18. Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach – a Working Couple. Supplement: the Bach Family’s Apartment in Leipzig. Part II

On the 4^th June 1723 the newspaper “State and Academic Newspaper of the Hollstein Independent Correspondent” reported: “At midday last Saturday four wagons arrived here from Köthen with the household goods belonging to the ex ducal Capellmeister , now appointed as Cantor of Leipzig; at two o’clock he arrived with his family in two carriages and moved in to the newly renovated apartment in the St. Thomas School.” (Dok II, page 104). This report had been annotated with: “Leipzig, the 29^th of May”. The date of the move into the Cantor’s apartment in the St. Thomas’s School was the 22^nd of May 1723.

Figure 1: St. Thomas Church yard with the school and church. The Cantor's apartment was in the South part of the building, which in the picture is facing the viewer. Engraving by Johann Gottfried Krügner the elder, 1723. (Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, Objekt S0002145)

Plans of St. Thomas’s School have survived which have entries for a “Master Pezold” (see Figure 4). This probably refers to Carl Friedrich Petzold (1675 – 1731), who was a teacher at the school from 1704 and was appointed deputy director shortly before his death (Dok V, page 425). We can therefore assume that these plans show the rooms as they were during his time there and give clues as to how the Bach family apartment looked in 1723 (see Figure 2 – Figure 4).

St. Thomas’s School underwent a major reconstruction in 1731/32. The roof was removed and one and a half floors added with a new roof construction. The Bach couple lived in the altered apartment until Johann Sebastian’s death in 1750. The layout of the rooms after the reconstruction was treated in the article “17. Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach – a Working Couple. Supplement: The Bach Family’s Apartment in Leipzig. Part I” and the plans for the reconstruction with dimensions are also given there. Here, we go into the shorter time before the reconstruction.

A comparison of the plans for the reconstruction with those from before shows hardly any changes to the ground floor.

Figure 2: Southern part of the ground floor of St. Thomas’s School (Cantor’s apartment) before the reconstruction of 1731-32 (Stadtarchiv Leipzig, RRF [F] 283)

The laundry and privy (“Secret” on the plan) were already in the Western part of the ground floor before the reconstruction. Access to the first floor was via a spiral staircase that had a landing that was markedly larger than on the reconstruction plan. Here, the room to the left of the entrance is not divided into a small room (“Stübgen”) and chamber (“Cammer”, modern German “Kammer”), but this could easily have been done at any time after the move in 1732. In any case, there was a separating wall in this room shortly before the school was demolished in 1902 (Richter 1904, page 50).

In the plans for the first floor before the reconstruction a room is labelled as auditorium for the third classes (American eight-ninth grades) – see Figure 3 (“Tertianer Auditorium”).

Figure 3: Southern part of the first floor of St. Thomas’s School before the reconstruction 1732-32 (Stadtarchiv Leipzig, RRA [F] 284)

But in one of the files there is a statement that “a room separated off for the Cantor which was previously the auditorium for the third forms” (GTK-Dok, pages 184 f.). The Bach family must therefore have had some living space in addition to that shown in this plan (Figure 3). There is no information on the size of this separated extra room. After the reconstruction, the area was again used for the school. To compensate, the Bach family was given a room in the new third floor, including an entrance (“Flur”) from which stairs led to the floor below and to the attic above. Otherwise, according to the plans, there were no significant changes to the Cantor’s apartment on the first floor. Before the reconstruction there were already two living rooms (approx. 20 and 17m²) on the East side, a small kitchen on the South side (about 9m²), and on the West side a room (approx. 15m²) as well as a chamber (approx. 10m²). These rooms were connected by a hallway (“Vor-Platz”) – for the areas see “17. Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach – a Working Couple. Supplement: The Bach Family’s Apartment in Leipzig. Part I”.

