The name Bach is associated with the composer Johann Sebastian Bach all over the world. But what is known about the women of the famous family of musicians?
The exhibition sheds light on their biographies and scope for action over a period of 200 years. At audio stations, the women of the Bach family themselves raise their voices and talk about their lives.
There are relatively many sources on some women, such as Bach's granddaughter Anna Carolina Philippina Bach. She was actively involved in her father Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's music trade and continued it as an independent businesswoman after the death of her parents. Her business correspondence with the music collector and organist Johann Jacob Heinrich Westphal — a bundle of 37 letters that the Bach Archive was able to acquire in 2017 — provides information about her activities. Anna Carolina Philippina Bach is also one of the few women from the Bach family whose appearance we have an idea of: Her silhouette, made by the Hamburg silhouette cutter Jacob von Döhren in 1776, is depicted on the exhibition poster.
By contrast, only one handwritten signature of Cecilia Bach — one of four professional singers in the Bach family — has survived: in 1783, she published the opera »Amadis de Gaule« by her late husband Johann Christian Bach — a work that had been artistically altered against the composer's wishes at its premiere in Paris in 1779. Cecilia used the preface to the first edition, for which she was responsible, to stand up for her late husband's rights. She emphatically pointed out the original version of the mutilated work.
The exhibition will elicit the stories from the sources and documents in a variety of ways and present them in an easily understandable way for museum visitors. Documents, music, pictures and artefacts as well as audio stations and interactive elements will be used to illustrate the previously hidden lives of the women.
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