Bach in Germany: A 16-Day Music-History Itinerary

Johann Sebastian Bach never left the German-speaking lands, yet he worked for almost every kind of employer his world offered: a town council, a duke, a prince, a city school, and, by title at least, a king. Each move changed what he wrote, because each employer needed different music. Following Bach through Germany is really a journey through those working environments, from the Lutheran churches of Thuringia to the courts of Weimar and Köthen, the civic machinery of Leipzig and the royal circles of Dresden and Potsdam. For anyone planning a Bach music tour of Germany, this guide sets out how the places fit together and points to our detailed articles on each, written for travellers on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, a 16-day journey from Berlin to Hamburg timed to Leipzig’s Bachfest.

A life told out of order

The tour does not follow Bach’s life in sequence, and it is worth knowing that before you set out. It begins at the end. In Berlin and Potsdam, Bach appears as an old man visiting Frederick the Great in 1747, and Berlin is also where his music was revived in 1829. Dresden belongs to his middle years in Leipzig, when he was courting the Saxon elector for a title. Leipzig itself holds the last twenty-seven years of his working life. Only then does the route turn back into Thuringia, to Weimar, Eisenach, Erfurt and Arnstadt, where he was born, trained and first employed. It moves on to Köthen, the court he left for Leipzig, and ends in Hamburg with his son.

Reading Bach backwards has an advantage. You meet the finished composer first, in the music the festival puts in front of you in Leipzig, and then go looking for where it came from. By the time the group stands in the church at Arnstadt where an eighteen-year-old Bach took his first post as organist, the distance travelled between that young man and the composer of the St Matthew Passion is plain to see.

A few places in Bach’s life lie off the route. Ohrdruf, where the orphaned ten-year-old went to live with his eldest brother in 1695, isn’t visited. Nor is Lüneburg, where he went to school from 1700, or Mühlhausen, where he spent a year as organist in 1707 and 1708 and married his first wife, Maria Barbara. Everything else that shaped him is on the itinerary.

Thuringia: a family trade

Bach was born in Eisenach in March 1685, the youngest of eight children of Johann Ambrosius Bach, the town’s director of musicians. Being a Bach in Thuringia was close to being in a trade guild. The family had produced three or four generations of town pipers, church organists and court musicians, and Bach himself later traced them back to Veit Bach, who died in 1619.

Eisenach is where Bach was born and baptised, and the Bach House there opened in 1907 as the first museum devoted to him. The museum is now candid that the half-timbered building was misidentified as his birthplace in the nineteenth century; the real house in the Fleischgasse no longer stands. That honesty is part of what makes it worth visiting, and our article on the Bach House in Eisenach looks at how it presents a musical childhood through instruments and family history.

Farther east, Erfurt was the family’s centre of gravity in the seventeenth century, where Bachs ran the town’s music and Bach’s own parents married in the Kaufmannskirche in 1668. Johann Pachelbel was organist at the city’s Predigerkirche in the same period. Our article on the Bach family in Erfurt traces how a network of cousins, uncles and in-laws worked the region’s musical posts before Johann Sebastian was born.

Arnstadt: the first post

Both of Bach’s parents died before he was ten. After school in Lüneburg and a brief spell as a court musician in Weimar, he was appointed organist of the New Church in Arnstadt on 14 August 1703, at eighteen. The post shows a talented young man who was not easy to employ. In 1705 he took leave to travel to Lübeck to hear Dieterich Buxtehude, reportedly on foot, and stayed away for about four months when he had been granted four weeks. The church authorities also complained about his playing and his handling of the choir. The Lübeck journey mattered: Buxtehude was the most celebrated organist in northern Germany, and the visit exposed Bach to a grander, freer style of organ writing than anything Thuringia offered.

The church where he played now bears his name, and the tour visits it for a guided tour and an organ recital. Our article on young Bach in Arnstadt separates the documented record from the anecdotes that have grown around these years.

Weimar: the court organist

Bach returned to Weimar in 1708 as court organist to the duke, and in 1714 he was promoted to Konzertmeister. For the first time he had a trained court orchestra and a regular need for organ music, and the result was much of the organ repertoire he is still best known for, along with his first regular cantatas. Two of his sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, were born here.

