Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Notebooks

Earlier in November, Bach Society Houston performed works from the two Anna Magdalena Bach Notebooks; you can watch the concert here. These notebooks, which originated in 1722 and 1725, respectively, were owned by Anna Magdalena Bach, J.S. Bach’s second wife. These two manuscript collections contain keyboard and vocal works of varying levels of complexity, composed by multiple people and entered into the notebooks by different scribes, including Anna Magdalena herself. In our own time, some of the more elementary pieces in the books are still well-known as teaching pieces for piano students. The notebooks are one of the few surviving sources related to Anna Magdalena Bach, who has been the subject of research, conjecture, devotion and fiction across centuries and continents. With us to talk about Anna Magdalena's musical and domestic life, her Notebooks and other sources related to her, and how we know what we think we know about her is Dr. Andrew Talle. Dr. Talle is Associate Professor of Musicology at Northwestern University and a scholar of music and society in eighteenth-century Germany. He is author of the book Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century. Stay tuned at the end of the interview to hear more about his new research into popular music in the Leipzig of Bach's time.