Meine Freundin, du bist schön

Today the family name Bach is synonymous with Baroque music. All told, the Bach clan included more than 50 professional musicians and composers—mostly men, but a few women as well—born between Hans Bach (c. 1575) and the end of the 18th century. And above all others, we revere Johann Sebastian Bach as the highest expression of techniques that had been generations in the making. But when Bach died, he was not the most famous musician of the day (that was Telemann), nor was he even the most famous Bach (that honor fell to son #2, Carl Philip Emanuel). This is not to diminish Sebastian’s genius, but rather to situate him in the midst of a musical lineage that neither began nor ended with him.
The earliest representative on tonight’s program, J. Christoph Bach (b. 1642), enjoyed great fame during his lifetime. He worked as organist and court musician in Eisenach, the birthplace in 1685 of his younger cousin Sebastian. Christoph is an interesting personality: ambitious, itinerant, often conflicting with his employers, who in turn were utterly devoted to him. For instance, rather than let him be wooed by a beautiful organ and job offer in another town, the town elders raised funds to build Christoph a new one right in Eisenach! Perhaps his best known extant piece, Meine Freundin, Du bist schön, is a secular wedding cantata. We hear the soprano solo, a passacaglia (repeated bass progression) celebrating passion with the tender refrain: “My friend is mine, and I am his.”

(c) Jason Stell