Bach Museum Leipzig: Objects, Archives and a Composer’s Afterlife

For years a heavy iron chest with eleven bolts served as a donation box in the cathedral museum at Meissen, until in 2009 it was recognised as property of the Bach household, its painted monogram the same “JSB” that Johann Sebastian used to seal his letters. It now stands in the Bach Museum Leipzig, a few steps from the church where he worked for twenty-seven years. The museum is full of objects with stories like this: a few things that survived, a great deal that didn’t, and the patient research that connects the two. On our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, a guided visit here opens the second day in Leipzig, during the city’s Bachfest.

A merchant’s house across from the Thomaskirche

The museum occupies the Bosehaus, one of the oldest buildings on the square outside the Thomaskirche. In 1710 it was bought by Georg Heinrich Bose, a gold and silver manufacturer, who turned it into a Baroque merchant’s residence, adding side wings and a rear building. The Bose family were wealthy and close friends of the Bachs, and Christiana Sybilla Bose was a close friend of Anna Magdalena Bach. The Bachs lived just across the square in the old Thomasschule, where Bach taught and where the family had its apartment. That building was demolished in 1902, so the Bosehaus is the nearest survivor of the household’s daily world. Our article on the Thomaskirche and the office of the Thomaskantor explains what that school and church asked of him.

In the rear building, Bose installed a banqueting hall with wall mirrors, a musicians’ gallery and a movable painted ceiling. Restored as the Summer Hall, it is now used for chamber concerts, mostly of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. Later owners kept the house in cultural use. The Richter family opened an art collection to visitors from 1765, and in 1893 the instrument collector Paul de Wit opened a private music history museum here.

The Bach connection returned in the twentieth century. A small Bach memorial opened in the entrance hall in 1973, and after two years of reconstruction the Johann Sebastian Bach Museum opened on 21 March 1985, Bach’s 300th birthday. A rebuild between 2008 and 2010 gave it its present form: twelve exhibition rooms across 450 square metres, reopened on 20 March 2010 by the German President, Horst Köhler.

The archive behind the museum

The museum is the public face of a research institution. The Bach-Archiv Leipzig was founded in 1950, for the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, as a central archive for manuscripts and documents and a research centre for Bach and his family. It moved into the Bosehaus in 1985, and since 2008 it has been an institute of the University of Leipzig.

Its scholarship shapes much of what visitors now know about Bach. It worked with West German colleagues on the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, the critical edition of all Bach’s surviving works, published between 1954 and 2007. It launched Bach Digital in 2010, an online portal of data and digital facsimiles of works by members of the Bach family. The museum makes this work visible rather than hiding it. In the research laboratory room, visitors can try dating a manuscript or follow the stages of a critical edition, the same detective work that sorted Bach’s cantatas into their annual cycles and established which works are really his.

Objects from the Bach household

Very little of Bach’s domestic life survives, and the museum is candid about that. One room deals with the family’s home life and its friendship with the Boses. It holds the only known original furniture from the Bach family, and from its bay window you can look across to the site of the old Thomasschule where they lived.

The iron chest is the most striking of these survivors. Its eleven bolts suggest it held things of value, and the painted “JSB” monogram matches the seal Bach used from 1722. The building itself has turned up evidence too. During the 2008 renovation, workers found four tempera panels behind a wall. They came from a built-in cabinet, probably painted in the first half of the eighteenth century, and likely belonged to the Bose family’s weapons collection. The same work uncovered fragments of marbled paper from around 1780 and rose-tendril wallpaper from around 1800.

The instruments Bach knew

Bach valued no instrument as highly as the organ, and the centrepiece of the organ room is the console of an organ by Johann Scheibe from Leipzig’s Johanniskirche. Bach inspected that instrument in 1743, and the console was restored during the museum’s 2008 to 2010 rebuild.

Two string instruments connect directly to Bach’s working world. A violone, a large bass string instrument, made by Leonhardt Pradter in 1672, belongs to the Nikolaikirche and is the kind of instrument that played the bass line in his church music, though its neck, pegbox, bridge and scroll were replaced in the nineteenth century. Beside it is a viola da gamba by Johann Christian Hoffmann, the instrument maker Bach commissioned in 1734 to maintain the instruments of the Thomaskirche and the Nikolaikirche. Nearby, a “wall orchestra” of Baroque instruments lets visitors bring each one forward at the press of a button. That brings the sound of the small ensembles described in our article on Bach’s weekly cantata cycle to life.

The treasure room

The most valuable items are kept in an air-conditioned treasure room added in the 2008 to 2010 extension. Its display case holds original manuscripts in Bach’s own hand. They are fragile, so the selection changes two or three times a year. A neighbouring display shows one of the 44 surviving original sets of performing parts from his chorale cantata cycle of 1724 to 1725, and that is rotated on the same schedule.

