Maria Barbara Bach
(1684-1720, first wife of J.S. Bach)
BIRTH
October 20, 1684
PLACE
Gehren, Germany
DEATH
July 7, 1720
PLACE
Köthen, Germany
FAMILY
HUSBAND
Johann Sebastian Bach
(1685-1750)
HOMES
RELIGIOUS VIEWS
RELIGION NOT DOCUMENTED
DENOMINATION NOT DOCUMENTED
MEMBERSHIPS
AWARDS
Maria Barbara Bach was the first wife and second cousin of Johann Sebastian Bach and the mother of the composers Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The couple had seven children, four of whom survived infancy. In the summer of 1720, while Bach was traveling with Prince Leopold to the spa of Carlsbad, Maria Barbara died suddenly at Köthen. She was buried there on July 7, 1720, and Bach learned of her death only on his return.
EARLY LIFE
Maria Barbara Bach was born on October 20, 1684, in Gehren, Thuringia, the youngest daughter of Johann Michael Bach, the town's organist and a composer, and Catharina Wedemann. Her father was a first cousin of Johann Sebastian Bach's father, making her a second cousin of her future husband. Her father died in 1694 and her mother in 1704, and Maria Barbara moved to Arnstadt, where she lived with relatives. There she came to know Johann Sebastian Bach, who became organist of the town's New Church in 1703. After he took a post as organist at Mühlhausen, they married at Dornheim, near Arnstadt, on October 17, 1707.
Maria Barbara accompanied Bach to his posts at Mühlhausen, Weimar, and, from 1717, Köthen, where he became music director at the court of Prince Leopold.
The couple had seven children, four of whom survived infancy. Their sons Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach became leading composers of the next generation.
In the summer of 1720, while Bach was traveling with Prince Leopold to the spa of Carlsbad, Maria Barbara died suddenly at Köthen. She was buried there on July 7, 1720, and Bach learned of her death only on his return.
CAREER
DEATH
Maria Barbara accompanied Bach to his posts at Mühlhausen, Weimar, and, from 1717, Köthen, where he became music director at the court of Prince Leopold. She was buried there on July 7, 1720, and Bach learned of her death only on his return. The couple had seven children, four of whom survived infancy. Their sons Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach became leading composers of the next generation. According to the Nekrolog ("obituary") co-authored by Carl Philipp Emanuel and Bach student Johann Friedrich Agricola, Maria Barbara's death in 1720 was sudden and unexpected. Bach was at the Carlsbad spa accompanying his employer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, when she died. When Bach left Köthen, Maria Barbara was in perfectly good health; but when he returned two months later, he was shocked to learn that she had died and been buried on 7 July. The cause of her death is undocumented. Professor Helga Thoene proposed that Bach's famous Violin Partita No. 2 (especially the final "Chaconne" movement) was written as a tombeau for Maria Barbara. However, these claims are controversial. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.
POPULAR BIOGRAPHIES
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