Bach FAQ 103
Children, Children: Was Bach One of Eight Siblings and Did Bach Have 20 Children with Two Wives?..
A very well-known image among Bach fans: the painting “Morning Devotions” by Toby E. Rosenthal. However, it was not created until many decades after Bach's death. The ages of the figures indicate that the scene depicts a time with Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena..
Children or Siblings? Of Johann Sebastian Bach?..
Yeah, that is a strange question. And anyway, why are we talking about children and siblings here, and why are the numbers different?..
Siblings, children ... it’s very easy to get them mixed up. That’s exactly what kept happening to me time and again while I was creating this website. The most recent time was just one day before my Bach Biography for Children went to print, when I got a huge shock. It happened as I was listening to the audiobook version of the paperback one last time. By the way, it was finished earlier than the printed version. There was that sentence in Chapter 12 that said, “... in the Bach household in Eisenach, never eight children played together”!..
Now, you have to understand that I never exactly brilliated in mathematics, just as I didn’t in most other school subjects. And one of the funniest moments (…at least, only rarely) was when you lost your place while counting. The following happened to me during my final check. As mentioned, this was before I sent the print order for the print edition of my Johann Sebastian Bach Biography for Children. So I listened to the audiobook version one last time. I had already checked and proofread this text at least 20 times before..
I’m actually always making “nonsense.” So I used the phrase “... there were never eight children playing together” once to describe the situation in Eisenach, when Bach was one of Ambrosius’s eight children. And once to refer to the first seven children from his first marriage to Maria Barbara. Since the two numbers were so similar, I got the “scare of my creative life.” Because it was only then that I realized I had confused a period spanning a quarter-century. What do both situations have in common? The reason why never seven or eight children played together is because so many of them died before that. Attention again: Bach had seven siblings and 20 children. Seven from his first marriage and 13 from his second..
That one sentence – or rather, that one mistake – had, as I realized during the last soundcheck, slipped through all the proofreading stages. Long, long after I’d finished school. When counting the kids. I thought I hadn’t realized that Johann Sebastian Bach had had seven siblings..
By the way, here you get to the listing of all siblings of Johann Sebastian Bach, that is to say to the children of his parents Ambrosius and Elisabetha..
Plus here you get to the list of the children of Johann Sebastian Bach (... that is to say not the siblings) with his wife No. 1, Maria Barbara, these are – again for you – seven children. Then to those with his second wife Anna Magdalena. Additional thirteen more. That is a total of? Right, 20 children..
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