The Bach Family in Erfurt: A Musical Network Before Johann Sebastian

As late as 1793, more than forty years after Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig, the town musicians of Erfurt were still known as “die Bache”, the Bachs, although by then no one of that name remained among them. The word had become a job title. For well over a century the family had supplied Erfurt with its town pipers, its council musicians and several of its church organists, and the city’s parish registers are full of Bach baptisms, weddings and burials. Long before Johann Sebastian was born, the Bach name was a guarantee of musical competence in Thuringia, and Erfurt was where that reputation was made. The city is a day trip from Weimar on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, with a guided walk through the old town and its churches.

Music as a family trade

In seventeenth-century Germany, music was a trade much like baking or weaving, and it was usually learned at home. A boy was apprenticed to a father, uncle or older cousin, lived in his household, learned several instruments, copied music and played at weddings and civic events. When he qualified as a journeyman, he looked for work, and the best way to find it was through relatives who already held posts or knew when one would fall vacant. A widow or daughter might marry the next holder of her late husband’s or father’s post, keeping it in the family.

Most towns of any size employed a company of town musicians, the Stadtpfeifer or Ratsmusikanten, paid by the council. Their duties were demanding and very public. They played from the church tower at fixed hours, sounding chorales and signals; they provided music for Sunday services; they performed at weddings, funerals and banquets; and they played at the council’s annual inauguration. Their instruments included cornetts, trombones, dulcians, shawms and crumhorns, as well as strings. In return they had a salary, often a house, and a monopoly over paid music-making within the town, which they defended fiercely against outsiders.

The Bach family fitted this world perfectly. Its founding figure, Veit Bach, a baker who died in 1619, was remembered in the family as a man who played the cittern while his mill turned. By Johann Sebastian’s time more than seventy of his descendants had worked as musicians, most of them in Thuringia, and the family’s habit of passing posts between cousins made it something closer to a guild than a household.

Johannes Bach arrives, 1635

The family’s Erfurt story began during the Thirty Years’ War. Johannes Bach, born in 1604 in Wechmar, a village near Gotha, was the son of a baker and town piper and had trained as a musician in Suhl. After posts in Schweinfurt, he came to Erfurt in 1635, the year two of the city’s town musicians were killed in a brawl. He was appointed in their place and soon became director of the council musicians, and from 1636 he was also organist of the Predigerkirche, the great church of the Dominican friars. He lived on the Krämerbrücke, the bridge lined with houses and shops across the river Gera, in a house called Zum Schwarzen Ross, the Black Horse.

Johannes held his posts for almost forty years, until his death in 1673. Under him, the leadership of the town music passed into the Bach family and remained there for generations. He and his brother Christoph played at Erfurt’s celebrations of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the war, and were rewarded with privileges, among them exemption from watch duty and compulsory labour. He is also the first member of the family whose compositions survive. A few works by him are known, among them a funeral aria, “Weint nicht um meinen Tod” (“Weep not for my death”), the earliest surviving music by a Bach.

The Erfurt line

Johannes became the founder of what genealogists call the Erfurt line of the family, one of its four main branches. His three sons all became musicians in the city. Johann Christian, a violinist, succeeded him as director of the town music. Johann Aegidius, a viola player, became organist of the Kaufmannskirche and the Michaeliskirche and took over the direction of the council music in 1682. Johann Nicolaus, a fine viol player, joined the town musicians when his father died. In 1682 plague struck Erfurt, and Johann Christian and Johann Nicolaus both died of it, leaving Johann Aegidius to hold the family’s position together.

He did so for more than thirty years, and the next generation carried it on. Johann Aegidius’s son, Johann Christoph, became organist in Erfurt and, from 1716, director of the town musicians himself. When he fell ill late in life, his own son Johann Friedrich deputised for him. That is more than a century of a single family leading the music of a major city, which is why “Bache” became the ordinary local word for a town musician.

Johann Sebastian’s parents in Erfurt

Johann Sebastian’s own branch of the family was closely tied to the city. His grandfather Christoph Bach, the younger brother of Johannes, served as a town piper in Erfurt from 1642 to 1654, and his father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was born there in 1645, a twin to another Johann Christoph. The family then moved to Arnstadt, where Christoph worked as a town musician until his death.

Ambrosius came back to Erfurt as a young man to play with his cousins in the town music. On 8 April 1668 he married Maria Elisabeth Lämmerhirt, the daughter of an Erfurt furrier and town councillor, in the Kaufmannskirche, the merchants’ church on the Anger. The couple lived at Junkersand, in houses later known as the Bach houses, and their first children were baptised in Erfurt. In 1671 Ambrosius was appointed director of the town musicians in Eisenach, where Johann Sebastian, their youngest child, was born in 1685. The story of those Eisenach years is told in our article on the Bach House in Eisenach.

