The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle

346 Pages·2022·20.579 MB·English

by  Annette Richards

The Temple of Fame and Friendship

The Temple of Fame
and Friendship
Portraits, Music, and History
in the C. P. E. Bach Circle
annette richards
The University of Chicago Press chicago and london
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical
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Published 2022
Printed in the United States of America
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 80626- 6 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 81677- 7 (e- book)
doi: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226816777 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Richards, Annette, author.
Title: The temple of fame and friendship : portraits, music, and history in the C. P. E. Bach
circle / Annette Richards.
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2021043225 | isbn 9780226806266 (cloth) | isbn 9780226816777 (e-b ook)
Subjects: lcsh: Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 1714– 1788— Art collections. | Art and music. |
Musicians— Portraits. | Composers— Portraits.
Classification: lcc Ml410.b16 r53 2022 | ddc 780/.07— dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043225
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
introduction 1
1 exhibiting: the bach gallery
and the art of self- fashioning 15
2 collecting: c. p. e. bach
and portrait Mania 75
3 speculating: likeness,
reseMblance, and error 112
4 character: faces,
physiognoMy, and tiMe 140
5 friendship: portrait drawings
and the trace of Modern life 178
6 feeling: objects of sensibility
and the “portrait of Myself” 205
7 MeMorializing: portraits and
the invention of Music history 226
Acknowledgments 267
Notes 271
Bibliography 305
Index 323

