Luisenstadt church park with a portrait of Bach commemorates the artist and the lost tomb.

Artistic development

Father's first music lessons are documented in the piano booklet for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach , which began on January 22, 1720 and contains entries up to around 1725/26. Between 1727 and 1733 he seems to have occupied himself particularly with the organ; this is documented, among other things, by his copy of his father's organ trio sonatas .

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was one of the first to try to live as a freelance musician, not from a free decision, but because his (few) attempts to find a new job failed. The social prerequisites for free artistry in Germany's new bourgeois society were only just beginning to emerge. So Bach got more and more into economic hardship. He found it difficult and slow to free himself from the powerful musical legacy of his father. To this day it is not clear whether he knowingly carried out forgeries when selling compositions from the estate of JS Bach.

His only student in Berlin was Sara Itzig , later married Levy (1761-1854), a great-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . In trying to meet the musically conservative taste of the Prussian princess who initially protested him, Bach missed those of his other contemporaries. This, together with a certain stubbornness of the aging, impoverished man, earned him the opposition of musicians like Johann Friedrich Reichardt or Carl Friedrich Zelter . The latter wrote to Goethe in retrospect on April 6, 1829 : “He was considered stubborn if he did not want to play to everyone; it wasn't against us young people and played for hours. As a composer he had the tic douloureux of being original, of moving away from his father and brothers, and got into the prickly, petty, sterile ... "

Bach's inner tensions and contradictions that determined his life can also be found in his works. In his instrumental music, the new, sensitive style aroused will of genius time (announced Sturm und Drang ), who in the twelve polonaises for the early Romantic reminiscent character piece and the piano sonatas near the Viennese classicism pushed forward.

As an organist and piano player, Bach was famous for his art of improvisation . “Without a doubt the greatest organist in the world! He is a son of the world-famous Sebastian Bach and has reached his father in organ playing, where not surpassed, ”enthused Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart in his 1806 posthumously published“ Ideas for an Aesthetics of Music ”. And the sentence passed down from his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel through Johann Nikolaus Forkel : "He was able to replace our father sooner than we all put together."

Soon after his death, a wreath of romantic legends was laid around the life of the ambivalent original genius in the spirit of his time. He is said to have "his raw mind, his rigid artistic pride, his immense absent-mindedness and his sullen, quarrelsome nature, which in the drink to which he was devoted violated all rights of civil society and order". This image is also reflected in Albert Emil Brachvogel's novel Friedemann Bach from 1858 as well as in his film adaptation of the same name from 1941 and in Paul Graener 's opera of the same name based on the novel from 1931.

Wilhelm Friedemann and his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel were the two most important sources for Johann Nikolaus Forkel's biography of their father Johann Sebastian.

filming

The film adaptation of the life of Friedemann Bach with the title Friedemann Bach from 1941, directed by Traugott Müller with Gustaf Gründgens in the title role, is essentially based on the historically inaccurate novel depiction of the Brachvogel.

plant

Many of his works have long been considered lost. Since the 1990s there have been an increasing number of recordings. In 1999, Harvard professor Christoph Wolff contributed to an increase in the number of well-known Bach scores with his discovery of extensive, previously lost holdings in the archive of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin in Kiev . In the anniversary year 2010, the Leipzig Bach Archive published an eleven-volume complete documentation with the support of the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos , California . In the same year, a CD edition of the composer's complete works began using the rediscovered material from the archive.

museum

In 2012, a museum called Wilhelm-Friedemann-Bach-Haus opened in the city of Halle .

Works (selection)

  • Easter cantata "Tremors and falls"
  • Ascension cantata "God goes up with shouts"
  • Pentecost music ("Let's lay off")
  • an advent music
  • several piano concerts
  • four organ fugues
  • eight fugettes
  • six piano sonatas
  • two sonatas for two concertos pianos
  • twelve polonaises for piano
  • ten fantasies for piano
  • Sinfonia in F major (dissonant)
  • Sinfonia in F major for the Pentecost cantata "Ertönet, you blessed peoples"
  • Sinfonia in D major for the Pentecost cantata "This is the day"
  • Sinfonia in D minor for 2 flutes, strings and basso continuo
  • Sinfonia in D major to the Ascension Cantata "Where is the journey of life going?"
  • Sinfonia in G major for the Christmas cantata "O Wunder"

Discography

  • Claviermusik I, Léon Berben , harpsichord, Carus 83 346, 2010
  • Cantatas I and II, a. a. Rastatter Hofkapelle, conductor: Jürgen Ochs, Carus Records 83362 and 83352, 2010

literature

Fiction

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Friedemann Bach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ Magazine of Music. Volume 2 (1784), p. 186 ( digitized version in the Google book search).
  2. ^ Peter Wollny:  Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann. 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).
  3. ^ Gustav Schilling: Encyclopedia of the entire musical sciences or universal lexicon of music art . Volume 1. Köhler, Stuttgart 1835, pp. 379-380, here p. 379 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  4. ^ Albert Emil Brachvogel: Friedemann Bach. A novel. Berlin 1858 ( urn : nbn: de: bvb: 12-bsb10106141-6 ).
  5. ↑ FAZ of November 6, 2010, p. 40: Greetings from papa .
personal data
SURNAME Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1710
PLACE OF BIRTH Weimar
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1784
Place of death Berlin