ABSTRACT

Johann Sebastian Bach lived in a number of households in the course of his life. Most of them, ranging from his birthplace in a town musician’s household in Eisenach, to the cantor’s service apartment in Leipzig, were typical of early modern urban households in two important respects. First, they included not only members of the immediate family, but also various other people. Second, these households were not just places of residence, but also sites of work and production: of musical learning, composition, and the copying of manuscripts. As historians have found, people’s roles in the family, in the household, and in the economy overlapped. Bach’s households during his shorter stints at the courts of Weimar and Cöthen also shared these characteristics.