Science  Write  Now

I am in Leipzig. Leipzig is Johann Sebastian Bach’s city. His plaque dominates the Thomaskirche where heperformed his cantatas every Sunday; the Archiv is dedicated to him, has his presumed face on medallions and bas relief on the walls; his substantial statue presides over the square. But I am in quest of his elusive spouse: the harpsichordist, renowned soprano singer and transcriber, Anna Magdalena Bach. Leipzig is where she moved in 1723 once she’d married her famous husband, becoming immediate stepmother to his four children aged between 6-13 years. I have only four days to find traces of her in the Bach Archiv and Museum, to see if I can glimpse her in the Leipzig streets. I am driven by my research question - was she really an “impoverished” widow, later buried in a “pauper’s grave”?[2] It is 2019 and I have not yet jettisoned her from my PhD research.

I had come to Anna Magdalena as a PhD biographic subject while listening to my then-partner play Chopin and Bach, preparing our next performance for Muse Poetica, the boutique poetry and classical piano business we ran. I was contemplating composing poems in response to Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Chopin’s Nocturnes. But as I listened to Bach one day, a new idea emerged and I wondered who were the women in these men’s lives? A quick Google search took me to George Sand (whose name I knew) and Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife (whose name I didn’t). I also read about an Australian researcher (and his critics), Martin Jarvis, who claims some of the compositions attributed to Johann Sebastian may actually have been written by Anna Magdalena – a possible scandal. My curiosity fired.

In posing my feminist question about the women behind the men, I was “dislodging the he” as feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes. “He does not include she,” she continues, “I had to dislodge that he.”[3] In my own creative process, I discarded the famous men to focus on the women behind them, dislodging the ‘he’ of Chopin and Bach, to find the ‘she’ of George Sand and Anna Magdalena. “Dislodging the he” is another way of “dismantling worlds” Ahmed affirms,[4] and the world I wanted to dismantle was the world where sexism and other forms of discrimination hold sway. This is how my PhD project first became the story of the ‘she’ of George Sand, the ‘she’ of Anna Magdalena, the ‘she’ of myself and the ‘we’ of my relationship with them. Shortly after this experience I found a supervisor who was also enthusiastic about my project and agreed to take me on as a candidate. I proposed writing a poetic biography which braided poems about these two creative women’s lives.

Anna Magdalena had called me to Leipzig. Two years into my PhD, I had already formed a connection to her through research and poetic composition. I had started by compiling a timeline of dates for significant events in her life – her training as a soprano in a musical family, her marriage, the birth and deaths of her many children, her activities running a large household, her transcription activities for Johann Sebastian, the death of her husband, and her life as a widow. I’d read about decrees made by a pontiff banning women’s singing in public, which continued to affect women in Anna Magdalena’s era. I’d also researched how households of similar socio-economic position to hers were run in that time, women’s dress, and      possible opportunities for women to work. I had already composed a dozen poems about various aspects of her life. She was coming into focus, but questions remained, particularly regarding the grim picture painted of her years of widowhood.

Once in Leipzig, I saw that Anna Magdalena was almost totally absent from the city, as she is from most accounts of Johann Sebastian’s life. The oft-repeated details, commonplace in accounts of her, are that she liked songbirds (and Johann Sebastian had given her some as a gift)[5] and that her husband praised her singing voice as a “flawless soprano”.[6]

~

On the first morning I walk to the Bach Archiv and climb the circular staircase full of expectation and trepidation. It is my first formal visit to an archive . (Surely only real scholars go to archives – was I a real scholar?). The archivist I had emailed agreed to meet with me when I visit. But, new to archives and their protocols, I haven’t made an appointment, although I wonder now that I didn’t realise it would have been mere courtesy to do so. She comes out to meet me and explains that she has her hands full with the Bach festival then blitzing Leipzig with a bonanza of performances. Sadly, she won’t be able to spend time with me after all, nor can she translate at a proposed meeting with the archivist who has written a book in German about Anna Magdalena. All my plans tumble down. I feel devastated, and again question my own credentials.

I am given a desk in the reading room where I can check the Archiv’s English language collection, but it is small and only a few articles add to my sense of who Anna Magdalena might be. I don’t find any answers to my pressing questions, nor about the Australian researcher, Jarvis, who proposes that Anna Magdalena composed pieces previously attributed to Johann Sebastian. This is hot controversy at the time, with many questioning his research, and I wonder if I would, sharing nationality with Jarvis, be tarred with the same brush. I had already discussed this by email with the archivist who communicated unequivocally that the Archiv doesn’t look favourably on his theories.

