Q.
How is it that Bach came to write a cantata about coffee?

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A.

Johann Sebastian Bach, as it turns out, was mad about coffee. The BBC reports that he would drink up to 30 cups a day 👀. This at a time in the 18^th Century when King Frederick the Great was loudly proclaiming the political and physical evils of this bitter brew.

FTG had some harsh words for those who would petition his coffee tax in 1779: ‘It is despicable to see how extensive the consumption of coffee is. It leads to every peasant and common man getting used to drinking coffee, because it is so easy to be had in the countryside.’

And what was Frederick’s healthful solution to replace the scourge that was coffee? Beer.

If we limit coffee, Frederick reasoned, ‘people will have to get used to beer again, which is to the benefit of their own breweries, because they will then sell more beer…By the way, His Royal Majesty himself was raised eating beer-soup, so these people can also be brought up nurtured with beer-soup. This is much healthier than coffee.’

King Frederick even built a squadron of Coffee Smellers to march about the village and sniff out any rebels who were roasting coffee rather than brewing beer soup.

What was a coffee-loving composer with a backlog of mental partitas to do? Mock through music.

Bach found another artist who scorned the coffee bashing – a poet named Picander – and commissioned him to write a satirical libretto about Lieschen – a young woman enslaved to caffeine. The result? Bach’s BWV 211: Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht.

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A little way into the cantata, daughter Lieschen implores her father, Schlendrian, to hand over the coffee goods:

Lieschen:
‘Father, sir, but do not be so harsh!
If I couldn’t, three times a day
be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee
in my anguish I will turn into
a shriveled-up roast goat.’

‘Ah!’ Lieschen adds in an Aria.
‘How sweet coffee tastes,
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
milder than muscatel wine.
Coffee, I have to have coffee,
and, if someone wants to pamper me,
ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!’

Papa Schlendrian is having none of it.

Schlendrian:
‘If you don’t give up coffee for me,
you won’t go to any wedding parties,
or even go out for walks.’

The familial coffee squabbles continue, but 30 cup Johann and his ally Picandel give the final victory to Lieschen, the coffee-lover. She will only consider marriage with a suitor who agrees, in writing , that she can make herself coffee whenever she wants.

Now, Bach would be hard-pressed to find any health professionals who would support a 30 cups a day habit. But, perhaps we can raise one cup of joe in his honour, and hope for just a splash of his genius.

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www.justcurious.ca

Article Photos: Nathan Dumlao