BACH IN MOHLHAUSEN: ENCOUNTER WITH PIETISM

JOHANN SEBASTIAN began his duties in Mühlhausen in a buoyant mood of joy. He was full of zeal to establish his musical ideals and confident of his powers to achieve them. His newly-won happiness in marriage added to his expectations for a rewarding life in Mühlhausen. His first apprentice, Johann Martin Schubart, and he set about to collect and copy all kinds of music that they expected to perform in the church.

This enthusiasm was somewhat unrealistic, however, in view of the conditions at St. Blasius Church. Bach must have foreseen the opposition he was to encounter there, for the Pietists’ domination of the church was well known and of long standing. His numerous relatives in Thuringia surely warned him of the musical situation before he took the post. His predecessor, Johann Georg Ahle, had held his position of organist for 30 years and had openly proclaimed alliance with Pietism and shared its opposition to concerted music.¹ Bach’s own church in Arnstadt had earlier vigorously suppressed the unorthodox pietistic music Adam Drese had tried to introduce, and memories of this experience must have forewarned Bach of the effects of Pietism on music. But Bach evidently underestimated these, and overestimated his powers as a musical missionary. He had to learn from bitter firsthand experience the full import of pietistic thinking, its threats to the essence of Lutheran dogma, and its destructive influence in music.

Bach and his apprentice managed to bring together an impressive repertoire but encountered only stubborn opposition from the pietistic clergy in their attempts to perform it. During his stay in Mühlhausen, Bach wrote a few cantatas but only one of them was ever performed at the church. The cantata (No. 131) “Aus der Triefe rufe xch, Herr” (From the Depth I Call, Oh Lord) probably was written in commemoration of a great municipal fire such as the one that ravaged the town the year before Bach arrived, but was not performed at St. Blasius; Georg Christian Eilmar, pastor of the rival church in Mühlhausei}, is believed to have written the libretto for this piece. Cantata No. 196, “Der Herr denket an uns” (The Lord Thinketh of Us), a wedding cantata, may have been performed in Arnstadt on the occasion of Johann Lorenz Stauber’s marriage to Regina Wedemann, but was not heard publicly in Mühlhausen. (Stauber had married Bach and Maria Barbara.)

The only cantata by Bach that St. Blasius allowed to be heard was actually commissioned by the city council to commemorate its yearly election. The cantata—then called Das Rathsstuckchen (the little council piece)—had a religious title “Gott ist Mein Konig” (God is my King) and Eilmar had chosen and arranged a text based on Bible passages, from the books of Samuel, the Pentateuch of Moses, and the Psalms,² appropriately alluding to the retirement of the aged councilors. In a joyous last movement Bach orchestrated the text welcoming the “new regime” with great fanfare of three trumpets, tympani, two flutes, two oboes, a bassoon, a string ensemble, chorus, and the usual organ accompaniment.

On the fourth of February the six burgomasters and 42 councilors— the Rathsherren— marched in a long procession from the Rathhaus to the Church of St. Mary to hear the Rathsstuckchen, along with an elaborate program of sermons, hymns, and blessings. The entire town watched from wooden scaffolds erected for the occasion as the gold- and fur-bedecked dignitaries passed by, the retiring council in the lead, followed by their younger replacements and then by all the civil servants clad in their special festive colors. The assembly moved in formation in front of the church to take the oaths of loyalty under the open sky. The bakers’ guild presented the councilors with a huge cake and the festivities concluded with the traditional banquets and merriment.³

The city went to the expense of printing Bach’s cantata, the only one that was printed during Bach’s entire lifetime.⁴ In this way the city of Mühlhausen openly expressed its pride in the talented young composer residing in their community. But though the Rathsstuckchen cantata was performed in St. Blasius Church on the Sunday following the great inauguration festival, the congregation who employed Bach was not willing to bestow any further tribute for the achievements of their organist. Instead the church was guilty of thwarting the genius in his endeavors of art and religious conscience.

St. Blasius Church benefited from Bach’s guidance in the reconstruction of their organ, an enterprise the new city council approved on February 21, 1708, two weeks after their inauguration. Bach’s entire report of the organ has been preserved and is a valuable guide to his conception of his favorite instrument. He used the organ in Eisenach, which was on a par with those in Hamburg and Lübeck,⁵ as his standard of comparison. But aside from this contribution to the improvement of music in St. Blasius, the church and its pastor refused Bach’s every attempt to use his great musical gifts for their services of worship. Every aspect of religious life in the church was subjected to the test of rigid pietistic thought. The freedom and variety that Bach believed essential to well-regulated church music was beyond the confines of Pietism and usually directly opposed to it.

