Once Bach had arrived in Leipzig, he cultivated and maintained connections with the city’s political, commercial, and clerical establishment as well as its intellectual elite. He received support from high-ranking state dignitaries and conducted regular business with town, church, and university officials. However, his most important interactions were basically with the professoriate of the university.

Johann August Ernesti

Since Bach had never studied at a university, he was the only faculty member without a degree. He clearly felt more comfortable in musical circles and may well have disliked the exclusive and often arrogant world of the professoriate. However, he never shied away from intellectual challenges and frequently impressed his colleagues by incorporating these challenges into his musical settings. It’s hardly surprising that Bach would call upon his colleagues and their families to become godparents of his children.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Mass in B minor

Frontispiece of Gesner’s Novus Linguae et Eruditionis Romanae Thesaurus, 1747.

Johann August Abraham Bach was baptised on 5 November 1733 and died on 6 November 1733. Once again, the child had been born premature, and his parents had the sad task of rushing the infant to church to receive a Christian baptism. Bach selected Johann August Ernesti as the godfather. Ernesti was rector at the University and simultaneously professor of ancient classical literature. One of the most widely published academic authors, he wrote works on Homer, Cicero, New Testament hermeneutics, and various other subjects. And we do know that Wolfgang von Goethe attended his lectures in the late 1760s. Elisabeth Caritas, the wife of Johann Matthias Gesner, was godmother to the child. Gesner had been involved in bringing Bach to Leipzig in 1730, but as he failed to receive a university appointment in Leipzig eventually left for Göttingen University, where he became the founding dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. Gesner was a prolific author of classical philology specialising in Cicero, Horace, Pliny, Quintilianus and others, and he published a dictionary of Latin etymology in 1738. For the Bach family, the birth and death of yet another child had sadly become commonplace.

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