However, the plan for the second floor before the reconstruction has some puzzles. The shape of the staircase from the first to the second floor is not logical, although this does not affect the assessment of the living area of the Bach family. But it does show a room and a corridor on the East side of the Cantor’s apartment, each with a window (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Sout-East part of the second floor of St. Thomas's School (Cantor's apartment) before the reconstruction 1731-32 (Stadtarchiv Leipzig, RRA [F] 285)

After the reconstruction the Bach family had two rooms on the East side of this floor with a total of three windows in that direction (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: South-East part of the second floor of the plan for the reconstruction of St. Thomas's School 1732-32 (Drawing by George Werner, Stadtarchiv Leipzig, RRA [F] 295, annotations by E. Spree)

However, there are no hints in the planning that the Cantor’s official apartment was extended on this floor. Could the Bach family already have been using parts of the space designated as “Master Pezold’s Library” (“Mag. Pezold’s Bibliothek”) before the reconstruction?

In summary we can establish that the family apartment before the reconstruction had an area of about 200m², including the corridors and kitchen. Afterwards it was a little bigger, but not significantly, and now extended over four instead of three floors.

The apartment into which the Bach family moved in 1723 was freshly renovated. The City of Leipzig had financed this with over 100 Taler (Dok II, page 104). For comparison: this sum was equivalent to two years’ salary of a miner in a Saxon mine. (Spree 2019, page 37).

There was one plague of St. Thomas’s school that the renovation would not have reduced. In 1717 one teacher wrote: “One should immediately consider the frequent pests of rats and mice that can be seen in such large numbers in St. Thomas’s school that they come out in broad daylight” (Szeskus 2003, page 23). Something could be done about it, even if only in a limited space such as an apartment. An encyclopaedia of the time says: “Of all the remedies against rats that one can think of, cats are the best” (Zedler Volume 30, column 1028). Today we know that cats seldom attack and kill rats, but rats do avoid their territory, so it is certainly possible that cats belonged to the Bach family household.

We can only speculate about how the Bach family used the rooms of the Cantor’s apartment. Berhard Friedrich Richter (1850 – 1931) described its state in the years before St. Thomas’s School was demolished in 1902 (Richter 1904 p31. ff.). His father Ernst Friedrich Eduard Richter (1808 – 1879) was Cantor there from 1861, so he knew the apartment from his own experience. However, caution is warranted in transferring the furnishings and uses of individual rooms from his report to the apartment in which the Bach family lived.

It can be assumed that the room in which meals were taken was near the kitchen known to be on the first floor, otherwise the prepared meals would have had to be carried via stairs. Bach did not need an instrument for composing (Dok VII, page 52; Dok VII page 109; Gerber 1790, column 90), so he did not necessarily need a specific room for this work. During the years when Anna Magdalena Bach lived there, she bore twelve children. There are several indications that they were nourished by a wet nurse who must have lived in the household during those times ("3. How many children did Anna Magdalena Bach have to care for? Part II"). Many of the children did not survive their first year ("2. How many children did Anna Magdalena Bach have to care for? Part I"). At least one maid must have had a bed in the apartment ("4. Were there servants in the Bach family household? Part I"). Their son Wilhelm Friedemann (1710 – 1784) moved to Dresden in 1732 to take up a post as organist at St. Sophia’s church. His brothers Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714 – 1788), Johann Gottfried Bernhard (1715 – 1739) and half-brother Johann Christoph Friedrich (1732 – 1792) left the house during the following years. All these changes in the family will have affected the way the rooms were used. Most of the rooms will have been used in different ways by the Bach family between 1723 and 1750.

Although little is known about everyday life in this household, we do know that Martha Elisabeth Hesemann, a relation of Anna Magdalena Bach, stayed for an extended visit in the autumn of 1742 (Ranft 1986, pages 169 ff.; Dok II, page 402). A distant relation of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Elias Bach, was private secretary and house teacher of the family from 1737 to 1742, and would have lived there (Dok I, page 118; Dok II, page 396).

These examples all show that the Bach couple saw possibilities to not only house their children and servants, but also other people. This will be pursued in further articles. The next one is about one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sisters-in-law, who died in the apartment in 1729.

Translation: Alan Shepherd

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