Mühlhausen: A Center for Religious Controversy

Mühlhausen had never been a stronghold of Lutheran orthodoxy. During the early days of the Reformation the ancient city was one of the main seats of Anabaptism, a close relation of Pietism. Anabaptists boldly demanded separation of church and state, in spite of the inherent threat to the established order of medieval society in this cause. Their main doctrinal dissent involved infant baptism. Anabaptists— and Pietists—also sought subjective means of attaining spirituality, rather than adherence to proper doctrinal dictates. Luther, Zwingli, and the Catholics were united in opposition to the sect, and all joined in the recommendation of the death penalty for practicers of the faith. When one of the more fanatical leaders, Thomas Münzer, instigated the Saxon peasants to revolt he was captured, beheaded, and his head displayed upon a spear as an example to the citizenry.

In Bach’s time, a century later, the democratic government of Mühlhausen⁶ reversed this harsh treatment of religious dissidents and took a very tolerant, even benign attitude toward Pietism. The sect, founded by Johann Arndt and Philipp Jakob Spener, was officially regarded by Lutherans as descried heterodoxy if not a heresy. The Pietists, like the Anabaptists, attached more importance to the personal experience of spiritual illumination than to passive submission to a doctrinal code of behavior. Both deviated from the orthodox Lutheran conceptions of good works and justification. Violent controversy raged wherever Lutheranism and Pietism came in contact, the old school claiming that spirituality was too lofty for human judgment and the Pietists maintaining that the orthodox alternative was merely frozen, intellectualized dogmatism.

Bach’s church, St. Blasius, was led by a preacher who openly confessed his leaning toward Pietism. Johann Adolph Frohne had inspired his congregation since 1691 with his sincere piety in an environment of religious peace. In 1699 Georg Christian Eilmar took the pulpit at St. Mary’s church in Mühlhausen and at once launched a violent attack upon Frohne. The vicious fulminations from the pulpits of both the Pietist and the passionate orthodox compelled the intervention of the magistrates, who called for an end to these impious expressions of strife and hatred.

When Bach arrived in Mühlhausen the disputes between the two preachers had flared up again. Some say that Bach sided with Eilmar, but such conjectures are based on rather flimsy evidence of any formal alliance. Bach’s first-born child was baptized by Eilmar, but this only shows that he wanted a recognized orthodox to perform this service. As mentioned above, Eilmar also wrote the libretti for the few cantatas that Bach composed in Mühlhausen. The austerity of these libretti, however, can hardly have had a deep appeal to Bach, who worked with Salamo Franck soon after he left Mühlhausen and all his life deeply admired his poetic texts. We really do not have enough evidence to call Bach’s association with Eilmar a friendship.

Pietism and Orthodoxy

Biographers have been puzzled by the contradiction between Bach’s confessed orthodoxy and his apparently strong pietistic leanings.⁷ The contents of his library included several works by renowned Pietists, and the libretti for his numerous cantatas often show a tendency toward the sentimental effusion typical of pietistic poetry. Even the profound sentiment of his music has been related to a pietistic mode of thought. All of this evidence stands very close to Bach’s central commitments to life and work. His library provides a good reflection of Bach’s viewpoint since it was collected when printed matter was still scarce. His books obviously were carefully selected to serve as guidance and affirmation of his theological convictions. And Bach’s conception of music as a tool of religion demanded that he carefully weigh the meaning and emphasis of the words he used as well as the emotional impact of the music. Scholars were correct in finding Bach close to pietistic thought in vital areas of his life and work, but they neglected to investigate the nature of the relationship between Pietism and orthodox Lutheranism. To what extent do they represent opposing points of view? The following brief examination of works, both pietistic and orthodox, in Bach’s library seems to suggest that confusion and haggling over minute points were more typical of this religious controversy than outright contradiction.

The 81 volumes of Bach’s library, all dealing with religious subjects, form a distinct unit very much reflective of his thinking. The only historical work, Josephus’ History of the Jews, supplements a theological viewpoint. All the other books are divided between those of pietistic leaning and standard works on orthodox dogma. Along with Luther’s complete works in two editions as the nucleus, the collection as a whole serves as a commentary or reference source to Lutheranism, even the ancient Josephus and the medieval Tauler and Thomas a Kempis.

