J.S. Bach and the Secret Language of Couples.

Years ago, after listening to my first husband and I chatting over breakfast, a friend said that he hadn’t understood a word of the conversation. When we were together Max and I peppered our talk with quotes and references that we knew and shared - a lot of them about music. A good conversation was like a piano duet - one piece - four hands. Over a couple of decades our joint hinterland of reading, experiences and humour increased exponentially. Eventually we could converse in a sort of coded language that only we understood. We thought it was quite normal but it was probably irritating and disconcerting for outsiders. There is a proper name for a this sort of family lexicon - it’s called a familect. - I just learned that. Who knew?

Years after we parted and Max's subsequent death, our old familect still persists in my head.

"Bach Mighty Bach" I say to myself and then I answer myself silently - "And after Bach - Palestrina".

It’s Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday on the 21st March.

As a professional musician in the eighteenth century Bach had to travel. He travelled to learn from other masters, he travelled to gain preferment and he travelled at the biddings of Kings. Three journeys stand out - two of them bookend his professional life and one marks a personal turning point.

In 1705 at the age of twenty, Bach walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, a distance of 250 miles. He followed the ancient Salt Route on a pilgrimage to sit at the feet of the famous organist of the Marienkirche - Dietrich Buxtehude.

When the eighteen year old George Frideric Handel made the same journey to Lübeck a couple of years earlier, Buxtehude offered Handel the opportunity to replace him at the Marienkirche - on the condition he married the organist's daughter Anna Margareta, who was 48 years old. Handel beat a hasty retreat.

Bach stayed in Lübeck for four months and Buxtehude probably offered him same deal as Handel - an offer he too must have declined. A couple of years after his return to Arnstadt, Bach married his second cousin Maria Barbara Bach. He was 22 she was five months older. They had probably know each other all their lives - maybe there was an understanding between them that went back years. The wider Bach family had been musicians long before their most famous member became the 'Mighty Bach' that Organ Morgan so revered in Under Milk Wood. The famlilect of the Bach family was music.

Maria Barbara's father was a organist and she herself was a noted singer. Between 1708 and 1719 Maria Barbara gave birth to seven children of whom four survived to adulthood and two would become famous musicians in their own right. In 1717 Bach and Maria moved to Köthen where Bach was appointed to the court of the musical Prince Leopold - he and Bach were still both in their early thirties and it was a happy working relationship.

In 1720 Prince Leopold took his court and his musicians to Carlsbad. It’s a lovely place Carlsbad - I’m sure it wasn't much different then from when Max and I were there the year we got married. Its numerous hot springs have long made it a place of refreshment and renewal. Tragically whilst Bach was there Maria Barbara died. She was only about 32. We don’t know the cause of her death. Fever? Appendicitis? An ectopic pregnancy? Whatever the case, by the time Bach got home she was already buried. Fortunately Maria Barbara's sister who lived with the family was there to look after the children.

Seventeen months later Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a professional singer at Leopold’s court. Over the next nineteen years she gave birth to thirteen children. That’s a lot of pregnancies - but as the family prospered the use of wet nurses would have meant Anna Magdalena would not have breast fed her own children and thus not gained the contraceptive protection of lactational amennhorrea. Her stepson Carl Philip Emmanuel described the crowded Bach household as a ‘pigeon loft’. Anna Magdalena must have been woman of extraordinary energy; almost always pregnant yet managing a house, coping with a sometimes absent husband, tending her much loved garden as well as working as a copyist and occasional performer.

"Did you know that JS Bach had twenty children - and I guess that goes for Mrs Bach too?”

(I think that one is Victor Borge)

As well as singing, Anna Magdalena played the keyboard and two years after they were married Bach gave her a little book of compositions in his own hand - the Clavierbuchlein. Some pages of the book survive - they contain the French Suites and the manuscript of the G Major Suite BWV 841. I wonder if Anna played them in an evening after the children were in bed? Did her husband stand beside her turning the pages or listen by the fire with his pipe and slippers? Bach sometimes put messages and riddles in his music - what familect might be hidden in those pieces? Bach wrote the titles of three books by the theologian August Pfeiffer inside the cover. One of them was ‘Anti-melancholicus, oder Melancholey-Vertreiber’ To Drive Away Melancholy. What was that about?

The journey that marks the final stage of Bach's life was in 1747 to the court of Frederick the Great at Potsdam. Bach’s son Carl Phillip Emmanuel worked for Frederick and Bach went to see him and a new fangled keyboard instrument called a piano. Frederick was no mean musician and he offered Bach a theme he had written himself for Bach to extemporise on.

"Never criticise the compositions of Kings. You never know who might have written them.”

(No idea where that one comes from.)

Four months later Bach sent to Frederick his ‘Musical Offering’ based on the Thema Regium that Frederick gave him. Bach inscribed the piece "Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta" that’s a mnemonic for the word ‘ricercar’ a musical term for a variation on a theme. More secret language.

Anna Magdalena survived her husband by twenty years. She made a living after his death by renting rooms, probably teaching, copying musical scores and selling some of the manuscripts of Bach’s compositions. She must have missed him and their life together. She would have no idea that 250 years later people still remember her.

(PS Don’t worry about Anna Margareta Buxtehude - she did eventually marry a more age appropriate successor to her father's post)

I had a craving for Haft Mewa this week - an Afghan fruit salad traditionally made around the spring equinox. It’s made of four fruits and three nuts flavoured with orange blossom or rose water.

Haft Mewa

Dried apricots – preferably Hunzas (the best apricots on the planet if you can get them)

Prunes

Dried cherries

Raisins

Pomegranate seeds (optional)

Almonds

Pistachios

Walnuts

Rosewater and/or orange flower water

You can vary the fruits – and the nuts, but the method is simple. Cover the dried fruit with water, add the flower essences to taste, blanch the nuts (I shirked blanching walnuts) add them to the fruit. Cover and refrigerate for about three days until the fruit has become well soaked and the fruit sugars have turned the fragrant water to syrup. Eat with thick yoghurt.

I cannot tell you how good this is. Have a happy equinox.