The beginnings of German-language opera can only be sketched loosely based on available sources. Our knowledge of its early history depends on ‘dates without visual aids’1 and ‘words without songs’, that is, mentions of performances and dates in more-or-less reliable archives, chronicles, and bibliographies,2 as well as mute libretti, which ultimately only hint at how the first opera-like works in German sounded and were performed onstage. The musical losses must be considerable. According to cautious estimates, in the twenty-four known sites of operatic performance in Protestant-Lutheran regions in northern, central, and southern Germany, about 230 works were performed in the seventeenth century alone.3

New documents reveal an intensive cultivation of Telemann’s church music in some unlikely places during the eighteenth century. Especially striking evidence comes from Breslau, where Gottfried Sauer, cantor at St. Maria Magdalena from 1740 to 1757, compiled an inventory containing no fewer than eight annual cycles of church cantatas by Telemann. From this one may conclude that during Sauer’s tenure at the city’s most important church, fully half of the music he performed was by Telemann. A similarly intensive use of Telemann’s cantata cycles occurred in Augsburg. In both cases, the driving force behind the cultivation of this repertory was a cantor who had contact with Johann Sebastian Bach. Yet despite these personal connections, it was not the church music of the Leipzig Thomaskantor that was performed but the cantata cycles of Telemann – works that were heard again and again. Thus, we may justifiably regard Telemann as the unofficial church music director of Protestant Germany as a whole.

Good times for cantors: Johann Matthias Gesner's rectorate (1730–1734)

On June 6, 1730, the elders’ council met at the town hall to deal with the vacancy in the St. Thomas rectorate. Applications and recommendations had been received in great numbers. The last of these candidates, presented by Mayor Born, was the rector of the Ansbach Gymnasium, Johann Matthias Gesner (plate 51). In Born's eyes, Gesner was most qualified candidate – above all because the highestranking princely-electoral education official in Saxony, the president of the superior consistory, Heinrich Count von Bunau, would ‘praise him highly’. Gesner had been ‘informed of the conditions at the school here’ and he had promised to accept the office ‘if he were called to it legitimately’. Of course, if the Ansbach rector were to be hired, it would still be necessary to ‘ensure’ that he would accept ‘no profession’, i.e., no parallel office at the university. Christian Gottlieb Jocher, who would later be famous as a lexicographer, was also still being considered as a more or less equally qualified candidate.

The first of the mayors to vote, Mayor Lange, rejected Mayor Born's candidate. He spoke emphatically in favor of Jocher or the conrector of the St. Thomas School, Hebenstreit, who was lauded on all sides, but had been declared unelectable on account of his deficient authority. The third mayor, however, Adrian Steger, jumped in to support Mayor Born. Since Hebenstreit ‘had not won the school's respect’, Steger preferred Gesner ‘most of all’, especially since the president of the superior consistory had already ‘written to Ansbach on his behalf’. In the end, all the other town council members voted for Gesner, a unanimity of opinion that also dominated the plenary session of the three councils two days later. Once again Born referred to Count von Bunau, who had praised Gesner's knowledge of foreign languages. In addition, he stressed that the agreement with the new rector regarding his not accepting a professorship at the university had to be written in such a way that Gesner would have to give up his position at the school immediately in the event of his accepting a call from the university.

Boarding school statistics and personnel after 1634

The second half of the seventeenth century was the period in which the St. Thomas School most resolutely pursued its mission to be a ‘music school’ as set forth in the school regulations of 1634, and as a result came to be a byword for excellence as a top-notch producer of trained musicians. In these years the number of Thomaners who went on to become professional musicians was legion. The most prominent graduates were the later St. Thomas School cantor Johann Schelle (enrolled at the school in 1665); the ‘inventor’ of German opera, Reinhard Keiser (enrolled 1685; appointed prefect of the First Cantorey 1692; plate 22); the Darmstadt court capellmeister Christoph Graupner (enrolled 1695), the Dresden court capellmeister Johann David Heinichen (enrolled 1696), and the Merseburg court capellmeister Johann Theodor Romhildt (enrolled 1697). At no other time did the St. Thomas School produce so many first-rate musicians.

With the school's growing fame, the attractiveness of a place at the boarding school also increased. Almost every week musically trained boys from Saxony, but also from Thuringia and even more distant locales, arrived at the school to audition in the hope of getting on the waiting list that offered such promising career prospects. Countless entries in Rector Thomasius's journal attest to this lively coming and going in the late 1670s and early 1680s. The boys who were admitted were on average fourteen years old (so their voices had not yet changed – the average age for the onset of puberty in the seventeenth century may have been as late as sixteen or even seventeen) and were pledged to an average stay of five to six years (with the option to stay longer, plate 21).

But above all it is the St. Thomas School matriculation book, which has survived complete and intact from 1640 onward, that shows that the town council did not (at first) resume the practice of requiring the school's leadership to admit great numbers of impoverished Leipzig boys, who were proverbially unmusical (p. 98). Despite the hardships of the Thirty Years War, the documented share of the town's children at the boarding school in the years 1640–1657 of Tobias Michael's cantorate (1631–1657) was about 9.6 percent (18 out 187 boys altogether).