Most of the pietistic, or allegedly pietistic books (with the possible exception of Arndt’s Vom Wahren Christenthum) were acquired after the Mühlhausen period, in editions of between 1723 and 1741.⁸ Only the volumes by the two most celebrated Pietists and founders of the sects bear earlier dates—1606 to 1609 (Arndt) and 1714 (Spener). Possibly Bach began his study of this divisive controversy with these works and later pursued his investigation with the works of lesser figures in the movement.

The best known of these Pietist authors was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705). Bach owned his Gerechte Lifer wider das Antichristliche Pabsttum (Justified Zeal Against the Antichristian Papacy), and was probably acquainted with his main work, the Pia Desideria, a sensational book in which he condemns orthodox theologians for their hatred of those who practice any deviation from accepted forms. He writes that what they mistake for faith is “nothing but human imagination and an exercise of the intellect,” and that of “the true heavenly light and life of faith they are entirely oblivious.”⁹ Spener never attacked the orthodox creed, always remaining true to his “dear Luther,” but he did warn against endless disputations, which often led to the neglect of true obligations toward the congregations. While theologians imagined themselves godly and blessed when they had proved the damnation of a colleague for a creedal error, the true test of a man’s faith must always be his life and conduct.

An earlier protagonist of Pietism, Johann Arndt (1555-1621), had first inspired Spener. We find a copy of his widely read Vom wahren Christenthum (Of True Christianity) in Bach’s library. In this work he reveals his mysticism and revolts against intellectual polemics. The book, appearing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, already accused the Lutheran clergy of lip service, and advocated a return to a life of true self-denial. He called them by a coarse German word, Maulchristenthum, for which there is no adequate translation. Translated literally, it means Christianity of the mouth, but maul indicates the mouth of a ferocious animal. This dreamer and ecstatic, who leaned toward the mysticism of medievals like Tauler, Thomas a Kempis, and others, remained an enthusiastic admirer and adherent of Luther and never questioned the orthodox documents of his faith—the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord. Nevertheless, for his attack on the clergy he was subjected to the same calumny as Spener. Both were accused of all the usual heresies—Papism, Calvinism, Flacianism, Enthusiasticism, Pelagianism, Wegelianism, and possibly other offshoots.

The authors of most of Bach’s books are, though strictly orthodox, not primarily polemical. One of the most exemplary dogmaticians of orthodox Lutheran theology, Johann Gerhard (1582-1637), was a lifelong enthusiast for Arndt. Gerhard had studied under Leonhard Hutter (whose “purest milk” of orthodoxy Bach had imbibed in school) and was renowned as one of the most solid and safest exponents of the faith. But since mysticism had always been suspect—as’too personal and defiant of established orthodoxy—Gerhard was strongly chastised for his association with Arndt. The Protestants had no more love for Spener and Arndt than the Catholic church had for Meister Eckhardt. The book that Bach owned—his Schola Pietatis oder Uebung der Gottseligkeit (School of Piety or Exercise in Godliness)—was primarily devotional. His two main theological works, Loci Theologici and Confessio Catholica, together with Chemnitz’ Examen Concilü Tridentini (which Bach owned) are regarded as the most important justification of Lutheran dogma.

Bach must have been fully aware of the great difference between the living word of Luther and the intellectual prattle of the theologians. The fact that he owned two editions of Luther’s complete works shows that he valued these most of all. And indeed, Luther and the Bible formed the core of his erudition, constant sources of reference for purity of creed as well as personal inspiration. He must have agreed with the Pietists in their attack upon the cold intellectuality and vicious militancy of the doctrinaires. This pedantic, intellectual school of theologians was not created directly by Luther. Melanchthon began a long line of Lutheran theologians intent on formulation and clarification. In a sense Melanchthon became the corruptor of the faith since he fathered that renewed Scholasticism that Luther despised.

But Bach certainly was aware of the limits and dangers of pietistic subjectivity. He owned four volumes of sermons by one of the most fanatic Pietists of his own time. August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) drew people from distant places with his passionate sermons. He was involved in sensational controversies with the universities of Leipzig and Erfurt and helped to expel the rationalistic philosopher Christian Wolff from the University of Halle. Francke deserves to be cited as the prototype of the Pietists who were fanatical in their insistence on personal experience of rebirth. His puritanical condemnation of all natural enjoyments was also more severe than his predecessors’. From the time of his great “rebirth” in his middle twenties, he held all ambition, honors, respect of the “world,” riches, and welfare, and all outer, worldly enjoyment in utter contempt.¹⁰ By these words he betrayed an aspect of Pietism contrary to the healthy ideas of Luther, and even of Spener, and it was here that Bach’s sympathy with Pietism must have reached its limits. Bach was surely not a puritan.

