JOHANN CHRISTOPH  BACH

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“Are you ready Sebastian?”

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My younger brother did not answer. He was looking at his ruck sack, which contained all his worldly goods,  and I could tell he was wondering if it was too heavy.  It was not so much the clothes he had packed as the musical manuscripts and books he had insisted he needed to take with him on his journey to Lüneburg. And of course, he had his violin, the Jacob Stainer instrument he inherited from our father Ambrosius when he died. Those items added a great deal more weight than a few extra pairs of stockings.

“They will likely have all the music you’ll need in the library of St. Michael’s School,” I told him. “Cantor Herda says the library there contains more manuscripts than he has ever seen in his life.”

Sebastian shook his head. “I will need all of mine,” he said. “It would be impossible to leave them behind.”

We were talking in the attic garret that had served as my younger brother’s bedroom for the last five years. Our parents had died, first Elisabeth, our Maman; and then, nine months later, our Papa, Johann Ambrosius Bach, the town piper of Eisenach, had passed away after an illness.

Papa had remarried after Maman died, but that woman, Frau Keul, who had already buried two husbands before Papa, went back to her family in Arnstadt when he died. My sister Marie Salome, eighteen, went to Erfurt where Maman’s family, the Lammerhirts, took her in.
But Jacob, thirteen and Sebastian, just nine, had nowhere to go. So I agreed to take them in with me, here in Ohrdruf, where I had recently been hired as the organist at the Michaelskirche. My wife Johanna Dorothea was not pleased—my two brothers took up space, even in the attic, and represented two more mouths to feed. Even though Doro is the daughter of one of Ohrdruf’s town councilors, my job was not well remunerated and money was always tight.  When Sebastian and Jacob came to live with us, we already had two babies in the house. 

But family is family and there was nothing else I could do. So we did the best we could, put the two boys into the local school and tried to raise them as Godly boys.

But now, five years later, Dorothea and I have two more children of our own, plus a relative of hers has written asking for a temporary place to stay. We were out of room and at our wit’s end. Jacob had left our household a year after he arrived, going back to Eisenach to apprentice with the man who took over our Papa’s position as director of the town’s musicians. 

Sebastian enrolled in the Ohrdruf Lyceum school, the local Latin school, with the help of a scholarship from someone in town, and had done quite well, especially when the new Cantor, Elias Herda, took over the choir and took Sebastian under his wing.  It was Herda who recommended that Sebastian, and Georg Erdmann, another boy in the Ohrdruf Lyceum, apply to the choir school at St. Michael’s in Lüneburg, a school from which Cantor Herda had himself recently graduated. Both boys were excellent choral soloists, and Herda wrote to the Cantor of St. Michael, August Braun, to recommend both boys, praising their musical skills.  As it turned out, St. Michael’s had a special program for musically gifted boys who came from impoverished backgrounds. Both Sebastian and Georg fit that bill. They would both receive full room, board and education free of charge. In exchange, of course, for their musical talents at St. Michael’s services, at special musical occasions in the town and whatever they could earn singing Currende on the streets for money.

So now, Sebastian was packing his things and getting ready to set out on the 250 mile journey with Georg.

“You could leave some of your things with me, Sebastian,” I said as I watched him heft his backpack and frown at the weight of it. “I will keep them safe and you can send for them when you have established yourself.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Your good wife would find my things and throw them out. She has never been happy with my presence in your home.” He weighed his bag again. “I will take my possessions with me,” he said. “It is all that I own in the world.”

I shrugged. My brother, even at the young age of fifteen, was stubborn and always knew what he wanted.  A year or two earlier, I had discovered he had somehow snuck into my own manuscript cupboard and had been copying out all the musical scores I stored there—scores I had forbidden him to look at. He was not ready for the complexities of those scores, especially the organ chorales. Sebastian had shown great promise on the organ, but he was only fifteen. He had not received anything in the way of instruction—just what he had observed of me when I played.  Still, whenever he sat down at the manuals and played something, whether from a musical score or from his own memory, it was quite remarkable how well he could play. There were rough edges here and there, of course, he was only a boy. But there was talent there. You could just listen for a few moments and hear it. He had a talent from God. I always tried to give Him thanks for that, and tried to not feel resentment for what he had that I did not. Talent from God.

There would be plenty of time for him to work his way into the more difficult music of the masters. I feared he would get discouraged if he encountered music too complex for his skill level. But he obviously disagreed with me and wanted to learn—by copying these scores into his notebooks, note by note—the secrets of the great men of old. 

In a fit of anger, I had destroyed his copied notes and put my collection of music under lock and key. But I could not be sure, even today, that his ruck sack, bulging and heavy, did not contain in his notebooks containing the same scores and music. He was a determined sort, my younger brother.

Now, I handed him a sheet of paper on which I had made some copious notations.

