Bach at home

Abstract

This brief text by the doyen of German social historians of music grows out of two interests: first, Salmen's long-standing investigations into the social status of professional musicians and, second, a fascination with J. S. Bach and his everyday life. The book includes a hundred pages of text, 30 pages with 15 primary sources ranging from secular cantata texts to archival sources on musicians’ pay and working conditions, a brief bibliography of often-cited literature, and 19 well-chosen images. Some of the images are well known, but most, including photos of period tobacco pipes and plates found at archaeological sites in Eisenach, are not. Salmen's goals are to reconstruct the material culture and everyday world in which Bach lived, the value of the monetary and in-kind payments he received, and the standard of living that those payments afforded him and his family (pp.6–7). In pursuit of these goals, he works with sources directly connected to Bach; with others on culinary practices and festive culture in Leipzig and the other places Bach lived; and with examples drawn from other musicians’ lives in towns around Lutheran Germany. The first group of sources is well known, but Salmen studies them in ways that produce some new insights. For example, he goes well beyond the usual brief mention of Bach's Leipzig service apartment in the St Thomas school to describe what was actually a full wing of the school building on five floors, with 15 rooms and further storage spaces, including two for beer (pp.13–14, 76). On Bach's surroundings, Salmen also offers valuable observations. Leipzig merchant Andreas Dietrich Apel's gardens just outside the city are familiar, but Salmen's description, and in particular the reproduction of an image in private hands (p.4), make clear how large and magnificent the gardens were. Salmen also offers detailed reconstructions of the dietary and social significance of beer and wine, and of the consumption of coffee and tobacco. On the subject of beer, for example, he does a good job of integrating the sub-topics of beer as a dietary staple, as a form of payment, as a social marker depending on its quality and relative to wine, and even how the so-called ‘beer fiddlers’ contributed to beer consumption and to the raising of taxes from that consumption.