Among Francke’s large following of disciples is Johann Jacob Rambach, two of whose sermons are found in Bach’s library. Rambach studied at the University of Halle under Francke and his friends Lange and Breithaupt. After Francke’s death in 1727 Rambach became professor of theology at the University of Halle but was badgered by Pietists for proofs of “penitential experiences.” The hypocrisy of this fanaticism disgusted Rambach, and he departed from Halle rather than satisfy them. He was primarily a poet and wrote elegies, cantatas, madrigals, sonnets, and spiritual songs. One of Bach’s librettists, Menantes (a pen name of Christian Friedrich Hunold), published a collection of the Pietist’s poems, together with his own, and Bach’s interest in Rambach may well have been aroused by his poetry.

Three other authors in Bach’s library deserve mention. Johann Mattaeus Meyfart (born in 1590), Heinrich Müller (born in 1631), and Christoph Scheibler (1598-1653), all show the tendency toward a gentle mysticism, together with an inclination to asceticism, so typical of Pietism. Although Scheibler wrote many philosophical works in which he took a stand against rationalism, his Aurifonia Theologica, owned by Bach, was free from philosophical and scholastic terminology. Heinrich Müller has been called a forerunner of Pietism.¹¹ Bach owned his Ceistliche Erquickungsstunden (Hours of Spiritual Refreshment), which is full of tasteless, sentimental figures of speech found also in pietistic poetry and much of German literature of that time. He advises pastors, “Preachers are wet nurses of the congregation; they must give healthy and sweet milk; they must first taste the aliment of the divine Word, they must masticate, digest, and transform it into life.”¹²

We cannot be as sure of Bach’s reaction to or acceptance of the mysticism of the Pietists as we are of his agreement with their distrust of dogmatism and his objections to their disdain for worldly pleasures. Bach has been called a mystic. His understanding of the meaning and personal import of mysticism, however, was conditioned more by the words of a medieval Catholic than by the books and lives of Pietists. His possession of the sermons of Johannes Tauler (13007-1361) is a surprising contrast in the fairly uniform content of the rest of his library.

Bach’s understanding of Tauler was conditioned by Luther’s conception of him and no one in Bach’s time had an objective, historical estimate of Tauler’s philosophy. The edition of 1720,¹³ which Bach owned, is particularly interesting because the some 2,000 double columns include not only the sermons of Tauler, “written for all Sundays and Festive days throughout the entire year,” but also has “comments by Dr. Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Johann Arndt and the testimony of other blessed teachers . . . ,” and a preface by Philipp Spener. Other works by Tauler in this edition are “The Imitation of the Poor Life of Christ” (in two parts, 279 pages), Medulla Animae (The Marrow of the Soul), Teutsche Theologia (German Theology) with prefaces by Luther and Arndt, a German translation of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, and two other works by Tauler. His biography and two books by Luther’s father confessor, Johannis van Staupitz, complete the contents.

The Teutsche Theologia, the most speculative work in the entire tome, was discovered by Luther in 1518 as an anonymous manuscript, which he attributed to Tauler.¹⁴ In a preface Luther says that he “learned more from it and what God, Christ, Man, and all things are, than from any other work he knew, except the Bible and St. Augustine.” Spener, although he praised the work, believed it was the work of some writer later than Tauler.

The mysticism of Teutsche Theologia is definitely more speculative than that of either Tauler or Thomas a Kempis. The entire book is pregnant with veiled philosophical speculations, probably based on mystic thinkers like Meister Eckhart, who received his training with the Scholastics of Paris. It speaks of the Perfect and the imperfect, of the Uncreated and the creature as the “Schein,” the semblance, the mere appearance of the former, having no true being other than in the perfect, being in itself a mere chance.¹⁵ These metaphysical speculations resound with strong Thomistic echoes; they also foreshadow idealistic Hegelianism as well as the existentialism of Tillich.