My desk overlooks the square and the Kirche, and as the bells ring out, I sense a fleeting awareness of Anna Magdalena, which pulls me out of my doldrums. Back in the 1700s, she too would have heard the Thomaskirche carillon. Did she tell family time by listening to these same bells? For a few precious moments she again becomes a real person to me, as she has done previously through research and composition. Later research tells me that Johann Sebastian would probably have had a pocket watch and there was also likely a mantelpiece clock to tell the time by, but the bells would nonetheless have been a musical background to Anna Magdalena’s everyday life. I feel a special bond forged here in Leipzig, hearing the same chimes.

I’d read that there was a plaque dedicated to Anna Magdalena somewhere in the city which isn’t mentioned on the tourist map. Blank looks greet my question to staff in the crowded Kirche shop.      

“I know where it is,” a customer down the back pipes up, walking toward me. “I will show you if you wish.”      

He is tall, with an open, friendly face and speaks English well; but even in this brief exchange his German cadences come through. I decide to trust synergy and the kindness of strangers.

He leads me outside. I ask what his interest in Anna Magdalena is, adding that most people aren’t. He replies that she was the subject of his PhD and has just published a book about her.[7] “How extraordinary!” I respond. I have come across an Anna Magdalena scholar not in the archive as I’d hoped and expected, but by what my research has led me to call ‘enacting myself in the world’. I had thought that my fiasco in the Archiv had drained all stores of scholarly magnetism, but nonetheless we have drawn together - German and Australian Anna Magdalena scholars. Is this the beginning of a synchronicity I wonder.   

“I’m also doing my PhD on her,” I add. He takes me to the plaque on the site of the Bach home and translates:

“She’s so neglected by history, isn’t she,” I say.

 “Actually, he adds, “most commentators have her wrong.” He introduces himself, Eberhard Spree.[9] I reciprocate and we shake hands. He asks me to join him for tea – the strangeness of our encounter making us both a little stilted. I can hardly contain my excitement as we cross the square to a Kaffee shop opposite the cathedral, but think I’d better tamp it down so that I at least seem scholarly. I wonder how my research and intuition, my ‘speculative imagination’, and poetics will stack up against views formed by a ‘real’ scholar, who speaks the language. I can’t quite believe my luck after my personal Archiv debacle – that scholarly magnetism has drawn us here, now into this evolving synchronicity. How extraordinary, meeting one of the only other Anna Magdalena scholars in Leipzig!

~ 

It appears to be a paradox – that I can name what I feel has drawn us together as ‘scholarly magnetism’ at the same time as holding to the ‘acausal’ nature of synchronicity. But what does ‘acausal’ actually mean? Surely it doesn’t mean that nothing has caused it? I find some of my confusion addressed by Jungian scholar Graeme Pemberton. He writes,

I can hardly comprehend the implications of what it might mean to be “outside spacetime”, although there are many instances in everyday life when we experience just that – dreams, déjà vu, waiting for a loved one in a hospital Emergency Department, for instance. I understand Pemberton as saying that we don’t understand yet how synchronicity happens because it occurs outside of the conditions of cause and effect (which are space and time based). Pemberton claims this “because causality is bound up with the existence of space and time and physical changes, and consists essentially in the succession of cause and effect.” Pemberton concludes, “For this reason synchronistic phenomena cannot in principle be associated with any conception of causality. Hence the interconnection of meaningfully coincident factors must necessarily be thought of as acausal.”[11]

To help unpack these weighty issues I turn to the remarkable twenty-five-year friendship between Carl Jung and Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Over these years of conversation and extensive correspondence, they committed their individual specialist training in physics and psychology, “to explore fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality”.[12] Pauli wrote of their need to engage in “constant criticism of the space time concept.”[13]

Reading their correspondence, their words crackle with the energy of their boundary-pushing research. Pauli experienced his own personal version of synchronicity in repeated incidents of technical equipment failure when he entered a room, which became dubbed the Pauli Effect.[14] He believed that physicists were more ready than ever to adopt Jung’s ideas in the 1930s and 40s, when Pauli and Jung were conversing, partly due to recognising the role of the observer in the outcome of quantum experiments. This discovery opened the way for the theorising that Pauli and Jung conducted, speculating on an ordering principal other than spacetime-based causality. Jung proposed, and debated with Pauli, the possibility that ‘meaning’, rather than cause and effect could be this other world “ordering factor.”[15] Pauli framed it like this: “Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which ‘similar’ things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.”[16] The possibility of ‘meaning’ being an ordering force in the universe remains a bold and radical suggestion in a world where the Newtonian and Cartesian influences continue to hold significant sway. But it matches my experience. ‘Meaning’ as an ordering principal gives me a way of framing and holding my own synchronistic experiences.

