The Composer Who Loved a Good Argument About Coffee

Johann Sebastian Bach is remembered, above all, as a composer of profound sacred music — the Mass in B minor, the Passions, cantata after cantata written for the glory of God. What history tends to forget is that Bach also wrote comedy.

A Portrait in Miniature

Of the roughly fifty secular cantatas Bach is known to have composed, only twenty-two survive — the rest lost to time, fire, and the general carelessness history shows toward anything not deemed sacred enough to preserve. What remains offers something the church music doesn't: glimpses of Bach as a colleague, a father, an observer of the ordinary comedy of eighteenth-century life.

Bach Akademie Australia's national tour, Weddings and Parties over Coffee, builds its program entirely from this smaller, stranger body of work — anchored by soprano Miriam Allan, who returns home from a celebrated international career (Glyndebourne, the Sydney Opera House, a performance at the funeral of Prince Philip) to sing alongside her own father.

“Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.”

— Douglas Adams

When Life Imitates Art

That detail is the quiet centre of the whole program. Bach's Coffee Cantata — his only work resembling a miniature opera — is a domestic farce: an exasperated father, Schlendrian, trying to break his daughter Lieschen's addiction to coffee by threatening to withhold everything from new dresses to a husband. She agrees to give it up, then secretly writes a clause into her marriage contract preserving her right to drink it whenever she likes.

In this production, father and daughter are played by an actual father and daughter — Miriam Allan and baritone Christopher Allan, a distinguished performer and, for 22 years, a voice lecturer at the University of Newcastle. Tenor Dan Walker narrates. It's a three-hundred-year-old joke about generational stubbornness, performed by two people who don't have to imagine the dynamic.

Leipzig's Coffee House Stage

The cantata was born from Bach's day job. In 1729 he took over Leipzig's Collegium Musicum, a concert society with a standing arrangement to perform in Zimmermann's Coffee House — an actual venue with instruments already installed, giving Bach a rare outlet for music that had nothing to do with Sunday service. It's why the cantata knows Leipzig's coffee-house culture so intimately, and why its humour still lands: Bach wasn't writing about abstract vice, he was writing about the people in the room.

The program pairs this with Bach's Wedding Cantata (BWV 202), two arias from Selig ist der Mann, a sinfonia by his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and the overture from the Orchestral Suite No.2 in B minor — eight instrumentalists tracing a throughline from courtship to marriage to the small, everyday negotiations that follow.

On Tour Nationally Through August

• Wednesday 5 August, 7:30pm — City Tabernacle Baptist Church, Brisbane
• Friday 7 August, 7:30pm — Harold Lobb Concert Hall, Newcastle Conservatorium of Music
• Sunday 9 August, 5:00pm — St James' King Street, Sydney
• Tuesday 11 August, 7:30pm — Wesley Music Centre, Canberra
• Sunday 16 August, 2:30pm — St Finbar's Catholic Church, Glenbrook

Tickets and full program details at bachakademieaustralia.com.au