Routines - Bach
We don't know the daily routine of Johann Sebastian Bach. No surviving documents give us a picture of Bach's daily life. But Malcolm Boyd gives us the closest thing:
"We need to be cautious, too, in attempting to form a picture of Bach's personality and temperament, for here again the evidence is slender. What we lack most are the personal letters that so vividly bring to life other great composers of the past, for example Mozart and Beethoven. It is to be regretted that, as C. P. E. Bach informed Forkel in a letter dated 13 January 1775: 'with his numerous commitments he had scarcely time for the most pressing correspondence, and consequently could not engage in extensive conversations in writing'. Except for two letters to Georg Erdmann and a few notes to his kinsman Elias, very little remains in Bach's hand to through light on his domestic and social life. . .Bach seems to have been warm-hearted, generous and hospitable in his own home. A man who enjoyed a pipe, who liked his wine and beer, and who fathered twenty children cannot have been indifferent to sensual pleasures, and during the period of his greatest celebrity in Leipzig he was always ready to receive the many visitors who sought him out. C. P. E. Bach, in a letter to Forkel mentioned above, described Bach's dwelling in the Thomaskirchhof as a Taubenhaus (dovecot), and in his autobiography (1773) he wrote:
'In my youth. . .no master of music was likely to travel through this place [Leipzig] without making my father's acquaintance and playing before him. My father's greatness as a composer, organist and keyboard player sui generis was much too renowned for a musician of standing not to get to know the great man better when the opportunity arose.'"
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