Thomaskirche and the Office of the Thomaskantor

“Since the best can’t be obtained, mediocre ones will have to be accepted.” So said a Leipzig councillor in 1723, as the city settled for its third choice to run its school choir and church music. The candidate was Johann Sebastian Bach, and the post he accepted, Thomaskantor of the Thomaskirche, became the one he held until his death twenty-seven years later. It was never simply a composer’s job. It was a schoolmaster’s post, a civic office and a church appointment rolled into one, with three sets of masters to answer to and a weekly deadline that never stopped. Understanding that office is the key to Bach’s Leipzig, and the Thomaskirche and its choir are a central stop on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour.

An office older than the Reformation

The choir Bach inherited was already five centuries old. It was founded in 1212 by the Margrave of Meissen, as part of an Augustinian priory at St Thomas, with a school attached to train future priests. The Reformation turned priory and school into civic Lutheran institutions, and the first holder of the title Thomaskantor, Georg Rhau, was appointed in 1518. Martin Luther himself preached in the Thomaskirche on Pentecost Sunday 1539.

The church Bach knew was largely the late-Gothic hall church consecrated on 10 April 1496, with its unusually steep roof, pitched at 63 degrees and rising to 45 metres, and a tower rebuilt in 1702, two decades before he arrived. Its interior, though, has changed. A Gothic Revival renovation between 1884 and 1889 removed most of the Baroque furnishings Bach worked among, so what visitors see today is a nineteenth-century idea of a medieval church, holding the music of an eighteenth-century one.

The council’s third choice

When Bach’s predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, died in 1722, the city council looked for a celebrity. Its first choice was Georg Philipp Telemann, then music director in Hamburg, who auditioned on 9 August 1722 and was appointed two days later, before declining after Hamburg improved his pay. The second choice was Christoph Graupner, court Kapellmeister at Darmstadt, chosen in January 1723. His employer, the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, refused to release him. Johann Friedrich Fasch of Zerbst withdrew because he did not want to teach.

Bach, then Kapellmeister at Köthen, auditioned on 7 February 1723. He was the only applicant without a university degree, normally expected for the post, and the council was split between members who wanted a capable schoolmaster and those who wanted a distinguished musician. Councillor Abraham Christoph Platz, a leader of the schoolmaster faction, made his remark about mediocre candidates in that context. It was less a verdict on Bach’s music than an argument that teaching mattered more. Mayor Gottfried Lange took the other view: “If Bach is elected,” he said, “we can forget Telemann.” On 22 April 1723 Bach was elected unanimously, his contract was dated 5 May, and on 13 May the Saxon consistory confirmed him after a theological examination. On the tour, the group visits the council chambers in the Leipzig History Museum where he signed it.

Two jobs in one

The post combined two roles. As cantor, Bach belonged to the staff of the Thomasschule. He prepared the choir for services, composed and copied music, led rehearsals, taught music and general subjects, and helped admit new pupils. As director of music, he was the city’s senior musician, responsible for music in its principal churches and for official occasions such as the annual inauguration of the town council and homages to the ruler.

That meant answering to three authorities at once: the city council, which paid him; the rector of the Thomasschule, his superior in the school; and the church superintendent, responsible for worship. Each had its own priorities, and much of the friction in Bach’s Leipzig years came from the gaps between them.

The school and the choir

The singers were the boarders of the Thomasschule. In Bach’s time the choir numbered around fifty boys and young men, of whom the best sixteen or so sang the cantatas. They were divided into four choirs for the Thomaskirche, the Nikolaikirche, the Neue Kirche and the Peterskirche. The first choir, under Bach, sang the main music in whichever of the two principal churches had it that Sunday. How that weekly rhythm worked, and what Bach asked the council for in his 1730 memorandum, is set out in our article on Bach’s cantatas in Leipzig.

The Bach family lived inside the school, in the cantor’s apartment of the old Thomasschule beside the church. The building was demolished in 1902. The nearest surviving witness to the household’s daily life is the Bosehaus across the square, home to the family’s friends and now the Bach Museum Leipzig, whose bay window looks out over the site of the old school.

A week in the cantor’s life

The weekly cantata was only the most visible part of the job. Alongside it, Bach provided music for church weddings and funerals, which paid fees, and wrote at least twenty festive works for university occasions. For years he also directed the Collegium Musicum, a society of students and professional players who gave regular concerts in the city. Kuhnau’s contract of 1701 had asked that church music be “not too long” and not “so digressive”, and Bach’s was almost identical.