“I’ve made a list of some of our relatives living and working in the cities and towns you and Georg are likely to pass through on your way to Lüneburg,” I said. “As you know, there are Bachs everywhere in this part of the world: church organists, town musicians, members of various court capelles. The one’s I have marked with a star are relatives I have written to, telling them that you may be passing through their towns and asking if they can put you and Georg up for a night and see that you are well fed. I am sure you will find they offer you hospitality and a night of shelter. We Bachs always stand ready to help one another.”

Sebastian took my paper and looked at it briefly before stuffing it into a side pocket of his pack.

“Thank you, brother,” he said. 

“Is Georg ready?” I asked.

Sebastian nodded. “He said he would be ready by noon.”

“Good,” I said. “The afternoon mail coach leaves at one. Herr Frankel, the driver, has said he will take you too as far as Wechmar at no charge. After that, you’ll likely be on foot.”

“I like walking,” Sebastian told me. “I can often hear music in my head whenever I get a good tempo going with my feet.”

“Yes, well, don’t tell anyone else that,” I said. “People may think you’re losing your senses.”

He smiled at me. “I am not concerned about what people think about me, brother,” he said. “I only want people to think about my music.”

I sighed. The boy was young, but he seemed to have an inner drive that surprised me. I don’t think I had that kind of internal ambition when I was 15 years old.

“One day, I am sure they will, Sebastian,” I said. “But today, nobody knows you or anything about your musical abilities. So if they see you humming and singing as you walk along the coach road, they may have you locked up for insanity.”

His face darkened. I worried for a moment that one of his famous temperamental explosions was coming. But then he smiled at me. 

“You are right, brother,” he said. “I will try not to get locked up.”

There was a knock at the door downstairs.

“That will be Georg,” Sebastian said. He lifted his pack with a slight grunt and followed me down out of the attic. I noticed he did not look around at the surroundings of his room for the last five years with any nostalgia. He simply walked out and left it behind.

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GEORG ERDMANN
I really didn’t want to go to Lüneburg. I was almost finished with Ohrdruf’s Latin School: one more year and I would have been eligible to apply to university, maybe the one at Halle, or Leipzig, or even Brandenburg. Especially Brandenburg, since that was the university that trained diplomats. I was thinking I’d like to be a diplomat. See the world, be involved in international affairs, help a nation defend itself against others. 

But Cantor Herda said I was a good singer and that St. Michael’s in Lüneburg was always looking for good singers, and that I could get an excellent education for a few more years—at no cost—and be even more ready to enter university. He made it sound like an excellent opportunity and, even though I did not want to go, he eventually convinced me.

I had no one else to advise me. My own parents died when I was just seven. My father had been a farmer in Leina, a small village not too far from Gotha in Thuringia.  Both my parents died in the sweating disease that swept through the state that year. I eventually came to Ohrdruf where one of my uncles also farmed, and he put me to work. That might have been my life’s occupation, except that Cantor Herda, walking in the countryside one day, heard me singing a folk song of some kind, and immediately went to my uncle and told him I needed to be in the Latin School. Where Herda could use me in his choir. 

And so I went, except for several weeks in the autumn when the harvests began. I didn’t really care—I was ten years old at the time. I liked working the farm with my uncle. But then, I liked school, too. And Herda taught me music and how to read it, and I decided I liked singing in the church, too. 

So here we are. I am bound to walk with this Bach fellow—he is much better at singing than I’ll ever be—all the way to Lüneburg. My uncle told me it will take us about a month. And he told me there are dangers along the way: highwaymen and bandittos. But he said if he stop along the way in the larger towns, we should be all right. Sebastian said he is a fast walker and thinks we can make it to Lüneburg in three weeks. I do not think so. I looked on a map. It’s a long way, and we have to cross the Harz Mountains before we reach the central plain that will take us north to Lüneburg.

So here I was, packed and ready to go. My uncle and his wife had bid me farewell. Tante Maria had cried a little, but she wept at everything. Still, I suppose it was nice to think she might miss me. I knew my uncle would miss me—he was already talking about finding a new boy to hire, and complaining about how much that would cost him. But then, he was always complaining about having to spend money for this and that. Despite the fact that his farm was quite successful and I think my uncle made a lot more money than he let on.

I walked into town and knocked at the door of the Bach house. Sebastian’s brother Christoph was the organist at our town’s church. He also maintained a few cattle on some acreage outside Ohrdruf, and tried to grow a few crops. My uncle always made fun of his efforts. But Sebastian told me his brother needed to maintain his little farm because the town paid him so little to play the organ in church on Sundays or whenever there was a funeral or a wedding.

I used to ask Sebastian why he wanted to make his living doing pretty much the same thing—playing music on a church organ, if he already knew that he would never make much money doing so. He looked at me with that funny expression he had, the one that seemed to say ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and told me that he was going to become a famous musician, known throughout the world, and that he would be fabulously wealthy one day.

