Sex, Death, and Minuets by David Yearsley

Author:David Yearsley [Yearsley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Marriage: Musical and à la Mode

Ridiculed in the Coffee Cantata are fashions liquid and sartorial—the bitter bean and the hoop skirt. The libretto’s self-referential treatment of two of the Leipzig performance venue’s most ubiquitous consumer goods—skirts and coffee—points the way toward the goal of almost all contemporary comedy: marriage. The changing nature of marriage was a central topic in Leipzig in the 1730s, as proponents of “sentimental marriage” argued that the young should choose their own partners, basing this decision on mutual love and shared interests rather than according to economic considerations and parental approval. One of the leading advocates of this new conception of marriage was Johann Christoph Gottsched, who saw high-minded theatrical comedies, cleansed of the rowdy hijinks of the likes of Hanswurst, as the main platform for propounding these views.9 The Coffee Cantata would inevitably have been heard within the context of this discourse, Picander and Johann Sebastian Bach sending up not only coffee, modishness, and intergenerational squabbling, but also sentimental comedy and its attitude toward marriage. Picander’s poetry and Johann Sebastian’s musical setting call into question the notion that, through engagement with the fashionable world, women might articulate a position of independence and a concomitant disavowal of paternal authority. This was musical entertainment that staged family tension, patriarchal anxiety and the problem of unwed daughters—all serious worries lurking behind the veneer of humor generated by the cantata’s lampooning of contemporary consumer culture. Gottsched’s plea for romantic self-determination stood in contrast to traditional attitudes. To what extent the modern Gottschedian view of sentimental marriage affected the Bachs’ domestic economy is harder to gauge.

These issues and objects were not simply abstractions for Bach and his family. At the most obvious material level, the Bachs had valuable paraphernalia that was listed in the disposition of Johann Sebastian’s estate: the larger of their two silver coffeepots was appraised at nineteen talers and twelve groschen—more than twice the value of their Stainer violin and nearly as much as their lute.10 These accoutrements demonstrated the family’s participation in the pervasive coffee ritual of galant culture, one signaling access to leisure and refinement, and enough money (even if just enough) to pursue both. From the family’s ownership of these items, one can infer that Anna Magdalena and perhaps her stepdaughter, Catharina Dorothea (born 1708), and eldest daughter, Elisabeth Juliana Friderica (born 1726), had sufficient flair to present themselves fashionably in public, perhaps even as singers modishly attired. Anna Magdalena would certainly have had a hoop skirt in Cöthen: by the 1730s the unwieldy mode of dress was so ubiquitous that Gottsched’s wife, Luise, called her 1736 play Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke (Pietist Affectation in the Hoop Skirt). In it, one sister accuses another of being so paralyzed by indecisiveness that she can’t bring herself to do what is done unthinkingly by all her peers: put the damn thing on.11 In the Bach household the coffee service is documented, and the fashionable skirts can be assumed.

Standing in stark contrast to Gottsched’s views was the no-nonsense

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