Beschreibung:
Anna Magdalena Wilcke held the post of Hofsangerin (court singer) in the central German principality of Cothen, having been recruited for the position by the Kapellmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach. Five months after taking up her new post, she made what must have seemed to her another wise move up the musical ladder of success: she married the Kapellmeister, 16 years her senior. Year after Anna Magdalena's official retirement from her position as court singer, Bach directed in Leipzig the first performance of the Coffee cantata (BWV 211), a vehicle for a highly skilled soprano in conditions that Bach scholarship has generally assumed spoke against public participation by women. Further, the work's libretto called into question the notion that women might articulate a position of independence through engagement with the fashionable world and a concomitant disavowal of paternal authority. This was a musical entertainment that staged family tension, patriarchal anxiety, and the problem of unwed daughters—all serious themes, notwithstanding the veneer of humor generated by its lampooning of contemporary consumer culture and in particular the fashion for coffee and hoopskirts. The Coffee cantata might well have offered a dramatic role to one of the composer's own daughters; if so, the work reflects an ambiguous light both onto the female musicians of the Bach family and, more generally, onto women and performance in mid-18th-c. Lutheran Germany.