Bach in Dresden: Saxon Court Culture, Petition and Musical Prestige

On 27 July 1733, Johann Sebastian Bach handed a set of hand-copied parts for a Kyrie and Gloria to the new Elector of Saxony in Dresden, together with a petition. In it he asked for a court title and complained that in Leipzig he had “innocently suffered one injury or another”. The music became the opening of the Mass in B minor. The petition reveals something less often seen in Bach: a man looking beyond his city post for protection and prestige, at one of the most glamorous courts in Europe. Dresden is the second stop on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, with two nights in the Saxon capital and visits to the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper and the Green Vault.

Leipzig’s rich neighbour

Dresden and Leipzig lay in the same state, the Electorate of Saxony, but they were very different places. Leipzig was a commercial city of fairs, publishers and a university, governed by its council. Dresden was the seat of the elector, whose court spent lavishly on art, architecture and music. Augustus the Strong, who had converted to Catholicism to become King of Poland, made the city a showcase, and his son, Augustus III, continued in the same spirit. The treasures of the Green Vault, which the tour visits, give a sense of that extravagance.

Music was part of the display. The court maintained one of the finest orchestras in Europe, a Catholic court chapel and an Italian opera. In September 1731 Bach was in the audience for the premiere of Cleofide by Johann Adolf Hasse, the court’s new opera composer, and the next afternoon he gave an admired organ recital at the Sophienkirche. For a Lutheran cantor working with schoolboys and a handful of town musicians, the contrast was obvious. Our overview of Dresden, Germany covers the wider history of the city.

Hasse and the sound of the court

The composer at the centre of Dresden’s musical life in Bach’s later years was Johann Adolf Hasse. Born near Hamburg, he began his rise at the Hamburg opera on the Gänsemarkt and went on to become one of the most celebrated opera composers in Europe, admired in Naples and Venice as well as Dresden. Cleofide, the opera Bach heard in 1731, marked Hasse’s arrival as the Saxon court’s composer, and his wife, the soprano Faustina Bordoni, was one of the great singers of the age.

For Bach, Hasse’s world represented everything Leipzig was not: Italian-trained singers, a large professional orchestra, lavish staging and a ruler who paid for it all. The relationship seems to have been cordial, and it helps explain why Bach’s Dresden Missa is written in so up-to-date a manner, with operatic solo writing alongside its massive choruses. It was music meant to be heard by people who knew the best that money could buy.

Bach’s visits to Dresden

Bach’s links with the city began early. In September 1717, while still at Weimar, he went to Dresden for a keyboard contest with the celebrated French player Louis Marchand, to be held at the Flemming palace, the residence of a leading Saxon minister. Marchand left town before it could take place, and the story of the Frenchman who fled rather than face the German organist was told and retold for the rest of the century. In September 1725 he played the new Silbermann organ in the Sophienkirche, and he returned in 1731 for the opera premiere and recital.

The connection became personal in 1733, when his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, won the post of organist at the Sophienkirche by audition and took it up on 1 August at a salary of 165 thalers a year. He held it until 1746, when he moved to Halle. With a son working in the city, Bach had every reason to keep visiting, and he gave further organ performances in Dresden in 1738 and 1741.

The 1733 petition

Augustus the Strong died on 1 February 1733, and five months of mourning followed, during which public music-making was suspended. Bach used the time to write a Missa, in the Lutheran sense of the word: a Kyrie and Gloria, the opening sections of the Latin Mass. Some scholars suggest the solemn Kyrie served as mourning music and the brilliant Gloria as a celebration of the new elector’s accession. A Missa suited both Dresden’s Catholic court and Lutheran use, since Leipzig’s churches also sang the Kyrie and Gloria in Latin on feast days.

On 27 July 1733 Bach presented the parts to Augustus III, with a petition asking for the title of court composer. Christoph Wolff has argued that the work was performed in the Sophienkirche the day before, where Wilhelm Friedemann was about to become organist, though other scholars doubt it. The parts Bach delivered are now in the Saxon State Library in Dresden.

The petition’s complaint about “injuries” in Leipzig was not idle. Bach’s relations with the city council were strained, and in 1730 he had sent it a frank memorandum about the poor state of its church music. His frustrations with the Leipzig office are explored in our article on the Thomaskirche and the office of the Thomaskantor.

A title at last, and a recital in the Frauenkirche

The petition did not succeed at once. Bach waited three years, and only in November 1736 was he granted the title of Electoral Saxon and Royal Polish Court Composer. It was an honorary title rather than a post in Dresden, but it gave him standing in his disputes with the Leipzig authorities, which were then at their height in a bitter quarrel with the rector of the Thomasschule.

A few weeks later, on 1 December 1736, Bach gave a recital on the new Silbermann organ in Dresden’s Frauenkirche, the great domed Lutheran church then rising in the city centre. What he played is not recorded. Organists who play in the church today still climb the original stone staircase that Bach used, and the Frauenkirche marks the anniversary with a reconstructed recital each December.

From Missa to Mass in B minor

Bach did not forget his Dresden Missa. In the mid-1740s he reused the Gloria in a Christmas cantata, and in the last years of his life, probably in 1748 and 1749, he expanded it into a complete setting of the Latin Mass, adding the Credo and the remaining sections, many of them adapted from earlier works. The result, now known as the Mass in B minor, is one of the summits of his output, though it was never performed complete in his lifetime.

The Dresden connection runs through it. The Kyrie and Gloria were shaped by a court whose taste for Italian opera and grand ceremonial music shows in their solo arias and festive choruses. Bach was writing, in part, to show that a Lutheran cantor in Leipzig could match the best the elector’s musicians could offer.

Courting royal patrons

The Dresden petition fits a pattern in Bach’s career. In 1721 he had sent a fair copy of six concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg, and in 1747 he would travel to Potsdam to improvise for Frederick the Great, afterwards sending him a printed collection on the king’s own theme, the story told in our article on the Musical Offering and Bach’s Potsdam encounter. Each time, a carefully prepared score served as an introduction to a powerful ruler. Dresden is the one case where the approach clearly worked.

Can you see where Bach played in Dresden?

Partly. The Frauenkirche, where Bach gave his 1736 recital, was destroyed in the bombing of February 1945, and its ruins stood as a memorial for decades. It was rebuilt after German reunification and reopened in 2005. The rebuilt church has a new organ, but the stone staircase Bach climbed survives. The Sophienkirche, where Bach played in 1725 and 1731 and where Wilhelm Friedemann was organist, was gutted in 1945 and its remains demolished in 1962 and 1963. A memorial now stands on its site. The tour’s walking tour of Dresden includes a visit to the Frauenkirche.

Can you hear the Mass in B minor on the tour?

Possibly. By tradition, Leipzig’s Bachfest has closed with the Mass in B minor in the Thomaskirche, though the tour’s three nights in Leipzig fall in the festival’s opening days rather than at its close. The tour’s six concert tickets are chosen from each year’s programme, so the works are confirmed once the programme is announced.

How much walking is involved in Dresden?

A moderate amount. The Dresden stay combines a walking tour of the old town, including the Frauenkirche, with guided visits to the Green Vault and the Semperoper, mostly on level paved streets but with some stairs inside the historic buildings. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity on most days.

Dresden on the Bach route

Dresden is where the tour shows Bach measuring himself against a royal court. Our overview of Bach’s Germany places this court connection alongside the civic world of Leipzig and the smaller courts of Weimar and Köthen.

Standing beneath the dome of the rebuilt Frauenkirche, it is worth remembering the cantor from Leipzig who came here at fifty-one, newly made a court composer after three years of waiting, and sat down at the organ to show the elector’s city what he could do.