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Ladies and Gentlemen, this Friday at Café Zimmermann in Leipzig, members of the Collegium Musicum will perform world premieres by Johann Sebastian Bach: a Suite in B minor and a brand-new Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra. Admission is free. Ladies are admitted only during the concert. 

Thus might have run one of the advertisements for the concerts at Gottfried Zimmermann’s fashionable Leipzig coffee shop. It’s hard to imagine how the public might have responded to new music of such distinction — though perhaps such things were commonplace in a city where you could hear Bach “premieres” every Sunday morning. Still, you have to wonder: Did the audiences at Café Zimmermann chatter over the music, or did they sit attentively and listen to these premieres by Telemann, Handel, and J.S. Bach? 

Live music in cafés and clubs is a common concept for us today — although even in more recent times, serious musicians have been known to complain about talkative club audiences. In the 18th-century, the idea of a full-fledged concert where coffee and lively conversation competed with music was a newish idea. 

Thus it is with great anticipation that Kansas Citians look forward to Kansas City Baroque Consortium’s season finale: Bach at the Café Zimmermann: Coffee, Pipe, & Drink—Vice, Virtue & Redemption. The program is an attempt to re-create, in part, one of these café concerts, with works that might have been performed and some that are related to the themes of tobacco, beer, and strong coffee.   

Café Zimmermann, which was located on the lower level of a building destroyed by Allied bombings in December 1943, was barely as big as a Starbucks. It consisted of two adjoining rooms: the smaller was 18 feet by 35 feet and the larger about 25 feet by 33 feet. Even a small chamber orchestra would have taken up good portion of the space. Small wonder that during summer months these concerts were held in a large outdoor space near the city gates. 

Whereas Leipzig had Zimmermann, Telemann, and the Bachs to thank for their concerts, Kansas City has cellist Trilla Carter. This is the 16th season of the Baroque Consortium she founded in 2009, and it is the first year that local demand for these concerts has grown so much that the group decided to repeat each program at a Northland venue. 

Trilla began as a cellist playing conventional repertoire, but already in high school she fell in love with music of the Baroque. After her orchestra performed a work by Handel, she remembers approaching her teacher and saying, “I want to play only this music.” This proved prophetic. “I just felt connected to it,” she said recently. “I thought it was the most amazing music that I’d ever played.” 

Later, learning the Bach cello suites in college, she found her curiosity further piqued. “But I remember feeling like I needed to continue searching.” Eventually she sought out Boston-based Phoebe Carrai and took part in her summer courses in Baroque cello. By 2007 Trilla was ready to take the plunge and “go for Baroque” — and two years later, she founded the prototype of the Baroque Consortium. 

Trilla is now one of the most influential voices in Kansas City’s music scene, and her ensemble is gaining national renown. Recently she answered a few questions about her journey.  

What aspects of Bach do you hope to convey during this season, and what does this last concert show us about music in 18th-century Leipzig? 

This season I wanted to offer a glimpse of the musical world in which Bach found himself — and showcase his early influences from Dieterich Buxtehude, his colleague Christoph Graupner, and his good friend Georg Philipp Telemann, all whose reputations and recognition far surpassed Bach’s during his day. 

Concert II this July was a bit of a survey of the Bach family and its dynasty of composer-sons that ushered us straight away into the changing musical landscape of the early Classical era. 

Café Zimmermann in Leipzig served as a kind of prototype for future concert settings. It brought music out of the church and court into a publicly accessible, informal setting for listening to music. The Leipzig Collegium Musicum, which Bach directed, was the ‘house band,’ and was made up of students and professionals. 

The Café’s importance was also in serving as a cultural bridge between performances for an elite audience, and music for an emerging public audience. 

How much of the repertoire on your concert do we believe was actually performed at these concerts? 

There is no complete, official playlist of all the concerts performed at Café Zimmermann during the period of Bach’s supervision (roughly 1729–1741). However, musicologists have reconstructed a reasonable picture based on surviving works that Bach likely composed or adapted for these performances, on contemporary accounts and student recollections, and on the ensembles and instruments we know were available to him. 

Concert III is an imaginative take on the scene of the day and partially inspired by countertenor Jay Carter’s offering of Bach’s gorgeous cantata of redemption, Just Resist Sin (No. 54). As I considered the context of the Aria from the Coffee Cantata, (“Oh, How Sweet this Coffee Tastes,” where the father reprimands his daughter for her obsession with coffee, and the aria  “As Often as I Light My Pipe” (BWV 515), where pipe-smoking is an allegory for the transience of life, I began playing with these concepts of vice, virtue and redemption as subtext to the light-hearted setting of a coffeehouse. We added an aria from Nicolas Bernier’s Coffee Cantata … and a song about wine crept in under the theme of vices. 

What do you think these concerts were like, in terms of the level of musical excellence? 

I imagine it was a pretty high level of musicianship in that Collegium Musicum (founded by Telemann in 1702). I suspect Bach was a rigorous task master. How could you compose at his level of perfectionism and not require the students to develop their playing to a very high level? And I highly suspect that the students did not earn a dime: If they were lucky, they made enough to buy their own coffee.

It’s fascinating to realize just how NEW this music was to the audience. They listened with a different mindset than we do. Almost all the music performed at the Café was “the new music.” 

What do you make of the suggestion, by some scholars, that Anna Magdalena, J.S. Bach’s wife, might have sung at some of these concerts? 

It was common that women were typically not “allowed” in coffee houses, but we know they were permitted to attend the concerts at Zimmermann’s, and it’s speculated that they were allowed to sip a cup. Leipzig was a bustling college town, intellectual, bourgeois: and here is Bach’s Coffee Cantata for soprano, about a young woman’s love for coffee. So who knows? 

Some have suggested that the spread of coffee through Europe, especially from 17th century onward, might have actually spawned the Enlightenment. Thoughts? 

Of course, coffee itself isn’t responsible for the Enlightenment, but the spaces where coffee was consumed surely became important venues for Enlightenment thought and discussion. I imagine that coffee houses created a new kind of space for the curious, well-read intellectuals and idealists to gather and exchange ideas. Then again, maybe it was the coffee that fed the mind of these intellectuals.

—By Paul Horsley

Bach at the Café Zimmermann takes place August 15th at Visitation Catholic Church and the 17th at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church. For tickets go to kcbaroque.org. To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send an email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or X/Instagram (@phorsleycritic).