Bach's Brandenburg Concertos... misplaced manuscripts
In 1734, in a palace in Berlin, a clerk was inventorying a dead man’s music. Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, had died on 3 September at his castle at Malchow, aged 57, unmarried and childless. He had been severely overweight in his last years, increasingly housebound; the autopsy reported a lung and liver both rotted away. His grand-niece, the crown princess in Bayreuth, wrote to her brother that her great uncle would make ‘a quite delicate roast for the worms, judging by his belly-fat’ – what the Bach scholar Rashid-S Pegah, in a 2017 Bach-Jahrbuch article, calls ‘a not exactly respectful obituary’. His estate was to be divided among five Prussian royal heirs, and the contents of his library had to be valued for equal distribution.
The clerk, tasked with tracking the assets, hurried through the music collection. Italian opera dominated the holdings: about 50 scores in total, seven of them by Handel, six by Conti, four by Orlandini. Among the named instrumental composers were Albinoni, Brescianello, Locatelli, Valentini and Vivaldi. The collection was the work of a serious connoisseur – a Hohenzollern educated in Leiden and Brussels, who had spent his early twenties at the Venetian carnival. Then the clerk came to two large bundles of concertos, one of 100 manuscripts, the other of 77. He didn’t bother to itemise them. He entered them collectively as concertos by various masters, for various instruments. Each was valued at four groschen.
Somewhere in one of those two bundles were six concertos in a single hand, with a French dedication on the title page dated 24 March 1721. The signature read Jean Sebastien Bach. The clerk did not write the name down anywhere in the inventory.
A momentous meeting... Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Berlin Stadtschloss
Bach had sent them to Berlin in the most unlikely gamble of his career. But first, he needed to buy a harpsichord. In March 1719 his employer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, had ordered a large two-manual instrument from the Berlin maker Michael Mietke – the most fashionable harpsichord builder in northern Germany. Bach was 34, Kapellmeister of the small Calvinist court, and his job included collecting it.
Berlin in 1719 was a city in transition. Friedrich Wilhelm I, The Soldier King, preferred military men to musicians and was dismantling the royal Kapelle to pay for his army. The court’s musical life had collapsed into the private establishments of his relatives. The most musical of these was his uncle, Christian Ludwig – a son of the Great Elector, a Prussian army officer, unmarried at 42, with no political power. What he had was money, a quiet establishment in his wing of the Berlin Stadtschloss and the cosmopolitan taste already on display in his library. Bach knew it.
During that visit, the two men met – probably, Pegah suggests, at one of the Margrave’s regular musical evenings, where he invited Bach to play. Bach was already a name, the man whom even his rivals recognised as the foremost organist in Germany. The Margrave, in the polite manner of music-loving princes, asked him to send some compositions when he had the time. Bach took it home to Cöthen, filed it away, and returned to a court whose musical life was, for the moment, the happiest he had ever known.
A terrible tragedy... the death of Maria Barbara Bach
A little over a year later, in May 1720, Prince Leopold – in fragile health since his early twenties – persuaded Bach to accompany him to Karlsbad to take the waters on his physician’s advice. Leopold had been to Karlsbad before; on his 1718 visit he had brought several musicians and even the court harpsichord, which servants hauled overland from Cöthen to Bohemia. Bach was the centrepiece of the second trip.
They were gone for two months and little did Bach know the tragedy that he only discovered, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel later wrote, ‘when he entered his house’. Carl Hermann Bitter, in his 1865 biography – the first major modern life of Bach – described the homecoming: ‘A terrible shock awaited him; his wife, whom he had left in perfect health, had died after so short an illness that no news of it had reached him, and he was too late to see her; indeed, she had been buried before his arrival.’ He was 35. He had four children.
‘There can be no question,’ Christoph Wolff writes in his standard biography of Bach, ‘that the 35-year-old widower was unsettled by the devastating tragedy that had afflicted him and his family, but at the same time he might also have wanted to take a fresh look at options that presented themselves elsewhere.’
Bach's Brandenburg Concertos... difficult times ahead
In November, he went to Hamburg, where the Jakobikirche organist’s post went not to him but to a man who paid 4,000 marks to the church for it. Then, in February 1721, his eldest brother Johann Christoph – the organist at Ohrdruf who had taken him in as a ten-year-old orphan – died at 49. He had now lost a wife and a brother in eight months, and the prince he served was about to marry a woman who, by every account that survives, was indifferent to music.
Bach would later call her eine amusa – a wife with no taste for the art on which her husband and his Kapellmeister had built their daily lives together. He was a Lutheran widower with four children in a Calvinist court town that travellers passing through on the Hamburg coaches mockingly called Cow Cöthen, with no good Lutheran school for his sons and no second prospect lined up.