For his first years in Leipzig he wrote new cantatas at a rate that is hard to credit, assembling cycles of church music for around sixty Sundays and feast days a year. The pace eased later, but the obligation to provide music never did. The modern equivalent can still be heard. The choir sings each week, and every June the city’s festival opens with the serving Thomaskantor at the Thomaskirche, as our article on Bachfest Leipzig describes.

What did the Thomaskantor earn?

About 700 thalers a year, by Bach’s own estimate in a 1730 letter to his school friend Georg Erdmann, but only a fraction of it was fixed. His base salary was around 100 thalers. Most of the rest came from fees for weddings and funerals, which made his income depend on the city’s health. As Bach put it: “when there are more funerals than usual, the fees rise in proportion, but when a healthy wind blows, they fall accordingly.”

Friction with the council and the school

Bach was not an easy employee, and Leipzig was not an easy employer. In his memorandum to the council of 23 August 1730, he set out the musical forces he needed and how far short the city fell. He asked for at least eighteen instrumentalists where the council provided eight, and for three or four trained singers to each part. The council was largely uninterested.

The bitterest quarrel began in 1736, with the school’s rector, Johann August Ernesti, over who had the right to appoint the student prefects who led the choirs when the cantor was elsewhere. Bach petitioned the church consistory, citing school statutes of 1634, and the council rejected his case. The dispute ran through letters to the city authorities and up to the king, even though Ernesti had stood godfather to Bach’s children. It also shows why a court title mattered to him: he had petitioned the Saxon elector in Dresden for one in 1733, and it was granted in 1736, while the quarrel was under way. Our article on Bach in Dresden follows that pursuit of prestige beyond the city.

After Bach: the line of Thomaskantors

The office outlived its most famous holder. Johann Friedrich Doles served longest after him, from 1756 to 1789, followed by Johann Adam Hiller, and in the twentieth century Karl Straube and Günther Ramin made the choir internationally known. Andreas Reize, appointed in 2021, is the eighteenth Thomaskantor since Bach and the first who is Swiss and Catholic.

Today the Thomanerchor has about ninety boys aged nine to eighteen, who still board together, now at the Thomasalumnat in Hillerstrasse. The choir sings motets in the Thomaskirche on Fridays at 6 pm and Saturdays at 3 pm and a Sunday service at 9 am. Under Reize it performs a Bach cantata every week with the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Where is Bach buried?

Inside the Thomaskirche. He died on 28 July 1750 and was first buried at the Johanniskirche. After that church was destroyed in the Second World War, the remains believed to be his were found undamaged in its crypt in 1949 and moved to the Thomaskirche, where the new grave was dedicated on 28 July 1950, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. Outside, Carl Seffner’s bronze statue of Bach has stood beside the church since 1908, and opposite it is a statue of Felix Mendelssohn, first raised in 1892, taken down by the Nazis in 1936 and re-erected in 2008.

Can visitors attend a motet or service in the Thomaskirche?

Yes. The Friday and Saturday motets are open to visitors; admission is by a printed programme costing €15, sold at the church doors from 45 minutes before the start. Sunday services are free. Times can change around school holidays and the June festival, so it is worth checking the choir’s schedule before planning around a particular performance. On the tour, the Thomaskirche features in the Leipzig walking tour and in the festival programme.

Is the Thomaskirche accessible?

Largely, yes. There is an alternative entrance at the Thomaskirchhof near Burgstrasse with no more than one step or a ramp, along with induction loops and a tactile model of the church. The toilets, however, are reached by thirteen steps below the church and are not wheelchair accessible. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), and the Leipzig walking is on mostly level paved streets.

The Thomaskirche on the Bach route

The Thomaskirche is where the threads of Bach’s Leipzig meet: the school, the choir, the council and the weekly music. Our guide to Bach’s Germany shows how this civic office differed from the courts he had served before, and our overview of Leipzig covers the rest of the old town around the church.

Bach complained and petitioned, yet he stayed. Standing in the church today, beside his grave and within earshot of the choir still singing his music, it is easy to see why the post held him. However frustrating, it offered a choir, a congregation and a reason to write every single week.