Bach must have read the work with awe, since it was so highly recommended by Luther, but the musician, entirely untrained in philosophy, probably felt bewilderment more. One wonders how he reacted, for example, to those strange, half Neo-Platonic, half Thomistic speculations on the Fall of Adam as a diffusion of the particular from the universal, as if it were less an historical event within time than a timeless, existential condition of mankind. Though he objected to the instrumentality of that “heathen” Aristotle, Luther had received enough training in the Scholastics’ work to grasp the mysticism of Tauler. However, modern scholars¹⁶ feel that Luther misunderstood Tauler, that he saw in him a forerunner of his own evangelism and reform. He read Tauler between 1515 and 1518, while he was still a monk and stood closer to medieval asceticism. Arndt more readily recognizes his weak points: “There are many unknown weeds in the forest; one must pass them by, and let them stand untouched.” Spener discovers several “papistic errors,” in the medievalist whom Luther believed to be antipapistic at heart.¹⁷ The Pietist forgives and overlooks these because in other places Tauler “often offers at your disposal the most glorious arguments by which they must inevitably be defeated.”¹⁸

In the end Luther rejected more of asceticism than the Pietists were later willing to give up. He was far less a puritan than August Hermann Francke and his Halle school. His asceticism was tempered by a belief in the reconciliation of the world and fruits of nature with the spiritual life. The mysticism of the Pietists retained, at least in its prescriptions for life in the world, much of the coldness of the medieval monk’s withdrawal, however much the sect would deny the theology of the monastics. In ideological conflicts like these, Bach undoubtedly turned to Luther. Certainly all we can glean from his personal life and his music points toward his love of rather than contempt for the good things and joy of the world.

Bach, who never totally rejected any musical style and was always ready to give credit to a work of the slightest value, was equally just and sober in evaluating the merits of the Pietists. To say he was a Pietist at heart is equivalent to saying he was a pious, warm-hearted Christian at heart, a good Lutheran. Bach was always more interested in a moving sermon than in a sophisticated defense of the dogma and selected for his library an overwhelming majority of collections of appealing sermons, many of which were by Pietists.

Pietism in Music

When the Pietists allowed their puritan, ascetic, subjective tendencies to encroach on music, Bach could no longer take such a tolerant attitude. He could not suffer their condemning verdict on the use of instrumental chamber (secular) music in church, or their ridicule of coloratura singing, which Spener likens to “outbursts of laughter by Italian sopranists.”¹⁹ These Pietists considered such elements “carnal,” “worldly,” and destructive of spirituality. They were unaware of the sublimizing power of a rare artist, as Bach was, illumined by Luther’s transcendental faith, who could transform the secular into the spiritual. The Pietists ignored Luther’s reconciliation of spirit and nature, but Bach had learned at the organ benches of Buxtehude and Bohm that worldly elements like dances, ornaments borrowed from secular music, and virtuosic display on manuals and pedals alike, could be wedded to and add depth to spiritual chorales.

Bach was no puritan. He loved fun, wrote many dances, smoked his big pipe, and drank his beer. A menu which has been preserved shows that on occasion he could enjoy a more than hearty meal.²⁰ And his 21 children were not born from ascetic abstention. His rollicking fun in the Coffee Cantata and the Peasant Cantata are certainly not the products of a puritan. The Peasant Cantata is reminiscent of the rustic ruggedness of Luther’s frank, uninhibited language. Francke condemns the demand of “The world” for any Ergotzung des Gemuths (amusement, delight, or recreation of the spirit); Bach, for his part, inscribes his partitas with the legend, “The art of clavier playing, consisting of Preludes, Allemands, Courants, Sarabands, Gigues, Menuets, and other Gallantries: composed for lovers of music for the delight of their spirit [zur Gemuths Ergoetzung]. von Joh. Seb. Bach . . .”

Spener, like Luther, judged the morality of worldly enjoyments according to the individual case, and did not condemn enjoyment as such,²¹ but the Pietists of the Halle school were fanatical and their stringent puritanism inevitably was as detrimental to art as it was to science. When austerity cuts off the life-stream by shunning the world and its natural enjoyments, art is bound to die. The hymns that Francke and other Pietists did compose are marked by bad taste, and Bach never used them in his services. This is the crux of Bach’s objection to Pietism. Instead of using music to enrich their spiritual lives, Pietists betrayed religion by outlawing music.

