In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his prince.  When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his wife was not only dead, but buried.  Spitta imagines his grief as he stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed.  She had borne him seven children, three of whom died; of the sons were Wilhelm Friedemann, the father’s favourite, and Karl Philipp Emanuel, whom the world long preferred to Sebastian himself, and whom later times spitefully underrate.

The shock of coming home to his dead wife did not annul Bach’s powers, and his next cantata with the suggestive title, “He that exalteth himself shall be abased,” shows a larger grasp of resource and power.  In the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the high praise of the eminent organist Reinken (whom by the way Mattheson accused of being “a constant admirer of the fair sex, and much addicted to the wine-cellar of the Council").

For all they may say of the superior genius of Bach’s first wife’s children, it was in his second wife that he seems to have found his more congenial and appreciative helpmeet.  Bach’s father had remarried after seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer.  Bach waited from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years more.  His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical than the mother of Bach’s first children.  Perhaps the newcomers thought it time to take the name out of the rut.

Anna Magdalena Wuelken was the daughter of the court trumpeter in the ducal band at Weissenfels.  She was twenty-one years old while Bach was thirty-six.  They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and together stood sponsor to the child of the prince’s cellar-clerk.  The wedding took place at Bach’s own house.

The new wife was very musical, a gifted singer and a devoted student.  She made the Bach home a little musical circle.  It is evident that she kept up her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, “They are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family, particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano and my eldest daughter joins in bravely.”

Soon after the marriage Sebastian and Anna started to keep a musical book together.  Her name appears in her own hand, then her husband’s cheery note that it was “Anti-Calvinismus and Anti-Melancholicus.”  In this book and another begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife.  There are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, “Edifying Reflections of a Smoker” in D minor, she transposed it up to G minor in her own hand—­doubtless that she might sing it to him while he puffed contentment in uxorious ease.  Later on is a wedding-poem, gallantly beginning,