The treasure room also holds a small glass casket containing finds believed to come from the graves of Bach and Anna Magdalena, including splinters of oak coffin and a thimble, on loan to the museum since 2010. Bach’s remains have had an unsettled history. He was first buried at the Johanniskirche, and after that church was destroyed in 1943 the bones believed to be his were moved to the Thomaskirche in 1950, where his grave now lies, across the square from the museum.

The face of Bach

Visitors are greeted at the entrance by a marble bust by Carl Ludwig Seffner, dated 1897, showing Bach at about sixty. Seffner modelled the face from casts of the skull and from existing portraits, which shows how much of Bach’s appearance has had to be reconstructed.

The museum’s best-known object is the portrait painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 1748, said to be the only portrait of Bach painted from life. Two versions survive, dated 1746 and 1748. In each, Bach holds a sheet bearing his six-voice triple canon, BWV 1076. The likely occasion was his entry in 1747 as the fourteenth member of Lorenz Christoph Mizler’s society for the musical sciences, which required members to present a portrait. The 1748 version passed from Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel to the organist Johann Christian Kittel and then to the Jenke family. In England during the Second World War it was kept at the Dorset home of John Eliot Gardiner’s father. The American Bach scholar William H. Scheide bought it in 1952, and on his 100th birthday in January 2014 he named the Bach-Archiv as its beneficiary. It was handed over in April 2015, shown publicly at the opening of that year’s Bachfest, and has hung in the Bach Museum since. The 1746 version belongs to Leipzig’s city history museum, which the tour visits that same afternoon.

A composer’s afterlife

Much of the museum is really about what happened after 1750. Bach’s music fell out of general use soon after his death, and Leipzig’s first monument to him came nearly a century later. Felix Mendelssohn, then directing the Gewandhaus Orchestra, proposed it in 1840 and gave a solo organ concert of Bach’s works in the Thomaskirche on 6 August that year to help pay for it. The monument was unveiled near the church on 23 April 1843. That revival, which began with his 1829 Berlin performance of the St Matthew Passion, is the subject of our article on Mendelssohn and the Bach revival.

The family runs through the whole exhibition. A central family tree is based on Bach’s own genealogy, the Origin of the Musical Bach Family, which names 53 male relatives. The line of working composers ends with his grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, who died in 1845. Listening stations fill in what that male genealogy left out: the life stories of 33 women of the Bach family, from his mother to his great-granddaughters. A listening studio lets you call up any of Bach’s works by title, opening words or catalogue number.

Can you see Bach’s original manuscripts at the museum?

Yes, though which ones depends on when you visit. The treasure room always shows original manuscripts in Bach’s hand and one original set of cantata parts, but both displays change two or three times a year to protect them. The Haussmann portrait, the organ console and the household objects are on permanent display.

Do you need to read music or speak German to enjoy it?

No. The exhibition is built around sound and objects rather than scores. The free Bach Museum Leipzig app provides a guide in around ten languages, including English, with accessible versions for blind and visually impaired visitors and in German Sign Language. On the tour, a local guide leads the visit.

How much walking and standing does the visit involve?

Not much. The museum is compact, with twelve rooms across 450 square metres, but the visit is mostly spent standing. The entrance door is 90 centimetres wide with a single five-centimetre step, there is a wheelchair-accessible toilet and a wheelchair space in the listening room, and there are induction loops and Braille-labelled touch stations. On the tour the guided visit fills the morning, and the afternoon is spent at the Leipzig History Museum. The tour overall is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity on most days.

How is it different from the Bach House in Eisenach?

The two museums tell different parts of the story. Eisenach, Bach’s birthplace, has what the tour calls the world’s oldest and largest Bach museum. It is set in a 500-year-old timber-framed house, with short daily recitals on historical instruments, and focuses on his childhood and family roots. Leipzig’s museum is built around the archive and the last twenty-seven years of his working life. The tour visits Eisenach later in the journey, and our article on the Bach House in Eisenach covers it in detail.

The museum on the Bach route

Leipzig comes in the middle of the tour, after Berlin and Dresden and before Weimar, Thuringia, Köthen and Hamburg. That makes the Bach Museum a natural point to take stock: the family tree, the court years and the Leipzig office are all set out under one roof, ready to be seen in the places that shaped them. Our guide to Bach’s Germany follows the whole route, and our overview of Leipzig covers the wider city.

The museum leaves its gaps in view. No study survives as he left it, and no rooms are furnished as his home. Instead there are a chest, a console, a portrait and a few pages of music, with scholars working beside them to explain what they mean. Across the square, the Thomaskirche is still full of his music.