Their worst offence was to replace the sturdy and classical Lutheran chorale, Bach’s musical Bible, with sentimental hymns. Francke, Nicolaus Ludwig, Count of Zinzendorf (1700-1760), Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen (1670-1739), and at times even Spener composed hymns with insipid texts and music of weak rhythmical and melodic texture. They abandoned a musical heritage deeply rooted in Christian history. Many melodies stem from Gregorian music, and several are attributed to St. Ambrose (340-397). The hymn “Herr Gott, dich lob en wir” (Lord God, We Praise Thee) is held to be Luther’s translation of Te Deum Laudamus, a hymn ascribed to St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, and probably dating back even further.²² The early Christian congregations may well have sung it. Countless folksongs have grown out of these venerable melodies, and the Lutheran chorale contains ninth and tenth century tropes and sequencies of the monks of St. Gall, and Meistersinger and Minnesinger songs of all kinds.²³

The Lutheran chorale then is not a creation of a person but of the collective genius of many centuries. Again and again these basic melodies appear in sacred as well as secular music, each generation setting them in their own style and modality, without appreciably changing the original structure of the melodies. Bach set these tunes in the harmonization of his time, which was the major and minor mode as we use it, but he left the melody nearly untouched. We can lift the melodies out of the harmonic frames of all his chorale-preludes and find their age-old modal construction—the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Ionian, and Aeolean.

Bach’s fidelity to these venerable tunes has deeper roots than a personal predeliction or mere conventionality. The hymns were part of a sacred tradition related to the Augustinian doctrine of free will. The entire theology, as Bach learned it from Leonhard Hutter’s catechism, is the exposition of this idea that Grace is “not accomplished by our natural forces,” not “through our merits,” but is a gift of God. In the pietistic attitude toward music Bach saw the divine Will subjectified, deprived of its divine origin and debased to a merely personal, psychological level. Bach interpreted his own supreme technique as a gift of God: “I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.” His humility had its source in the philosophy that Arndt summarized so well in the Teutsche Theologia: “man shall not attribute anything that is good in him to himself, but to God.”²⁴

Bach’s awareness of God in music was one with his perception of God through his faith. Illumination and justification depended on God and not on any emotional state of mind. In essence the Pietist hymn writers were putting themselves above God by elevating their emotional responses and the art inspired by them. Their substitution of inspirations of the moment for the classical chorale seemed a sacrilege to both Bach’s religious beliefs and his philosophy of art. This pietistic element of subjectivity in the composition of hymns and the puritanical attitude toward figured music drove Bach from Mühlhausen as soon as other opportunities presented themselves.

Departure for Weimar

Bach’s desire to leave Mühlhausen evidently came to the ears of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar, for the powerful prince and lover of music made an offer to Bach, which he accepted immediately. Bach’s letter of resignation, dated June 25,1709, was addressed to the burgomaster, the town councilors, the “highly learned, the highly and very wise gentlemen” (probably teachers and professional men), and to the “highly gracious patrons and gentlemen.” He expresses polite gratitude for their having allowed him to enjoy a better subsistence than before. Then, in one of those interminable, labyrinthine German sentences of that period (this one contains 135 words!) he tells the council that he has not been able to honor God with a well-regulated church music,”²⁵ an end toward which he has striven all his life.²⁶ In the same sentence he describes his efforts to promote music in the surrounding villages, where “it often excels what we produce at St. Blasius”; that he has at his own cost acquired a good repertoire of music; that he has done his duty toward the upkeep and repair of the organ; that it has been impossible to accomplish these things without opposition; and that there are no signs of improvement in the future, although some souls in this church would rejoice at a change. He adds still further that however simply he lives he does not earn enough. In the next paragraph he announces his decision to join the court-chapel of His Serene Highness of Saxe-Weimar, where he will be able to “pursue the objective of [his] ultimate aim, [the] rightly well-conceived church music” (die Wohlzufassenden Kirchen Musik).²⁷

In requesting his dismissal, he offers the city of Mühlhausen his services, and indeed, he was released on the condition that he would continue to supervise the reconstruction of the organ. Bach kept his word. In 1709 he returned from Weimar to take part in the Reformation Festival and played a prelude to Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”²⁸

Bach’s statement of resignation is valuable for the confession of musical faith it contains. Undoubtedly he had been forming his ideal of a well-organized program for church music for some time. Throughout his life his striving toward this goal influenced his moves and decisions. “Rightly-conceived church music” forms the key to understanding of Bach the man, the musical reformer, the fulfiller of Luther’s ideal. Although he had to wait 15 years before he could fully realize his ideal, at Leipzig, he never lost sight of it during his stays at the courts of Weimar and Kothen. Tragically the fulfillment of Luther’s musical ideals came too late. Leipzig was the only place where his “rightly-conceived church music” was heard, and with Bach’s death his music went into oblivion for an entire century.