Bach family
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The Bach family was of importance in the history of music for nearly two hundred years. Four branches of it were known at the beginning of the 16th century, and in 1561 we hear of Hans Bach of Wechmar, a small town between Gotha and Arnstadt in Thuringia, who is believed to be the father of Veit Bach. The family genealogy, drawn up by Johann Sebastian Bach himself and completed by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, describes Veit, a baker and a miller, as the founder of the family, "whose zither must have sounded very pretty among the clattering of the mill-wheels". His son, Johannes (Hans) Bach, "der Spielmann", was the first professional musician of the family. Of Hans's large family the second son, Christoph, was the father of Johann Ambrosius who was, himself, the father of Johann Sebastian. Johann Ambrosius' eldest brother, Heinrich of Arnstadt, had two sons: Johann Michael and Johann Christoph, who are among the greatest of J. S. Bach's forerunners, Johann Christoph being once supposed to be the author of the motet, Ich lasse dich nicht ("I wrestle and pray"), formerly ascribed to Sebastian Bach and now confirmed to be his (BWV 159a). Another descendant of Veit Bach, Johann Ludwig, was admired more than any other ancestor by Sebastian, who copied twelve of his church cantatas and sometimes added work of his own to them.
The Bach family never left Thuringia until the sons of Sebastian went into a more modern world. Through all the misery of the peasantry at the period of the Thirty Years War this clan maintained its position and produced musicians who, however local their fame, were among the greatest in Europe. So numerous and so eminent were they that in Erfurt musicians were known as "Bachs", even when there were no longer any members of the family in the town. Sebastian Bach thus inherited the artistic tradition of a united family whose circumstances had deprived them of the distractions of the century of musical fermentation which in the rest of Europe had destroyed polyphonic music.
Of the seven children Sebastian had with his first wife only three survived him, two of whom had musical careers of their own: Wilhelm Friedemann and the aforementioned Carl Philipp Emanuel. Another two, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, were sons of his second marriage to Anna Magdalena Wilcken, herself a very gifted soprano and the daughter of the court trumpeter of Prince Saxe-Weissenfels.
References
External link
- Bach Family Tree (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/famtree.html)