The Weimar years ended badly. When Bach pressed to leave for a better post, the duke had him detained for almost a month, from 6 November to 2 December 1717, before releasing him with notice of dismissal. The tour spends three nights in Weimar, which also makes a base for Thuringia. Bach’s own workplace, the ducal palace chapel, was lost when the palace burned in 1774, so the Weimar he knew has to be read from the town around it. The tour’s walking tour takes in the town’s Bach sites, among them the town church of St Peter and Paul, where two of his sons were baptised, and the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, a reminder that the same small court later drew Goethe and Schiller. Our article on Bach’s organ music in Weimar places the Orgelbüchlein and the great organ works in the court and church setting that called for them.

Köthen: the court Kapellmeister

From 1717 to 1723 Bach was Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, a young ruler who loved music and played it himself. Köthen’s court followed the Reformed church, which used little elaborate music in worship, so Bach’s job was mostly secular and instrumental. Those years produced the six concertos he dedicated on 24 March 1721 to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, and the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

They were also years of loss and change. In July 1720 Bach came home from a journey with the prince to find that Maria Barbara had died and been buried. On 3 December 1721 he married the soprano Anna Magdalena Wilcke. The tour reaches Köthen for a walking tour of the castle and the church of St Agnus, and two articles cover what was written there: the Brandenburg Concertos and the Köthen court, and The Well-Tempered Clavier and Köthen.

Leipzig: the city’s music

In 1723 Bach took the post he held for the rest of his life: Thomaskantor in Leipzig, responsible for the music of four churches and for teaching at the Thomasschule. It was a civic appointment. He answered to a town council, not a prince, and his working week was set by the Lutheran church year. The office, its duties and its frictions are the subject of our article on the Thomaskirche and the office of the Thomaskantor.

For the first years he produced a new cantata for almost every Sunday and feast day, assembling annual cycles of church music on a scale nobody has matched. Our article on Bach’s cantatas in Leipzig explains how that weekly cycle worked, from the order of service to the schoolboys and town pipers who performed it. Across the square from the Thomaskirche, the Bach Museum Leipzig holds original manuscripts, the console of an organ Bach inspected and the only portrait painted from life. It is run by the Bach-Archiv, the research institute that also organises the city’s festival.

The tour’s three nights in Leipzig fall during Bachfest Leipzig, the festival through which the city performs his legacy each June, with concerts in the churches he wrote for. For the wider city, its market square and its other musical residents, see our guide to Leipzig, Germany.

Court, church and city: what each employer wanted

The clearest way to read the route is through the question every employer answered differently: what music do we need, and who will pay for the musicians? At Weimar, the duke’s household supplied a trained orchestra, and Bach had a court chapel and a ruler’s taste to satisfy. At Köthen, a Reformed court with little use for elaborate church music, he wrote for a prince’s chamber, and the instrumental works of those years show it. At Leipzig, the paymaster was a town council that expected a cantata nearly every Sunday but supplied only eight town musicians for church music. In his memorandum to the council on 23 August 1730, Bach asked for at least eighteen instrumentalists and three or four singers to a part, and complained that some of the players he had were partly retired.

Dresden and Potsdam show the other end of the scale: royal courts where music was an instrument of prestige and resources were far greater. Bach never worked at either, but he looked to both. He petitioned Dresden for a title and visited Potsdam, where his son served the king. Seeing these places in a single journey makes the pressures of his working life visible in a way that biographies struggle to convey.

Dresden: courting the elector

Leipzig’s council could be a frustrating employer, and Bach looked for protection higher up. Dresden, the Saxon capital, had one of Europe’s grandest court musical establishments, with an Italian opera and a Catholic court chapel. In 1733, after the death of Augustus the Strong, Bach presented the new elector, Friedrich August II, also King Augustus III of Poland, with a Kyrie and Gloria and a petition for a court title. The title, court composer, came in 1736. The music became the opening of the Mass in B minor.

The tour spends two nights in Dresden, visiting the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper and the Green Vault. Our article on Bach in Dresden explains why a Lutheran church musician in a commercial city sought prestige at a Catholic court, and what that tells us about his ambitions.

Potsdam and Berlin: the king and the revival

Bach’s second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, served Frederick the Great as a court harpsichordist from around 1738, before and after Frederick became king in 1740. In May 1747 the elderly Bach visited the court at Potsdam, where the king, a keen flautist, gave him a theme on which to improvise. The result, worked up and printed after Bach returned home, was the Musical Offering, the subject of our article on Bach’s Potsdam encounter with Frederick the Great. The tour spends a day in Potsdam among Frederick’s UNESCO-listed palaces and parks.

