Young Bach in Arnstadt: A First Organist’s Post and a Restless Reputation

On 21 February 1706, the church consistory in Arnstadt summoned its young organist to explain himself. He had been away for months longer than his leave allowed, and the congregation was unhappy with his playing: he had “made many curious variations in the chorale and mingled many strange tones in it”, so that people singing the hymns had become confused. The organist was twenty-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach, in his first real job, and the records of his four years in Arnstadt give a rare, unvarnished picture of a great musician before he was great. They show talent, ambition and impatience in equal measure. Arnstadt is a morning excursion on our Bach: The Man, His Music small group tour, with a guided visit to the church where he played and an organ recital there.

A family town

Arnstadt was not a strange town to a Bach. Members of the family had worked there for generations as town pipers, court musicians, organists and composers, and the town’s records list seventeen Bach births and eight Bach marriages. More original Bach family sites survive in Arnstadt than in any other town in Thuringia. Johann Christoph Bach, the gifted organist of Eisenach whom Johann Sebastian later called “the profound composer”, was born there in 1642, and his story is told in our article on the Bach House in Eisenach.

The family worked as a network, with posts in one town often passing to a cousin from another. Our article on the Bach family in Erfurt shows how that network worked in the city where Johann Sebastian’s parents married. For a young Bach looking for work in 1703, Arnstadt was familiar ground.

A new organ and an eighteen-year-old

Arnstadt’s New Church had been built between 1676 and 1683 on the site of a church destroyed by fire in 1581. It was a Baroque hall church with three tiers of galleries running around the interior, and on the third tier the organ builder Johann Friedrich Wender of Mühlhausen built a new organ with two manuals and 21 stops between 1699 and 1703. The church’s wooden barrel vault gives it the warm acoustic for which it is still known.

Bach, just eighteen, was asked to examine the new instrument in the summer of 1703. He had spent the previous seven months as a court musician in Weimar, and he played so impressively that he was offered the post of organist. He was appointed on 14 August 1703. It was his first post as an organist, at an age when most musicians were still apprentices.

What the records show

The Arnstadt documents are minutes and complaints, not anecdotes, and they repay a careful reading. The church authorities complained that Bach neglected rehearsals with the student choir, a duty he seems to have resisted. In 1705 an argument with a student, Johann Heinrich Geyersbach, whom Bach had called a “Zippelfagottist”, roughly a “fidgety bassoonist”, ended with Geyersbach answering with his fist, and the church council reprimanded Bach for the insult.

Read together, these records describe a gifted young man who knew his own worth, chafed at routine duties and had little patience with a student choir he had not chosen. They also show a town consistory trying, with limited success, to manage a musician who was already better than the job.

The walk to Lübeck

In the autumn of 1705 Bach asked for four weeks’ leave and set out for Lübeck, more than 400 kilometres to the north, to hear Dieterich Buxtehude, the most celebrated organist in northern Germany. He travelled largely on foot, though he may also have had lifts on carts and horses along the way. Buxtehude was organist of St Mary’s Church, and each Advent he presented the Abendmusiken, a series of evening concerts with large forces spread across the church’s galleries.

Bach stayed for nearly four months. When he was questioned on his return, he said only that he had gone “to comprehend one thing and another about his art”. What he heard shaped him: Buxtehude’s preludes, with their strong rhythmic openings and full use of the pedals, and his free, dramatic treatment of chorale melodies. The sense of large-scale structure in Bach’s later organ music, much of it written at Weimar and described in our article on Bach’s organ music in Weimar, owes a great deal to that winter in Lübeck.

Music from the Arnstadt years

Little of the music Bach played in Arnstadt can be dated with certainty, but a few works are usually placed in these years. The best known is a light-hearted keyboard piece, the Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, traditionally linked to his elder brother Johann Jacob, who left Thuringia around 1704 to serve as an oboist in the Swedish army. Its movements depict friends trying to talk the traveller out of going, a lament, the farewell and a fugue on a postilion’s horn call, and it shows the young Bach writing with humour as well as skill.

The other major evidence came to light only in 1985, when a manuscript collection of early chorale preludes copied by a later organist, Johann Gottfried Neumeister, was identified in the library of Yale University. It contains more than thirty settings attributed to Bach, generally dated to his years in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen or shortly before. They are modest, practical pieces of the kind an organist needed every Sunday, and they show the starting point from which the far bolder chorale preludes of the Weimar years developed.

21 February 1706: the reprimand

The consistory’s minutes of February 1706 show what Bach brought home. Besides the overstayed leave, the authorities objected to the way he accompanied the congregation’s hymns. His “curious variations” and “strange tones”, the bold harmonies and wandering keys he had heard in the north, confused the singers. When told his preludes were too long, he made them too short.

Later in 1706 came another complaint, that he had brought an “unknown maiden” into the organ gallery to make music. She is often assumed to have been his second cousin Maria Barbara Bach, whom he would soon marry, though the records do not say. Since women’s voices were not normally heard in the church’s music, it was another sign of an organist who preferred his own ideas to the consistory’s rules.

Leaving for Mühlhausen

Bach did not stay to be disciplined further. Soon after his return he applied for the post of organist at St Blasius in Mühlhausen, a larger and more important church, and he took it up in July 1707. His cousin Johann Ernst Bach succeeded him in Arnstadt. On 17 October 1707 Bach married Maria Barbara in the village church of St Bartholomew at Dornheim, a few kilometres from Arnstadt. A year later he moved on again, to the ducal court at Weimar, where he would write much of his greatest organ music.

What can you see of young Bach in Arnstadt today?

More than in most Bach towns. The New Church was renamed the Johann Sebastian Bach Church in 1935, and both its Wender organ of 1703 and a Steinmeyer organ of 1913 were restored and rebuilt between 1997 and 1999 and are played in services. On the market square, a bronze statue of the young Bach lounging on a bench, by Bernd Göbel, was unveiled in 1985 for the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth and still divides opinion. The Castle Museum has an exhibition, “Bach in Arnstadt”, on the family’s long working history in the town. Dornheim’s church, where Bach married, is a short drive away.

How long is the Arnstadt visit, and how demanding is it?

The Arnstadt visit is a morning excursion from the group’s base in Weimar, with a guided tour of the Bach Church and an organ recital. The afternoon is free in Weimar. Arnstadt’s centre is compact, and the walking is on paved streets and cobbles. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity on most days.

Why does Arnstadt matter to understanding Bach?

Because it shows him before the legend. The Arnstadt records are some of the earliest documents of Bach at work, and they reveal a musician still finding his voice, testing his employers and taking risks with the music of worship. The confidence that later produced the Leipzig cantatas is already there, but so is the impatience that would cause him trouble in every post he held.

Arnstadt on the Bach route

On the tour, Arnstadt comes after Eisenach and Erfurt, completing the picture of Bach’s Thuringian roots before the journey moves on to Köthen. Our overview of Bach’s Germany follows that route from his family’s towns to the courts and cities of his later career.

Sitting in the Bach Church as the organ begins, it is worth picturing the eighteen-year-old who first played it, already sure of his gifts and impatient with anyone who could not hear them. Arnstadt gave him his first organ and his first quarrels. Within a few years, he had outgrown both.