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Updated: May 26, 2025
More cannot be said of his ancestors than that for some generations they had been hard-working, honest folk of the peasant class, given to music, but by no means a family of musicians like the Bachs. His mother was born Maria Koller, and it has been suggested that the name is a variant or corruption of the Croatian Kolar, meaning a wheelwright.
He hummed gayly a few bars of the choral and stopped, listening. The boy turned his face back over the road. "They are coming," he said softly. "Ja, they are coming." The next moment a heavy cart came in sight. It was laden to the brim with Bachs and music; some laughing and some singing and some playing on fiddles or flutes or horns beaming with broad faces.
When at last the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly find surpassed outside of Dickens. The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs.
His noble technique, based on his profound study of the Bachs, was spiritualized by his own glowing fancy. In his playing, as in his compositions, every note was a pearl of great price. With his piano concertos he showed how clavier and orchestra may converse earnestly together without either having its individuality marred.
The great Heinrich swept them with his eagle glance. "Is there not one," he went on slowly, "who dares promise, in the presence of the Bachs that before Reinken dies he will meet him and outplay him?" The Bachs were silent. They knew Reinken. Sebastian, wedged between his father and the fat Bach, gulped mightily. He struggled to get to his feet. But a hand at his coat-tails held him fast.
The man caught up Sebastian by the arm and jumped on to the tail-board of the cart. And thus enveloped in a cloud of dust, surrounded by the laughter of fun-loving men and youths the boy came into Erfurt, to the great festival of all the Bachs. "Sh-h! It is Heinrich! Listen to him to Heinrich!"
Sebastian, sitting between his father and a fat Bach, gulped with joy. It was the great Heinrich who composed chorals and fugues and gavottes and hush! Could it be that he was rebuking the Bachs the great Bachs!... Sebastian's ears cracked with the strain.
It is unfortunate to have to include among the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fair family man, and a great composer. He first too much eclipsed his father's fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby. He had family troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him. So much for the Bachs.
He dropped into silence, and a little brook that ran over the stones near by babbled as it went. The boy raised his eyes. "And he had a lute," he prompted softly. "Ja, he had a lute and while the mill-wheel turned, he played the lute sweet, true notes and tunes he played in that old mill." The boy smiled contentedly. "And now we be a hundred Bachs. We make music for all Germany. Come!"
But at least his life, like Bach's and that of many another, had proved that marriage is not always and necessarily a failure when set to music. The genealogy of the Bachs shows them to have been in the habit of marrying at least two or three times apiece, and of being very prolific. Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of "the Father of Modern Music," had a twin brother, Johann Cristoph.
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