Hoopskirts, Coffee, and the Changing Musical Prospects of the Bach Women

On June 15, 1721, nineteen-year-old Anna Magdalena Wilcke took up her post as Hofsängerin (court singer) in the central German principality of Cöthen. Hired by the music-loving Prince Leopold and having been recruited for the position by the Kapellmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach, she became the second-highest-paid member of the court’s musical establishment. Anna Magdalena’s salary of 300 talers amounted to twice that of the best paid of the other court musicians, with the exception of the Kapellmeister, who received only 100 talers more than she. Having recently left her parents’ household in nearby Weissenfels, Anna Magdalena had established her professional status and economic independence. Five months after taking up her new post, she made what must have seemed to her another wise move up the musical ladder of success: she married the Kapellmeister, sixteen years her senior. Their combined salary of 700 talers amounted to a third of the prince’s entire musical budget.

Thirteen years later and well after Anna Magdalena’s official retirement from her position as court singer, Johann Sebastian Bach directed in Leipzig the first performance of the Coffee Cantata (bwv 211), a vehicle for a highly skilled soprano in conditions that Bach scholarship has generally assumed spoke against public participation by women. Further, the work’s libretto called into question the notion that women might articulate a position of independence through engagement with the fashionable world and a concomitant disavowal of paternal authority. This was a musical entertainment that staged family tension, patriarchal anxiety, and the problem of unwed daughters—all serious themes, notwithstanding the veneer of humor generated by its lampooning of contemporary consumer culture and in particular the fashion for coffee and hoopskirts. As I will propose here, the Coffee Cantata might well have offered a dramatic role to one of the composer’s own daughters; if so, the work reflects an ambiguous light both onto the female musicians of the Bach family and, more generally, onto women and performance in mid-eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany.

Musical Example 1.

J. S. Bach, “Güldner Sonnen frohe Stunden” (bwv 173a/2), mm. 7–9.

The women of the Bach family were indeed excellent singers, and we can get a sense for just how fine a musician Anna Magdalena must have been from the congratulatory cantata “Durchlauchster Leopold” (Most Serene Highness Leopold, bwv 173a); the piece was composed by her husband in honor of their mutual employer and first performed on December 10, 1722, little more than a year after Cöthen’s leading musical pair had celebrated their wedding. The cantata includes two soprano arias for the court’s star singer: the first, “Güldner Sonnen frohe Stunden” (Happy hours of golden sunshine), is one of the most graceful of Johann Sebastian’s creations, requiring poise, finesse, and agility. In delivering the capering triplets and jaunty melodic leaps, Anna Magdalena would have displayed her gallant musical refinements and technical accomplishment

Musical Example 2.

J. S. Bach, “So schau dies holden Tages Licht” (bwv 173a/2), mm. 66–76.

(ex. 1). The second aria, “So schau dies holden Tages Licht” (Look upon this day’s lovely light), allowed even greater opportunities for her to exercise her virtuosity; her voice would have soared with optimism and surety in the passage-work, just as it had to hold steadfast in the long sustained notes auguring Prince Leopold’s enduring happiness (ex. 2).

In order to be able to perform these arias, Anna Magdalena had been well trained by members of the musical Wilcke family; whether her mother or trumpeter father played a more central role in her musical upbringing is unknown, but her education in the family craft of music would have begun in early girlhood. A contemporary engraving of a female singer found in Johann Weigel’s Musicalisches Theatrum (fig. 1) from around 1720 makes clear that the virtuoso female singer was a literate musician who was adept at coordinating...