“I will give you some of my money, if you need it, Georg,” he told me once. “I will have enough to share. Just you wait and see.”

Of course, everyone knew that someone named Bach was going to become a musician—the Bach family was renowned throughout Thuringia state as a family of musicians. Of course, Sebastian and Christoph’s father had been one of the town musicians in Eisenach. And he had a twin brother who was also a famed musician. And almost all his uncles and cousins and distant cousins and almost everyone with the last name Bach was some kind of musician somewhere in the state. It was quite remarkable, really. In my family, the Erdmanns, we had farmers, and bakers, and storekeepers, and a pastor or two, and a town councilor and probably a dozen other occupations. But all the Bachs were musicians. 

Christoph and Sebastian met me at the door and welcomed me in. Christoph’s wife, with a new baby on her hip, offered me something to eat or drink, but I declined. I know how tight things were with that family right now. It was one reason that Christoph and Cantor Herda had arranged for the two of us to enroll in the St. Michael’s School in Luneburg. They could no longer afford to feed and house Sebastian and their family had grown. It was time for him to leave.

Christoph told me that the postal coach was scheduled to leave Ohrdruf at one o’clock…about an hour hence. 

“Come,” his brother said. “Let us go down to the tavern to wait. I will buy you boys a pastry for your midday meal and maybe a glass of beer.”

That sounded good to both of us, so we walked down to the plaza in front of the Rathaus, where a stone monolith and fountain  had been erected centuries ago for a reason that most of us had long forgotten. We ducked into the tavern at the edge of the plaza and enjoyed the sausage pastry and drank our beer. 

“Brother,” Sebastian said when we were finished. “I found some papers in a book that I think came from Papa’s house after he died.”

“Oh?” Christoph said, disinterestedly.

“Yes. They mentioned something called the Song of Asaph. Do you know what that is?”
I saw Christoph’s head swivel violently as if someone had smacked him in the face. He began blinking rapidly. 

“The what?” he said.

“The Song of Asaph. All I can tell is that apparently it is quite old. There were some notes in Papa’s hand on the page that seemed to indicate Papa had been looking for it. Do you know anything about it?”

Christoph shook his head back and forth.

“Never heard of it,” he said quickly. “Probably some piece of music that Papa was looking for for one of the concerts he led. Probably up at the Wartburg Castle—he worked quite a lot with the Duke’s capell there.”

“Yes,” Sebastian said, nodding. “That must be it. Though he had written down a few musical notes that he said might have come from this manuscript. They are quite interesting … do you want to hear them?”

He began singing the notes from memory. They sounded like an old Gregorian chant from a century or two ago.

“No!” Christoph said vehemently. Sebastian stopped singing abruptly and looked at his brother with surprise and a bit of hurt feelings. “We don’t have time for that nonsense. Your coach will be here soon.”

It was more like half-past one when we heard the approach of the mail coach, with the snorting of the horses, the sound of their hoofs and the creaking of the old carriage. We took up our rucksacks and went outside. Nobody in the tavern said good-bye to us. Nobody in the tavern knew we were leaving for a new city and a new life. And nobody in the tavern cared one way or another.

Christoph went to speak to the driver, Frankel, who was letting us ride with him to Wechmar. Frankel looked displeased, as if he didn’t remember promising to let us ride with him, but eventually he looked at us both, standing beside the carriage, packs over shoulder, looking hopeful.

“Fine,” he said finally. He pointed at Sebastian. “You, the short one, you get up here next to me.” He pointed at me. “You--you’re on the back bench. You’d better hang on tight back there, because I’m not stopping if you fall off. And I mean it. I have a schedule to keep.”

I nodded and climbed up the back of the coach. There were two people sitting inside, and the back deck was full of packages and boxes which I assumed held the post. I secured my pack under the bench seat and looked around for some kind of handhold.

Sebastian gave his brother a hug goodbye and climbed up next to Frankel. The driver gave a cursory look back at me and then cracked the whip. The two horses startled and then set off, heading north out of the city. I immediately understood what the driver meant—I was tossed around, left and right, forwards and backwards, by the motion of the coach, especially as we left the town and began traveling down the country road, which bumpy, uneven and, for a passenger on the high back bench, dangerous.

I managed to hold on, but it was a constant battle. I knew that by the time we arrived in Wechmar later that night, I would be sore and exhausted.

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Author's note:  In 1700, the fifteen-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach and his friend Georg Erdmann, 17, left Ohrdruf and walked the 250 miles north to the city of Lüneburg, near Hamburg, to attend the St Michael's choir school. Every biography of Bach mentions this journey.

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But what happened on this epic journey? History is silent, so the historical novelist has taken over and created quite an adventure for the two boys. Look for publication of The Song of Asaph this summer!

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--James Y. Bartlett

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