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Within the mainstream of Bach studies, there has been, until recently, relatively little commentary on the manuscripts compiled in the Bach family that have since the Romantic period been known as the ‘notebooks’ for Anna Magdalena Bach. This compilation of solo keyboard pieces, along with a sprinkling of vocal works and the odd bit of pedagogical material, originates in two small bindings given by J S Bach to his young wife in the early years of their marriage. The second manuscript, lavishly bound with gilt edging, bears the date of 1725. This is the main ‘notebook’ that has entered the public imagination as providing an otherwise rare glimpse into the spirit of Bach’s domestic life, and indeed as it bears Anna Magdalena’s initials (in gold) on the front cover and contains mostly the writing of Bach’s second wife herself, it provides valuable insight into music-making by women in pre-Enlightenment Germany.

The remarkably high level of musical competence amongst amateur musicians in the German-speaking world was rather more pronounced in Protestant lands. This should come as no great surprise when we consider the standard of literacy amongst Lutherans not only in the cities but even in the countryside, and the role of communal artistic culture in civic life through the towns in Saxony and Thuringia. Whilst the social restrictions of the period denied women an equal place at most institutions of higher learning, one should not thus assume that they had no outlet for their intellectual and artistic yearnings. The level of technical prowess evinced in the 1725 notebook for Anna Magdalena testifies quite positively to her musical education and refinement. She was, after all, a professional singer in the employ of the prince of Anhalt-Köthen and a descendant on both sides of distinguished musicians at the courts of Zeitz and Weißenfels. The unfortunate notion of some musicologists—even those writing within the past generation or two who should know better—that the music in this collection was somehow a stretch of her abilities is frank misogyny.

Apart from early versions of two partitas (BWV827 and 830) and the first five of the French suites (BWV812-816), the keyboard pieces in Anna Magdalena’s notebook are a mishmash of short movements partly by J S Bach himself and otherwise by family friends and two of the family’s then-teenaged sons. There is even a piece by no less a distinguished contemporary than François Couperin—Les bergeries from the second book of harpsichord pieces (1716). For whatever reason, various minuets and polonaises make up the majority of pieces in the collection; their simple metres belie their great expressive potential. Of particular interest are the earliest compositions in the hand of Carl Philipp Emanuel, J S Bach’s second son by his first wife Maria Barbara. The two G minor polonaises (BWVAnh123 and 125) especially attest to the distinct broad brushstrokes of Emanuel’s musical character. What he was like as a teenager is anyone’s guess, but if the saying that one composes one’s personality is anything to go by, then he must have been quite a handful for a stepmother who with her notebook may very well have been involved in his training and artistic formation. Anna Magdalena must nonetheless have been a patient guide to the younger generation, as is equally clear from an untitled movement in F major (BWVAnh131, track 27) that most likely is the earliest exemplar of a composition by a juvenile Johann Christian, possibly supervised by one or both parents. A generally pedagogic theme likewise appears in a minuet in G major (track 18) ‘par Mons. Böhm’, most likely referring to the Lüneburg organist Georg Böhm who oversaw the young Sebastian Bach’s training in his late teenage years.

In addition to providing herself with worthy vehicles for her enthusiastic activity as a keyboard player, Anna Magdalena Bach also gave rein to her earlier professional vocation as a singer through copying out a number of works for solo voice, including voice/continuo versions of the opening recitative and aria from the cantata Ich habe genug (BWV82) and an aria from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s opera Diomedes (1718)—the justly famous ‘Bist du bei mir’ (track 22/40), long attributed to J S Bach himself. The presence of these and other songs poses a tantalizing question: did Anna Magdalena see in her notebook a parallel space for vicariously living the life of a professional singer that had been interrupted by the duties and status of a wife and mother? Did J S Bach sense early on a certain frustration in a wife whose musical ambitions demanded an outlet? He had, after all, chosen a mate who could match him in his devotion to God, family and art, and Anna Magdalena’s notebook suggests that Bach was a sympathetic and supportive spouse doing his best to give nourishment to his wife’s musical ambitions.

The presence in this collection of keyboard and vocal works of a sacred character has a meaning deeper than the frequently glib description of such music as minor and even imperfect corollaries to what is often imperfectly described as ‘personal devotion’. These arias and chorales (nine in total, if one includes the setting of Jesus, meine Zuversicht from the 1722 manuscript) are overwhelmingly concerned with themes of contentment (both spiritual and domestic) and with the inner peace felt by a soul on its arrival in the presence of a benevolent God. As the unknown author of the text for Gedenke doch, mein Geist, zurücke (track 36) states without any hint of despair: ‘Inscribe these words on my heart and breast: / Be mindful that you must die.’ Seeing as the attributions for these pieces to J S Bach are fairly airtight, it is not difficult to imagine such pieces as embodying musical and literary messages to one’s partner in marriage. Whilst the works in Anna Magdalena’s notebook are slight and of seemingly little value compared to the great suites and variations and virtuoso fantasies and fugues, they nonetheless manifest the entire spirit of a civilization whose values we would do well to understand with the same energy with which we master Bach’s considerable demands on our technical and expressive abilities. Moreover, each of these works is a precious artefact surviving from a woman of whom so little is known that we lack even a representation of her very physical likeness. To know her, and to know the man who was Johann Sebastian Bach, we could do worse than to try our hands and voices at the music they considered worthy enough to accompany their innermost thoughts and actions and which filled the four corners of their living spaces.

Bach: Notebooks for Anna Magdalena