The pull of Erfurt remained strong. In 1684 Ambrosius asked to return there as a town musician, but the Duke of Eisenach refused to release him. Had the duke said yes, Johann Sebastian would probably have been born in Erfurt.

The Kaufmannskirche: the family’s parish church

If one building in Erfurt can be called the Bach family church, it is the Kaufmannskirche, the Church of the Merchants, on the long square called the Anger. Over the years the family’s lives passed through it again and again: its registers record the baptisms of 61 Bach children and the marriages of twelve Bach couples, along with godparents, funerals and burials in the old cemetery. After Ambrosius and his family moved away, relatives continued to meet in Erfurt for family gatherings, at which, by later family tradition, they sang chorales and improvised comic songs together.

Pachelbel and the Bach network

Erfurt also drew musicians from outside the family, and the Bachs made the most of them. Johann Pachelbel, now remembered for a single canon but in his day one of the leading organists in Germany, was organist of the Predigerkirche from 1678 to 1690, the post Johannes Bach had once held. He lived in one of the Junkersand houses where Ambrosius’s family had lived, became a friend of the Bachs and was godfather to one of Ambrosius’s daughters.

Johann Sebastian’s eldest brother, Johann Christoph, studied with Pachelbel in Erfurt and briefly served as organist of the city’s Thomaskirche before taking a post in Ohrdruf. When their parents died in 1694 and 1695, the ten-year-old Johann Sebastian went to live with him, and it was from this brother that he received his first keyboard training. In that sense, the Erfurt network shaped Johann Sebastian’s earliest musical education, even though he never lived in the city.

The network worked in both directions. A cousin, Johann Bernhard Bach, born in Erfurt in 1676, began his career as organist there before moving to Magdeburg and then to Eisenach. Another relative, Johann Ernst Bach, would succeed Johann Sebastian in his first post as organist at Arnstadt, the subject of our article on the young Bach in Arnstadt. When Johann Sebastian later began compiling a genealogy of the family, he was recording a web of relationships that had sustained Bach careers for a century.

Johann Sebastian’s own visit

Johann Sebastian came to Erfurt at least once in a professional capacity. In 1716, by then court organist at Weimar, he was invited to examine the new organ in the Augustinerkirche, the church of the Augustinian friary where Martin Luther had lived as a monk two centuries earlier. Organ inspections were a speciality of his. He would test every stop, check the wind supply and the action, and play the instrument hard to expose any weakness, and his reports could be blunt. In Erfurt he was on familiar ground, among the churches where his relatives had played for eighty years.

Which Erfurt sites are connected with the Bach family?

The main ones are the Kaufmannskirche on the Anger, where Johann Sebastian’s parents married; the Predigerkirche, where Johannes Bach and later Pachelbel were organists; the Michaeliskirche, where Johann Aegidius played and which has a Compenius organ dating from 1652; the Augustinerkirche, whose organ Johann Sebastian examined; and the Krämerbrücke, where Johannes Bach lived. The Junkersand houses where Ambrosius and Pachelbel lived are a short walk from the bridge. Most of these lie within a compact old town that survived the Second World War largely intact.

What does the Erfurt day on the tour include?

The Erfurt visit is a day trip from the group’s base in Weimar, with a guided walking tour of the old town that takes in the Predigerkirche, the Krämerbrücke, the Cathedral and the Church of St Severus. The Kaufmannskirche and the Augustinerkirche lie within the same old town, a short walk from the route. If seeing them matters to you, a Tour Specialist can tell you how the day is paced.

How demanding is the Erfurt walking tour?

It is a moderate day on foot. The old town is compact and largely level, but the streets are often cobbled, and the Cathedral and the Church of St Severus are reached by a broad flight of 70 steps from the Domplatz. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity on most days.

Erfurt on the Bach route

Erfurt is where the tour shows that Johann Sebastian did not appear from nowhere. His father, grandfather, great-uncle and dozens of cousins had already made the family name stand for skilled, reliable musicianship, and the posts, teachers and connections that opened his early career came through that network. Our overview of Bach’s Germany follows the route from these Thuringian towns to the courts and cities of his later life.

Standing on the Krämerbrücke, where Johannes Bach once came home after sounding the hours from a church tower, it is easy to picture a city whose music was simply something the Bachs did. Johann Sebastian would carry that inheritance further than any of them, but he learned it first from a family that had already mastered the trade.