~

Back at the Leipzig Kaffehaus, the experience of synchronicity is still unfolding, acausally and outside-spacetime. However the waiters are definitely within the spacetime continuum, timing the steeping of the tea at our table with a small clock for the required three minutes. I ask Eberhard about his thesis regarding Anna Magdalena’s character. “Anna Magdalena was stronger, more enterprising than she had credit for, particularly after Johann Sebastian’s death,” he says. He recounts how, together, Anna Magdalena and Johann Sebastian ran the Bach family business: his composition and performance, trade and rental of music instruments, her transcriptions, accommodation and tuition of private students. After Johann Sebastian died, Eberhard explains, Anna Magdalena couldn’t be Cantor or musical director, but she was still ‘Frau Capellmeister’. She continued the business, as well as assuming solo care of three of the couple’s many children, including Gottfried Heinrich who was said to be intellectually disabled.

This is such a relief to hear; conventional wisdom has her impoverished, surviving on meagre alms from the city, buried in a pauper’s grave – an awful, ignominious end I never could fathom and one of my most pressing research questions. But to unpack this episode I need to branch off briefly into literary criticism, as the stories of Anna Magdalena Bach abound with charlatans, chancers and publishers happy to hoodwink the public.

Anna Magdalena first came before the reading public’s eye in a book written by Esther Meynell in 1930 entitled The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena. No author’s name was placed on the cover, so it seemed that the book was written by Anna Magdalena herself. There was a small disclaimer buried in the English edition acknowledging that “certain episodes” were imaginary.[17] The book and subsequent editions capitalised on the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian’s death, becoming “one of the most successful books in recent years in Germany.”[18] Unfortunately, led by a lack of clarity about the author, the book’s genre (that is, a novel and not a memoir) and its style, which “convincingly fit the historical period”,[19] Meynell’s imaginings supplanted the sparse information circulating about Anna Magdalena. Prime amongst these was the issue of Anna Magdalena’s years of widowhood, which Meynell represents as impoverished, writing that “it needed some seeking to discover Dame Bach in her seclusion of poverty, so quickly are forgotten our more prosperous days.”[20]

By the time I sit down to tea at the Kaffeehaus with Eberhard I’ve done enough research to have grown fond of Anna Magdalena. However you look at it she was a resilient woman – becoming step-mother to her spouse’s four children and going on to have thirteen of her own, including coping with the death of seven. But Meynell represents her as a bit of a wet blanket. How can I reconcile Meynell’s portrait with the fact that to have a classically trained voice Anna Magdalena would have needed considerable muscular development to support her voice, as well as personal confidence to perform in public? I had read that she ran the Bach family home — a centre of musical learning which accommodated visiting scholars and musicians, provided tuition, sold and traded musical instruments — alongside domestic responsiblities. I had formed the view that she was a woman of substance, not the simpering, rather pathetic doe-eyed woman Meynell represents. “ [N]aturally I always obtained his approval before I indulged in epistolary correspondence”,[21] Meynell has Anna Magdalena say, and “only once do I recall when I had the temerity to think he was in the wrong.”[22] These utterances are at odds with the portrait I am developing.

In the Leipzig conversation with Eberhard, I only have these intuitions about Anna Magdalena’s character to go on – surely this woman I was getting to know, this strong resilient woman with continuing responsibility for children and links to scholars and other musicians, wouldn’t have remained in a crumpled heap after her spouse’s death? I risk sharing my nascent poetic portrait with the ‘real’ scholar, half prepared to be corrected with facts gleaned from the archive. I ask him whether she suffered in widowhood, in the way authors portray her—and he tells me that he uncovered evidence that proves that Anna Magdalena would have had more reason for her to work after Johann Sebastian’s death, not less. He describes studying Johann Sebastian’s estate and its distribution and tells me widows were permitted to work in that era. He discovered the conditions under which the city council paid Anna Magdalena a pension—as an upstanding citizen who had lost a spouse and whom they wished to help remain at a similar level of prosperity. In addition, Anna Magdalena continued to pay the subscription to a silver mine. Eberhard has done Bach scholarship a great service in refining what is known of Anna Magdalena and correcting misapprehensions.

