When we truly respect someone’s intellect, our first instinct is to treat them with the utmost reverence: to place them on a pedestal and see them as somehow more than human. With composers we admire, especially those well cemented in the canon and long departed, this instinct can be all the more entrenched – and yet, doing so robs these figures of their essential humanity and undercuts our attempts to connect with their work. As such, it can be both grounding and amusing to remember that our favourite composers were human and, therefore, prone to all the foibles, weaknesses, and creature preferences of the species.
My relationship to coffee is not at all a casual one. Upon entering a new city or town my first thought is to wonder where I might find a cosy third-wave coffee shop to haunt for the duration of my sojourn. For Christmas this year, instead of a chocolate advent calendar, I had a special coffee calendar with little sachets of different blends for each day. In my opinion, a walk in brisk wintry weather is only made perfect by clutching a travel mug of homebrewed coffee. In a comfortingly unfailing way, the impulse to seek out a good flat white punctuates each and every one of my days.
If you are similarly inclined, perhaps it might amuse you to know that you are in good company. Ludwig von Beethoven adored coffee. His sense of taste most likely heightened by the deafness he experienced from age twenty-eight onwards. Making the drink for himself and his guests in a glass carafe, Beethoven was sometimes so fastidious as to count out the sixty beans he needed per cup of coffee individually, according to biographer Anton Schindler. Schindler attests that for Beethoven, coffee was the only genuinely “indispensable” component of his diet. Beethoven also had a documented habit of working out of the private back rooms of coffeehouses and restaurants near his place of abode – so much so that friends and colleagues knew to seek him out in those establishments when they needed him.
Compositions with memorable programmatic content, or those that originated by way of a particularly pithy story, often come to be known by a nickname. The most famous of these in music associated with coffee is the so-called Coffee Cantata, or J. S. Bach’s secular cantata (the closest thing to opera he ever wrote), Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (“Be still, stop chatting,”) BWV 211. Completed in 1735 and set to words by the librettist known as Picander, the lively composition captures a fascinating political moment in the cultural history of coffee in Europe. In the cantata, concerned father Schlendrian needles and negotiates with his coffee-addicted daughter Liesgen, who desires unfettered access to her “sweet coffee… more delicious than a thousand kisses, milder than muscatel wine.” Schlendrian withholds the possibility of marriage as leverage to try to persuade Liesgen to give coffee up, but Liesgen arranges a sneaky loophole in the terms of her dowry, allowing her to brew coffee whenever she likes once she’s married.
J.S. Bach: Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211, “Coffee Cantata” – Aria: Ei, wie schmeckt der Coffee susse (Emma Kirkby, soprano; Rogers Covey-Crump, tenor; David Thomas, bass; Academy of Ancient Music; Christopher Hogwood, cond.)
Café Procope in Paris
Coffeehouses were already fairly well embedded in the social fabric of the middle and upper classes of Western Europe when the cantata was composed; in Paris, Café Procope had been open from 1686, in Leipzig, Gottfried Zimmerman’s café had already been open for twenty years (with the Collegium Musicum founded by Georg Philipp Telemann hosting concerts there from 1720). Nonetheless, the drink and the coffeehouses that served it were still regarded with suspicion by some factions. In her book Tea, Coffee & Chocolate: How We Fell in Love with Caffeine, Melanie King notes that early fear and suspicion around coffee came from the feeling that those who drank coffee “were too prone to copying the Turks” – it was to the trade, warfare, and travel of the Turkish that the origin of coffee in Western Europe was most often attributed.
This fear of the unknown – or foreign – when it came to coffee played out in the spheres of gender, public policy, and health in a variety of contradictory ways. Doctors had recognised the stimulating effects of coffee but, unable to identify caffeine as the active ingredient until the 1830s, medical professionals and civilians alike circulated rumours that coffee could possibly cure constipation, cure chronic swelling, increase virility – or, cause problems with impotence and sterility in men. Coffee drinking was attributed to the realm of hard work and industry by some, with its ability to stimulate the body and awaken creativity; coffeehouses were often thought of as gathering places for music and the exchange of ideas. Simultaneously, public officials warned that male-only coffeehouses encouraged laziness and sloth by providing men a place to avoid their wives and domestic duties. For young men and women alike, coffee was feared to be a kind of gateway substance leading to further depravity.
Drinking coffee constitutes a kind of freedom to act and indulge oneself and one’s body, and therefore, naturally became a battleground for gender. In Germany, female loitering in coffeeshops was frowned upon to the point where women organised their own women-only Kaffeekranzchen (coffee groups). In the cantata, Liesgen traces her love of coffee through the matrilineal line: “The mother adores her coffee habit / and grandma also drank it / so who can blame the daughters?” Cynthia R. Greenlee notes in her article for Bon Appétit that in setting this cantata, Bach may have been “poking fun” at the divided coffee culture of his own Leipzig, playing out the “cultural ambivalence” surrounding the drink by embodying its two poles sonically in the two contrasting voices of Liesgen, coffee fanatic, and Schlendrian, concerned sceptic.
Returning to my opening point about stripping historical figures of their humanity in our attempts to canonise and revere them, we might sometimes pigeonhole J. S. Bach as a family man, pedagogue, and lover of God, scripture, and sacred music. However, the Coffee Cantata reveals a different kind of disposition, hinting at a bawdy, comic, and socially alert Bach. In the daily degustatory rituals of life – the enjoying of a little cup of coffee – a thread connects our humanity to that of composers who lived hundreds of years ago.
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