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Bach's Coffee Cantata

© John L. Hoh, Jr.

I recently received a review copy of a book entitled Lives of the Musicians: Good Times, Bad Times (and What the Neighbors Thought). As I'm paging through I naturally gravitate to the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach, the pre-eminent Lutheran composer. And as I read the entry, this sentence hits me:

"Bach loved food and coffee (once he wrote a whole cantata on coffee)"

A whole cantata on coffee? I never heard of it, but if this is so, then there is no doubt about Bach's Lutheran affiliation. So I set out to do some research. And here is what I found.

The name of the cantata is Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Kaffee Kantate). In English that comes out to "Be quiet, do not chat" (Coffee Cantata). And to understand the cantata, one must understand the times in which Johann lived and what he must have felt in a coffee-hating society as a lover of the aromatic bean juice.

From a web site (http://journale.com/really/coffeecantata... I found this about Bach and coffee:

In Germany, coffee was not accepted in the home until the second half of the 18th century. This was due to a mixture of factors: + a long standing fondness for local beer, + a general distrust of things considered "un-German," + as well as ongoing prohibition, taxes & libel specifically directed against coffee.

This trend was reflected in Bach's Coffee Cantata of 1732, a satirical operetta which provides a musical insight into some of the prevailing attitudes. It tells of the efforts of a stern father to check his daughter's propensity for coffee-drinking by threatening to make her choose between a husband and coffee. Unperturbed, the daughter sings an aria which begins, "Ah, how Sweet coffee tastes - lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel"

As you go through the cantata, there is conflict. Dad, a good German through and through, is perplexed that his dear daughter drinks the hated coffee! He insists she stop; she insists she needs the coffee buzz.

What's a father to do? Well, in the cantata he makes a threat: no husband until she gives up the java bean! Herein we find a cultural change from the US model. In the United States, Lieschen would have grabbed her coffee maker and her can of coffee and eloped. But in Bach's Germany, the father found the husband and arranged a marriage. And no maiden wanted to become an old maid! Thus Lieschen agrees to forego coffee for a husband. But while dady goes searching for the beau, Lieschen makes it clear she will not marry any man that would refuse her coffee.

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