Berlin’s other Bach story came after his death. On 11 March 1829 the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion with the Berlin Singakademie, its first performance outside Leipzig, and launched a revival of Bach’s music that has never stopped. Our article on Mendelssohn and the 1829 revival explains why that concert mattered so much to nineteenth-century Germany. The tour opens with three nights in Berlin, including a concert and a tour of the Philharmonie.

Hamburg: the son’s city

The tour ends in Hamburg, a city Bach knew mostly as a visitor. In 1720 he played there before the aged organist Johann Adam Reincken, improvising at length on the chorale An Wasserflüssen Babylon. Reincken reportedly told him: “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that it lives in you.”

Hamburg’s real Bach connection is Carl Philipp Emanuel. In 1768 he left Frederick’s court to succeed his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, as director of music in the city, and he died there in 1788. The tour’s last full day includes the Komponistenquartier, a group of small museums devoted to Telemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Brahms and other composers who worked in the city. Our article on C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg shows how the family’s music carried on beyond Leipzig.

Where you can still hear Bach on the route

Several places on the tour still use the music they are known for. In Leipzig, the Thomanerchor, the choir Bach directed, performs a Bach cantata every week with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in its motets and services at the Thomaskirche. In Eisenach, the Bach House has given a short performance on its historical keyboard instruments every hour since 1973. In Arnstadt, the group hears an organ recital in the church where Bach held his first post. Add the six concerts included in the tour, most of them during Bachfest, and the journey becomes as much about listening as looking.

Bach’s own end came in Leipzig, where he died on 28 July 1750, aged 65, after unsuccessful eye surgery. He was buried at the Johanniskirche, and after that church was destroyed in the Second World War, the remains believed to be his were moved to the Thomaskirche in 1950. Visitors to his grave there today stand a few metres from where the choir still sings his music.

Do you need to know Bach’s music well to enjoy this tour?

No. The tour is designed for people who love the music, not specialists, and local guides at each site explain the history as you go. That said, a little listening beforehand pays off. A few cantatas, a Brandenburg Concerto and part of the St Matthew Passion give you points of reference for nearly every stop. Our list of books on Johann Sebastian Bach suggests reading at every level, from Christoph Wolff’s biography to John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven.

How physically demanding is the 16-day route?

The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate). Travellers should be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground. Days combine city walking tours on cobbles, coach transfers between towns and long periods seated in concerts and churches. The group stays in six places: three nights in Berlin, two in Dresden, three in Leipzig, three in Weimar, one in Halberstadt and two in Hamburg.

Why does the tour travel in June?

Because that is when Leipzig holds Bachfest. The 2027 departure runs from 5 to 20 June, and the festival from 10 to 20 June, under the motto “Passion”, marking 300 years since the St Matthew Passion‘s likely premiere. Early summer also means long daylight for walking tours in Thuringia. Tickets to six concerts are included. They are chosen from that year’s festival and concert programmes, so the works named on the itinerary are indicative until the programme is announced.

Is this tour suitable for solo travellers?

Yes. Odyssey groups are small, with between 6 and 14 travellers and a maximum of 14 on this departure, and many travellers join on their own. Solo travellers can book a room of their own, and the group dines together at the welcome and farewell dinners and at several other included meals. Our Tour Specialists can confirm the current single-room price for the 2027 departure.

How the route fits together

Taken as a whole, the itinerary reads as a series of working environments rather than a list of sights. In Thuringia, music was a family trade, carried on by organists and town pipers. Weimar and Köthen were courts, where everything depended on the taste and resources of one ruler. Leipzig was a civic and church system with its own rules and committees. Dresden and Potsdam were royal stages, where prestige rather than a salary was at stake. Hamburg shows what came after Bach, in his son’s career and the city’s long musical life.

Each place answers a question the others raise: why the organ music came from Weimar, why the concertos came from Köthen, why the cantatas came from Leipzig. By the end of sixteen days the music sounds different. It is no longer an abstract body of masterpieces but the work of a man who, week after week, wrote for the rooms, the people and the occasions that you will have seen for yourself.