J. Ambrosius two months after the wedding. The boy
Sebastian was put in charge of an uncle.

At eighteen he was organist at Arnstadt--at twenty-one he went on foot
fifty miles to Luebeck to hear the great Buxtehude play the organ. He had
been given four weeks' leave and took sixteen. He was severely reproved
for this by the Consistory; and the reproof is in existence still. While
they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and
variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when
rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and
waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with him mildly again,
adding, that they "furthermore remonstrate with him on his having
latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music
in the choir." His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it
to the parson. Further explanation we have none.

Spitta speculates on the identity of this "stranger maiden." In the
older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they
occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick
opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his
cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and
friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assuming this to
be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the
young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach "spoke to
the parson," he confessed his love and his betrothal.

Further Spitta comments: "The plan on which Bach wished to found his own
family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by
which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing
conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a
relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most
certain of understanding him. If we must call it a coincidence, it is,
at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his
race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of
its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the
marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the
cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice
may signify that in him the highest summit of a development had been
reached, so that his instinct disdained the natural way of attempting
further impro