Looking back nearly a decade later, in a 1730 letter to his old Lüneburg schoolmate Georg Erdmann, Bach would tell the story of his Cöthen years as ending despite his expectations. He had once expected, he wrote, ‘to end my days’ there – Leopold had been a music-loving prince, and the position had seemed a life’s work. But the structure he had counted on was closing, and the prince he had bet his life on was a sick man.
Bach's Brandenburg Concertos... taking a long shot
Bach’s response was a kind of self-delusion – what Joan Didion, three centuries later, would name in The Year of Magical Thinking. Her memoir of the year after her husband’s sudden death describes a mind that could not accept what had happened, behaving as if the lost reality might still be recovered. Bach, in his own register, did something like it. Death was everywhere in his century and he knew it intimately; it deadened nothing.
Grief does to people what it does, in any age. He could not function inside the collapse he saw coming, so he behaved as if the Margrave’s polite request for some compositions might somehow open the door he needed opened – even though he had no Kapellmeistership to give. He would do the same thing again nine years later in the Erdmann letter, writing to an old schoolmate with no documented capacity to help, asking whether there might be a post available somewhere. Bach in 1721 was eight months out from Maria Barbara’s burial.
He took the long shot. He chose six concertos from the music he had written at Cöthen and earlier – works he had refined over years of writing for one of the finest small orchestras in Germany. And then, refusing to delegate the labour to a copyist, he wrote out the entire fair-copy score in his own hand, in the immaculate calligraphic script he reserved for his most important documents – weeks of evenings, by candlelight, after his Cöthen duties were done. He made errors as he went, because he was revising and copying simultaneously; the corrections are still visible on the manuscript.
Bach's Brandenburg Concertos... music of the highest quality
He addressed the Margrave in the elaborate, formal third person the period demanded, calling the music une petite portion des talens que le Ciel m’a donnés pour la Musique – ‘a small portion of the talents which heaven has given me for music’. It was the standard self-deprecating formula of court correspondence. ‘Bach’s effusive language was so over the top,’ Colleen Wheelahan, morning host on SiriusXM Symphony Hall, has observed. ‘He humbly presents the concertos, praying the Margrave will not judge their imperfections.’
One detail in the manuscript points unmistakably to deliberate display. The Fifth Concerto contains a written-out virtuoso harpsichord cadenza – one of the earliest of its kind in European music. Bach had written an earlier version of the work, with a cadenza of 18 bars. For the Margrave’s copy, he replaced it with a new cadenza of 65 bars – close to a third of the entire movement. Christoph Wolff, in Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, writes that Bach made the expansion ‘in order to impress the dedicatee and to accentuate the composer’s virtuosic prowess’. He was begging, in immaculate calligraphy, in courtly French, with the most ambitious music he had ever written, to a recipient whose taste was real but whose power was not.
Christian Ludwig's musical court
The annotator Howard Posner, writing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has called what Bach sent to Berlin ‘a monumentally inept piece of self-promotion’. The judgment is harsh, and recent scholarship gives it pushback. For decades, the picture of Christian Ludwig’s musical establishment rested on a single 1734 record – a payment for mourning clothes at his funeral, listing six musicians by name. Pegah’s article, drawing on archival work under the Bach-Archiv Leipzig’s Expedition Bach research project (2006–11), has revised the picture substantially.
He documents that by 1716 the Margrave was employing his own chamber musicians, who performed at royal events alongside the Queen’s establishment – a 1716 court report noted that the King ‘keeps none in his pay’. By the early 1730s, a Bayreuth chamberlain visiting Berlin recorded that at the Margrave’s residence ‘there were weekly concerts and assemblies’. His Kapelle, led by the gambist Johann Christoph Emmerling, also mounted at least one musical-theatrical production at his country estate at Malchow in June 1723, with a famous touring soprano from Wolfenbüttel among the performers.
A gamble falls on deaf ears
The music wasn’t wrong for the recipient. Bach knew what the Margrave collected, and the establishment that would receive the manuscript was capable of engaging with it. What was wrong was the structure: a Hohenzollern younger brother had taste, a Kapelle, even occasional opera – but no Kapellmeistership to offer, no court to staff, no formal position to convert appreciation into the kind of employment Bach needed. He signed it Jean Sebastien Bach, in the French manner, and sent it to Berlin. Then he waited.
No letter, no commission, no acknowledgment of any kind survives. The manuscript went into the Margrave’s library – a kind of dead letter office for the most ambitious music Bach had ever written – and stayed there, unattributed, until his death 13 years later bundled it anonymously into a lot of concertos by various masters. By every ordinary measure it should have ended there: an unanswered application filed and forgotten, the composer’s name unnoted.
A new hope
That it did not is a matter of accident – a pupil who recognised the hand, a Prussian princess who kept the collection, a librarian who opened the bound volume in 1849 and knew what he was holding. The Brandenburgs are now among the most played instrumental music of the Baroque. For all his hopes and industry, Bach never got the job. But we kept the application.
