Did you know that a woman poet wrote the libretti for 9 of J. S. Bach’s sacred cantatas in 1725?
Yesterday evening, I participated in a pre-concert chat with Suzie LeBlanc, Artistic and Executive Director of the Early Music Society of Vancouver (EMV), and Alexander Weimann, Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra to discuss Christiane Mariane von Ziegler (1695-1760), a notable writer in Leipzig who was named poet laureate by the University of Wittenburg in 1733. Following our talk, there was a wonderful performance of three of the Bach’s cantatas based on her libretti, as well as his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major. This performance was one of several concerts held during the EMV’s Summer Music Festival which focused this year on the theme of “Women in Sight.”
Like her poetic predecessor Christine di Pizan (1364-1430), Ziegler was an educated woman who came from a prominent family, who was also a mother and a widow. Ziegler married at age 16, had her first child and lost her husband the next year at age 17. She remarried a few years later at age 20, and had a second child. But her second husband and both her children (ages 6 and 10) subsequently died when she was only 27. She returned to Leipzig to her family home (the famous Romanus house built by her father, the former mayor of Leipzig) and became the head of the household. Ziegler became renowned for hosting literary and cultural salons at the Romanus home, as well as for encouraging women to participate in the literary and cultural life of the city. Besides authoring books of poetry and translations, she authored a treatise on women’s education.
We get a vivid sense of Ziegler’s personality from this description of her in a letter by one of her contemporaries, Christian Gabriel Fischer quoted on the Bach Cantata Website: “We were invited to Mrs. von Ziegler’s house….She is a daughter of Romanus, a Leipzig Mayor and lives with her mother in the famous Romanus House….She is still a young widow, but will probably have difficulties marrying again because of many different circumstances. Among other things, her conduct is almost more than you would expect of a woman and her spirit is much too lively and clever/alert to be able to subjugate herself to normal type of understanding that men have. The shape of her body is not ugly, but her bone structure is rather prominent. Her face is rather commonplace. She has a smooth/level forehead, beautiful eyes, appears healthy with a slightly tan skin color, about 36 years old, speaks freely, but sensibly and properly, in her relations with others she tends to be more on the friendly side, amusing and humorous rather than solemn or grave. She takes part in everything; she plays all sorts of different instruments and sings to her own accompaniment, she can shoot rifles, pistols and crossbows in competition with others. She speaks French and is particularly adept in her German writing style and in poetry.….[She] encourages unreservedly other members of her sex to improve their minds by reading good books…. Following her example, there are already, as I have heard, other women here in Leipzig and in Saxony who are following her example as they try to emulate her good conduct. Distinguished individuals from the higher class of society enjoy Madame von Ziegler’s company so much that she is never missing from any of their social gatherings where she becomes the ‘life of the party’.”
Ziegler was the only woman invited to become a member of the prestigious German literary society led by Johann Christoph Gottsched. She won the literary society’s annual poetry prize twice. Ziegler’s words were also put to music once by Georg Philipp Telemann, a composer whom her father befriended and assisted professionally. This short, lively and spirited piece below, “Ich kann lachen, weinen, scherzen” (I can cry, laugh, joke), captures a sense of Ziegler’s exuberant personality.
After her third marriage (and the deaths of her mother and long imprisoned ex-mayor father) Ziegler moved to Frankfurt with her husband, but no longer published her writing. We’ll never know the reason. (You can find out more about Ziegler, her work and the historical context of the baroque period in a book by Mark A. Peters.)
During the festival, I attended a number of excellent concerts, including an opera and dance performance based on the life of Dido, a talk and performance on early keyboard instruments by artist-in-residence Catalina Vicens, as well as a performance by young cellist Jessica Korotkin of her own compositions based on Bach’s cello suites. I was also wowed by an all-Bach organ recital featuring Alexander Weimann.
Jessica Korotkin told us about the crucial catalytic role that one particular woman patron and family played in preserving J.S. Bach’s music his death. Sara Itzig Levy (1761-1854) was a harpsichord student of J.S. Bach’s eldest son and supporter of Bach’s second son and family. She performed and advocated for Bach’s work at her Berlin salons, and collected his manuscripts for posterity. She was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn’s maternal grandmother, Bella Itzig Salomon, who gifted Felix Mendelssohn the manuscript to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion which he performed in 1829 to widespread acclaim, which led to a revival of interest in Bach’s oeuvre.
Thank you to Suzie LeBlanc, the EMV team, Alexander Weimann, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, and all the very talented musicians and hard-working staff involved for raising the visibility of historic women curators, musicians, composers, and librettists over the past 10 days!