Introduction
To sit for one’s Picture is to have an Abstract of one’s Life written and published,
and ourselves thus consigned over to Honour or Infamy.
jonathan richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715)
Imagine, as a music lover, walking into a room densely hung with the faces of
your music heroes and heroines: the divas who inspired you, composers who
moved you, poets and writers on music who taught you how to listen to and think
about music. As a connoisseur of music, you’ll recognize many figures from the
past, both famous and obscure; as an eager participant in contemporary music
culture, you’ll know, or at least know of, many of the living musicians pictured
there. You might reflect on the expression on a particular face or compare the
way personalities are projected through the various images; you might muse on
whether the representations of individual figures contain clues to musical style,
artistic imagination, or creative character. You might wonder about the friend
whose room you find yourself in, as you begin to sense the depth and scope of ideas
about the art of music and its meanings presented there. In the faces collected
around you, you can trace your friend’s understanding of, and identification with,
musical lineage and legacy; but there is also a vision of the future, represented
by the vibrant new talents depicted in the latest artistic styles, recently added
to the already crammed walls. As your eyes range across the portraits lined up
many rows deep, your inward ear perhaps calling to mind the sounds associated
with individual faces, you find yourself immersed in extended musical, artistic,
intellectual, and social networks, circles of friends and forebears, colleagues and
acquaintances, that together deepen and enrich your understanding not only of
your friend the collector, but of the whole art of music.
When the English musician, traveler, and music historian Charles Burney
visited Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Hamburg in 1772, he recorded an experience
something like this in his travel diary. On entering the Bach household, the first
{2} Introduction
order of business was portraits: before he could hear for himself the famous
skill of the “German Orpheus” at his Silbermann clavichord, or engage him in
conversation about his own music and his family legacy, Burney was given the
opportunity to admire a collection of portraits, then numbering about 150, in
which Bach took great pride. He was shown the oil painting of Johann Sebastian
Bach by Elias Gottlob Haussmann and the portrait, also in oils, of his host’s
grandfather, Johann Ambrosius Bach. His attention was caught in particular
by the numerous representatives of his own nation pictured in Bach’s gallery,
but he saw composers and performers, living and long dead, of every era and
nationality. The report he published the following year provides us with a vivid
sense of the experience:
When I went to his house, I found with him three or four rational, and well-
bred persons, his friends, besides his own family, consisting of Mrs. Bach, his
eldest son, who practices the law, and his daughter. The instant I entered, he
conducted me up stairs, into a large and elegant music room, furnished with
pictures, drawings and prints of more than a hundred and fifty eminent musicians:
among them, there are many Englishmen, and original portraits, in oil, of his
father and grandfather. After I had looked at these, M. Bach was so obliging as
to sit down to his Silbermann clavichord, and favorite instrument, upon which
he played three or four of his choicest and most difficult compositions, with
the delicacy, precision, and spirit, for which he is so justly celebrated among
his countrymen. In the pathetic and slow movements, whenever he had a long
note to express, he absolutely contrived to produce, from his instrument, a cry
of sorrow and complaint, such as can only be effected upon the clavichord, and
perhaps by himself.1
In the Bach collection there were portraits of family members and friends,
of admired colleagues and long- dead predecessors, of sources of inspiration and
authority. Encyclopedic in its scope, and containing nearly four hundred objects
by the time of Bach’s death in 1788, the collection extended to literary, philo-
sophical, mathematical, mythical, and political figures closely or loosely related
to music. In its final form, along with C. P. E. Bach’s father and grandfather, the
collection included his brothers Wilhelm Friedemann, Johann Christian, and
Johann Christoph Friedrich and his stepmother Anna Magdalena. Contemporary
musicians from across Europe represented there included composers Joseph
Haydn, Christian Gottlob Neefe, Johann Adam Hiller, Christoph Willibald Gluck,
and Jean- Jacques Rousseau; Leopold Mozart in the famous group portrait with
his children Wolfgang and Nannerl; the Viennese actor and painter Joseph Lange
with his second wife, the singer Aloysia Weber; and German star singer- actors
Franziska Koch, Carolina Müller, and Marie Sophie Niklas. From an earlier
generation there were George Frideric Handel and Louis Marchand, Arcangelo
Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi.
Bach’s collection encompassed kings, emperors, and other musical patrons
as well as writers, thinkers, and philosophers who had turned their attention to
Introduction {3}
music. Erasmus was there, in the company of Charlemagne, Gregory the Great,
and Robert Fludd; Aristotle and Epicurus; John Milton and Gottfried Leibniz.
In the collection too were the contemporary German poets and men of letters
Christoph Daniel Ebeling, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Georg Sulzer. Even in a period when portrait
collecting was passionately pursued by members of the intellectual classes across
Europe, and when a collection of portraits was an important demonstration
of education, social status, and means, Bach’s collection was unprecedented:
it was the first portrait collection to focus on the art of music on anything like
this scale and in such a broad sense, and its scope and quality were unmatched.
It was widely known during Bach’s lifetime, especially in German- speaking Europe,
and it continued to be important long after his death.
When word of it began to circulate in the 1770s, Bach’s was not the only
collection of musician portraits known to his contemporaries, but it was by
far the largest and the most significant. In England there was a collection of
portraits in the Music School at Oxford, which Philip Hayes expanded from its
seventeenth- century core of eighteen paintings to about forty during his tenure
as Heather Professor of Music from 1777 to 1797. Far smaller than Bach’s and
narrower in scope, the Oxford collection focused largely on musicians (most of
them English) who were associated with the university.2 More nearly comparable
to the Bach collection in size and scale was that of Padre Giambattista Martini
in Bologna, which numbered about four hundred items by the time of his death
(and is still intact today). But that collection was not begun in earnest until the
early 1770s, by which time C. P. E. Bach had already assembled the more than
150 portraits that he showed to Burney and was rapidly expanding his holdings.3
Quickly translated and widely circulated, Burney’s description of C. P. E.
Bach’s collection piqued the interest of Bach’s German followers, contributing to
a craze for collecting musician portraits among a group of admirers that included
the Sondershausen organist and son of a former J. S. Bach student Ernst Ludwig
Gerber; the Göttingen professor and biographer of J. S. Bach Johann Nikolaus
Forkel; the young lawyer and musician Hans Adolph Friedrich von Eschstruth;
the J. S. Bach student in Dresden Christoph Transchel; the C. P. E. Bach student
in Copenhagen Niels Schiørring; and the physicist and musician Ernst Florens
Friedrich Chladni.
Their collections paralleled those of famous and obscure contemporary collec-
tors (many of them known to Bach) of portraits in other areas, from the literary
“Friendship Temples” of the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim in Halberstadt
and the publisher Philipp Erasmus Reich in Leipzig— both of them devoted to
paintings of writers and poets— to the extensive portrait print collection, also of
literary figures, belonging to the publisher and writer Friedrich Nicolai in Berlin;
from the vast collection of about 3,300 portrait prints of fellow members of the
medical profession assembled by the Berlin doctor Johann Carl Wilhelm Moehsen,
to the ten thousand or so sheets of portraits of people of all sorts assembled by
the Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater.4 Collections like these had their
{4} Introduction
well- known precursors in the earlier eighteenth- century Temples of Worthies
and Temples of Friendship that were a prominent feature of the most famous
English landscape gardens, described in detail for aspiring German readers in
influential books such as Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld’s Theorie der Gartenkunst
(1779– 85)5 and inspiring lavish imitations such as the park at Wörlitz, where the
library of the Gartenhaus was specifically designed to incorporate a wide- ranging
program of portraits of great cultural figures, ancient and modern.
In Germany as in England, the period saw a huge increase in the appetite for
portraits, peaking in the 1780s, as portraiture increasingly became the dominant
representational genre thanks to its role in staging character, identity, and the
shifting relations between the self and the world.6 The craze for portraiture was
rampant, transforming the genre from its lowly position near the bottom of the
hierarchy of the visual arts to a place near history painting at the top.7 Detractors
might still consider portraitists mere “face painters,” at the mercy of commissions,
their work empty of moral purpose and baldly imitative. To quote the Earl of
Shaftesbury, portraiture might be understood “not so much as a liberal art nor to
be so esteemed; as requiring no liberal knowledge, genius, education, converse,
manners, moral-s cience, mathematics, optics, but merely practical and vulgar.”8
Yet as was made clear by the wealth and success of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who
would become director of the Royal Academy in London, by the second half of
the century portraiture was lucrative, splendid, and representative,9 dominating
the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy, drawing the most attentive and
responsive viewers at the Royal Gallery in Dresden, and generating extended
critical writing (fig. I.1).
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Charles Burney’s experience of listening among
C. P. E. Bach’s portraits produced one of the age’s most vivid verbal portraits of
a musician:
After dinner, which was elegantly served, and cheerfully eaten, I prevailed upon
him to sit down again to a clavichord, and he played, with little intermission, till
near eleven o’clock at night. During this time, he grew so animated and possessed
that he not only played, but looked like one inspired. His eyes were fixed, his
under lip fell, and drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance. He said,
if he were to be set to work frequently, in this manner, he should grow young
again. He is now fifty- nine, rather short in stature, with black hair and eyes,
and brown complexion, has a very animated countenance, and is of a cheerful
and lively disposition.10
Taken as a whole, Burney’s report of his evening with C. P. E. Bach slips among
registers, literary genres, and writerly personae, from the diarist recounting a
good evening to the music critic marveling at an extraordinary performance,
from the connoisseur of the visual arts inspecting a portrait collection to a music
lover losing himself in the pathos of Bach’s clavichord art, from the anecdotist
ventriloquizing Bach’s own dryly humorous voice to the informative reporter
recording Bach’s age and physical appearance. Burney’s account is striking for