He once pulled a sword on a bassoonist. The bassoonist had it coming.
The Instrument Itself
Johann Sebastian Bach’s speaking voice was, by most accounts, the opposite of his music: blunt, prickly, and frequently angry. The man who wrote the most sublimely ordered music in Western history spent an astonishing amount of his career in petty bureaucratic warfare with church councils, town officials, and incompetent musicians — and his letters on these subjects seethe with barely contained fury wrapped in the formal syntax of eighteenth-century German.
He spoke formal High German with a Thuringian accent — the dialect of Eisenach and the Saxon territories where he spent most of his life. His vocabulary divided cleanly into two registers: musical terminology, which he deployed with the precision of a surgeon, and bureaucratic complaint language, which he deployed with the precision of a lawyer who is right and knows it.
“Not sociable” was how acquaintances described him. He lived entirely through music. When he taught, he was patient but demanding — expecting from students the same obsessive precision he demanded from himself. When someone played badly, patience evaporated. The Geyersbach incident is the proof: in 1703, the eighteen-year-old Bach called a bassoonist a Zippelfagottist — roughly, a “nanny-goat bassoonist” — to his face, in front of other musicians. Geyersbach confronted him on a dark street with a stick. Bach drew his sword. They fought until passersby separated them. The church court blamed both of them. Bach was eighteen.
What the Record Shows
Bach’s letters to the Leipzig town council, the Erdmann letter (1730), and the Obituary written by his son C.P.E. Bach and former student Johann Friedrich Agricola (1754) provide the primary evidence. Court records from the Geyersbach incident survive. The Nekrolog (obituary) describes his temperament and working habits. Secondary accounts from students and colleagues, filtered through eighteenth-century biography conventions, fill in details about his personality and manner.
A Thuringian in God’s Service
Thuringian German — the dialect of central Germany, distinct from both the northern Low German and the southern Bavarian. Bach spent his entire life within a hundred-mile radius: Eisenach, Ohrdruf, Arnstadt, Weimar, Köthen, Leipzig. The accent was provincial by the standards of cosmopolitan courts. He didn’t care. He signed everything Soli Deo Gloria — “To God alone the glory” — and meant it. The music wasn’t for audiences. It was for God. The audiences got to overhear.
What He Actually Said
On his purpose: Soli Deo Gloria. (Written on every manuscript.)
On incompetent musicians: Called Geyersbach a Zippelfagottist — “nanny-goat bassoonist.”
On resources (to the Leipzig council): “The state of music is quite different from what it was, since our Identity has increased so much, and we have progressed so far in the art of music, that I need more capable musicians.”
Arnstadt, After Dark
Imagine Arnstadt, 1703. It’s dark. Bach is walking home from a rehearsal where his musicians played, once again, like amateurs. He’s eighteen, already the best organist in the region, and stuck conducting people who can barely keep time. A figure steps out of the shadows. It’s Geyersbach, the bassoonist he insulted. Geyersbach has a stick. He calls Bach a dirty dog. He swings.
Bach draws his sword. In the moonlight, they fight — the future composer of the Mass in B minor, age eighteen, making precise thrusts that tear Geyersbach’s jacket. Passersby pull them apart. The church court investigates. Both are censured. Bach moves on to compose 1,128 works that define Western music. Geyersbach is remembered for getting into a fight with Bach and losing.
Sources
- Opening Night, “The Day J.S. Bach Drew His Sword on a Bassoonist,” openingnight.online.
- Classic FM, “When Bach Took a Beating,” classicfm.com.
- Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (W.W. Norton, 2000).
- C.P.E. Bach and J.F. Agricola, Nekrolog (Obituary of J.S. Bach, 1754).
- Mental Floss, “11 Facts About Johann Sebastian Bach,” mentalfloss.com.