Johann Ludwig Bach: Motets

Edited by Daniel R. Melamed

Ralph Branca and Johann Ludwig Bach

Ralph Branca pitched for 14 seasons in baseball’s Major Leagues, but he is remembered less for his own accomplishments than for his connection to another, now more famous player: Bobby Thompson. It was Thompson, of course, who hit a legendary three-run home run off Branca to clinch the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants in the ninth inning of the last game of a playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I thought of Ralph Branca several times in editing the motets of Johann Ludwig Bach for Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era. Branca came to mind because just as most baseball fans know his name only as the pitcher involved in Thompson's legendary home run, musicians tend to think of Johann Ludwig Bach, if they think of him at all, in relation to his famous cousin and contemporary Johann Sebastian. My time spent with Johann Ludwig's music has convinced me that Johann Ludwig was an interesting and gifted composer in his own right, but it also confirms that his connections with J. S. Bach are an important part of the interest he holds for us today.

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Johann Ludwig Bach was born near Eisenach in 1677. His common ancestor with Johann Sebastian was probably their great-great-grandfather Lips Bach (d. 1620), making them third cousins. Johann Ludwig spend almost his whole career in Meiningen, a small court in the principality of Saxe-Meiningen, rising in 1711 to the position of Capell­meister, a position he held until his death in 1731.

One of his two sons (both of whom were painters), Samuel Anton Bach, was a student at the Leipzig University along with C .P. E. Bach, and here we meet a connection to his famous relative: Samuel Anton was also a pupil of J. S. Bach, who was entrusted with his musical education. In fact, Johann Ludwig and Johann Sebastian are likely to have known each other from their earliest years, since their families lived and worked in a small area around Eisenach for many years. 

Johann Ludwig has an important place in early eighteenth-century music, because he was involved in the performance and composition of some of the earliest mixed-text cantatas of the so-called "Neumeister type." But if not for his famous cousin, posterity would hardly know about his cantata composing. Most of Johann Ludwig's surviving cantatas are transmitted only in scores and performing parts J. S. Bach prepared for performances during 1725-26 and later.

In fact, one of these cantatas, "Denn du wirst meine Seele nicht in der Hölle lassen" BWV 15, was attributed to Johann Sebastian for many years. Perhaps this is a somewhat backhanded compliment to Johann Ludwig, but an honor nonetheless—how many of us can claim a composition with a BWV number?

Johann Ludwig Bach, “Gedenke meiner, mein Gott” (no. 4), AmB 326, fol. 194, in the hand of the principal copyist of the Amalienbibliothek motet manuscripts. Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

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The motets in the central-German repertory are simple and direct music, designed for limited forces—voices and con­tinuo only, with the possibility of doubling instruments—in an age whose most advanced and ambitious sacred music was the vocal concerto. Their declamatory model is homophonic, their harmonic vocabulary is limited, and their approach to text expression and illustration is unsophisticated. Yet in the hands of a skilled composer like Johann Ludwig Bach, motets could be immensely effective in presenting biblical texts, chorales, and other strophic texts with great rhetorical force.

The present edition presents Johann Ludwig Bach's eleven known motets, eight of them published for the first time. Johann Ludwig brought to the motet excellent craftsmanship, a sense of harmonic surety, the ability to spin a short musical idea into an extended work, and skill at adapting textual and musical features of other kinds of vocal music (particularly the vocal concerto).

The high quality of these pieces and the musical imagination that Johann Ludwig shows in them are remarkable precisely because the motet in central Germany was an unadventurous genre. The shining exceptions, of course, are the motets of J. S. Bach, which stand above the contemporary repertory in the boldness of their construction and the degree of their composer's musical ambition in them. But outside of J. S. Bach's, Johann Ludwig's motets are arguably the best and most thought-provoking works in a repertory dominated by formulaic music designed for forces of limited abilities, the best of the contextual repertory around J. S. Bach's compositions. 

From Johann Ludwig's motets we can learn a lot about Johann Sebastian's. For example, we can better understand the significance of J. S. Bach's inclusion of two texts called "arias" in his motets, one at the end of "Komm, Jesu, komm" BWV 229, the other given to one of the choirs in the middle movement of "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" BWV 225. Johann Ludwig Bach's motets also include several poetic texts called "arias." Both composers were clearly interested in expanding the possibilities of the motet beyond biblical texts and chorales. J. S. Bach's "arias" are each for four voices, Johann Ludwig's for solo voice, but their musical aims are similar.

As if Johann Ludwig did not owe enough to his famous cousin, it is even possible that J. S. Bach was responsible for the survival of his motets. The principal source for all eleven, and the only source for nine, is a set of manuscripts from the collection of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. We do not know from what sources these copies were made, but there is circumstantial evidence that they may have originated with J. S. Bach. This would mean that J. S. Bach knew these works, but also that we have him to thank for their transmission and survival. That would make Johann Ludwig Bach's legacy even more dependent on his most famous relative.

Ralph Branca—still going strong—has made his peace with his place in baseball history. I have a feeling he’d understand Johann Ludwig Bach. 

Johann Ludwig Bach, “Uns ist ein Kind geboren” (no. 9), AmB 90, fol. 33, in the hand of the secondary copyist of the Amalienbibliothek motet manuscripts. Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

Daniel R. Melamed, a New York Yankee fan, is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Music, Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University and a master’s degree in performance from Stanford University. He is the author of books and articles on members of the Bach family as well as on Mozart, Lassus, and problems of attribution; and has edited vocal music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for Hänssler-Verlag, Carus-Verlag, and Harvard University. He serves as Vice President of the American Bach Society and as an editor of the Journal of Musicology. He recently conducted several works from the new edition with Ensemble Musical Offering of Milwaukee.