My work on this book began with a question: why did Cothen's court capellmeister Johann Sebastian Bach and two others in the premier league of German capellmeisters of his generation, Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner, apply for the St. Thomas School cantorate in 1722/23? Or, more concretely, why would any leader of a famous court orchestra want to resign a position working with professional musicians in order to take a job with a municipal boys’ school and the ‘dusty robes’ of a cantor? Expressed in a broader historical context: how did it come about that the chronological list of the St. Thomas cantors is made up almost exclusively of the names of famous and historically significant musicians? No other municipal music institution in Germany, or for that matter in all of Europe, can boast a comparable list of prominent names, least of all over the span of half a millennium. From the end of the sixteenth century in particular and on into the nineteenth century the St. Thomas School cantors shaped the development of the whole of Protestant church music. Seth Calvisius, Johann Hermann Schein, Tobias Michael, Sebastian Knupfer, Johann Schelle, Johann Kuhnau, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Friedrich Doles, and Johann Adam Hiller were all among the most influential composers of their times, and they were so because they did not yet conceive of their office as being in the first place that of a choir director and a guardian of tradition but rather were at the same time creators of a repertory of their own works that was adopted in many other places. In other words, the real question is what made the St. Thomas cantorate so attractive from the late sixteenth century on through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it consistently drew the best musicians, and did so long before those who held the office could adorn themselves with the honorific ‘Bach's successor’?

Bach's letter to Erdmann

In the fall of 1730, the forty-five-year-old St. Thomas school cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, took up his pen in order to write a letter to his old schoolmate, Georg Erdmann, with whom he had attended school in Ohrdruf. In 1700, the two had travelled together to Luneburg, where they had both enrolled in the St. Michaelis school. Erdmann had gone on to study law, and in 1718 had become Russia's diplomatic representative in Danzig. In 1726, after a long pause, Erdmann attempted to resume contact with Bach, asking for news of his Fatalitäten, i.e., the main events of his life over the last two decades. But the St. Thomas cantor let their correspondence fall by the wayside again after just one short letter – probably on account of ‘his many activities’ that scarcely left time enough even for ‘the most necessary correspondence’ – and in 1730, Bach still owed Erdmann the news he had been asked for in 1726.

Now, on October 28, 1730, Bach informed Erdmann that his familial situation was satisfactory. By now he had seven children from two marriages (four sons and three daughters); all of them were ‘born musicians’, with whom he could present vocal and instrumental concerts, especially because his second wife, Anna Magdalena, ‘sings a good, clear soprano’ and his eldest daughter ‘joins in not badly’. The picture Bach drew of his professional situation was, however, completely different. His former master, Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Cothen, was a prince ‘who both loved and knew music’, for which reason Bach had believed he could live out the rest of his life in Cothen. But as fate would have it, in December 1721, the regent married a totally unmusical princess from Bernburg (his second marriage), as a result of which the prince's future ‘inclination’ to music was already in danger. And because the Leipzig cantorate had been described to Bach as ‘so favorable’, and the town had in any event offered much better educational opportunities for his sons than Cothen, in the end he had moved to Leipzig, but only after much deliberation, because ‘it did not seem at all proper to me to exchange my post as capellmeister for that of a cantor’.

Early history of the St. Thomas School

When in the year 1212 the Margrave Dietrich (the Oppressed) of Meissen endowed a foundation for the Canons Regular of St. Augustine to establish a monastery and a hospital in Leipzig, and a year later conveyed to them the old Market Church on the town's west side as their collegiate Church of St. Thomas, neither he nor the clerics had in mind any vision of what would one day be a flourishing elite music school. The charter deed drawn up for the St. Thomas Foundation in 1212 (plate 1) states that the Margrave established it ‘out of devotion to his dearly beloved wife Julia’ and ‘for the forgiveness of his sins’; it also states that he hoped the result would be that the worship of God in the Church of St. Thomas might ‘thrive in perpetual peace […] and be free of and secure against all secular commotions and disturbances’. The existence of a St. Thomas Foundation School is documented from as early as 1254, and the school may have been established even earlier, though this is not documented. As late as 1539, when the Reformation arrived in Leipzig, there were neither any plans to make the school into a music school per se nor was any such direction foreseeable. Nevertheless, at least insofar as can be ascertained from the incomplete documentation that has survived, in the course of the school's first three centuries some fundamental principles were established, if only as it were accidentally, that made possible the phenomenal future of the St. Thomas School.

Margrave Dietrich's namesake, Bishop Dietrich II of Meissen, had already founded a chapter of the Augustinians in Meissen in honor of St. Afra in 1205, and along with it a foundation-proprietary school for twelve boys in order to improve the quality of the services at the new chapter's collegiate church of St. Afra. The assumption that Margrave Dietrich had something similar in mind for Leipzig is only natural, but is neither confirmed nor refuted by the sources.

Singing for endowments and the growth of the school: a causal relationship

To understand why around the turn of the seventeenth century the St. Thomas School was transformed into a music school that became famous far beyond Leipzig, we must look at a passage in the new Leipzig school regulations of 1634, the first ever to be printed. The beginning of chapter VII says that a boy desiring admission to the St. Thomas School as a boarder would have to demonstrate above-average vocal and musical abilities. The passage goes on to refer to an important relationship:

In other words, the Thomaners’ singing in the churches, at special occasions, and in the streets had made the school rich from performance fees and donations by the Leipzig townspeople, and in order to continue this success story, it became an iron-clad rule that the St. Thomas boarders all had to be musical. This passage in the 1634 school regulations would have read very differently had it been written three years previously.