The tea is hot and strong. I ask if Eberhard has read Esther Meynell’s book, [23] pleased to share this with someone in the know. He obviously doesn’t have the same level of frustration I do, making the reasonable point that Meynell reflected her 1920’s conservatism. This is before I realise how earlier editions had traded on a misrepresentation. I contrast Meynell’s representation with another novel which excited me called Counterpoint by Anna Enquist, which shows Anna Magdalena and Johan Sebastian as equals. Both Meynell and Enquist’s books could be said to be speculative biographies but Counterpoint seems so much more convincing than Meynell’s chronicle. Enquist has imbued her work not just with Anna Magdalena’s musical but emotional intelligence as well. Eberhard tells me he will write another book which will describe Anna Magdalena more accurately. He offers to send me the paper he had translated into English.

When I return to Melbourne, I eagerly read Eberhard’s paper and his thorough detailing of the multiple factors which lead him to comprehensively refute claims that Anna Magdalena died in poverty. l later read academic musicologist Andrew Talle’s 2020 review of recent Anna Magdalena scholarship, research and writing, critiquing other authors including the researcher Martin Jarvis who caused such a splash in the world of Bach scholarship. Talle dismisses Jarvis’s claims, for presenting “the trappings of scholarly research (i.e., scientistic verbiage, footnotes, tables, images of manuscripts, etc.), but the standards of evidence it exhibits are extraordinarily low.”[24] In comparison he writes a glowing endorsement of Spree’s scholarship: “Spree is able to present materials and interpretations that credibly hint at the resourcefulness of her character.”[25] Not only did synchronicity take me to an Anna Magdalena scholar but it took me to one with a reputation for impeccable scholarship.

The tea and conversation in Leipzig draws to its surreal end. So much intensity from one chance meeting. We wander out so Eberhard can show me a Johann Sebastian statue I haven’t yet seen. We take selfies, looking self-conscious, both of us suddenly not scholarly at all.

[1] Quoted in Graham Pemberton. “Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious — Jung and Synchronicity” on Graham Pemberton Medium website, 2/10/2021. Retrieved 8/2/24., n.p.

[2] Hogstad, Emily. “The Widows of Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn: What Happened to Them?” 3/6/23. Retrieved 12/1/25.

[3] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Costa Mesa, USA: Adobe Digital Version, Experian Information Solutions, Inc., 2017), 4.

[4] Ahmed, Living, 4.

[5] Ingeborg Allihn, “Musik Und Gender Im Internet”, March 6, 2013, retrieved 21/1/19. 1.

[6] Allihn, “Musik”, 1.

[7] Eberhard Spree, “Die verwitwete Frau Capellmeisterin Bach”. Studie über die Verteilung des Nachlasses von Johann Sebastian Bach, Altenburg 2019.

[8] “Memorial plaque to Anna Magdalena Bach at the exterior of Thomaskirche” on Wikipedia Commons

website. Retrieved 12/1/25.

[9] Recounted with kind permission of Eberhard Spree.

[10] Graeme Pemberton, “Archetypes”, n.p.

[11] Jung quoted by Pemberton, “Archetypes”, n.p.

[12] Maria Popova, “Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter” on Marginalia. Retrieved 17/9/24., n.p.

[13] Popova, “Atom”, n.p.

[14] “The Pauli Effect” on The Institute of Physics website, retrieved 21/9/24, n.p.. Pauli won the Nobel Prize for what was called the Pauli Exclusion Principle. The second Pauli exclusion principle was “jokingly formulated as follows: "It is impossible for Wolfgang Pauli and a functioning device to be in the same room" (Pietschmann 1995, 43).” Quoted in “The Pauli Effect” on Swiss Federal Institute of History website (ETHZ), n.p.

[15] Popova, “Atom”, n.p.

[16] Popova, “Atom”, n.p.

[17] Allihn, “Musik”, 1.

[18] Stirk, quoted in Allihn, “Musik”, 1.

[19] Hubner, 2004 quoted in Allihn, “Musik”, 1.

[20] Esther Meynell, The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach, Endeavour Press (Chatto and Windus, 2016), first published 1925, loc, 26.

[21] Meynell, Chronicle, loc, 963.

[22] Meynell, Chronicle, loc, 424.

[23] Meynell, Chronicle.

[24] Andrew, Talle. “Who Was Anna Magdalena Bach?” in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2020. Retrieved 2/2/21, 146.

[25] Talle, “Who Was”, 166.

The science inspiring the piece:
Maria Popova, “Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter” on Marginalia. Retrieved 17/9/24., n.p.

“The Pauli Effect” on Swiss Federal Institute of History website (ETHZ)

Image: Close-up of title page to the first volume of Singende Müse an der Pleisse, a collection of strophic songs published in Leipzig in 1736, by "Sperontes", Johann Sigismund Scholze. Art historian and Bach portrait expert Teri Noel Towe believes there is a chance that the two people shown may be Bach and his wife Anna Magdalena (Public Domain)