The lost portrait of Anna Magdalena: who was Johann Sebastian Bach's second wife?
- Bach Society Brasil
- 6 hours ago
- 13 min read
In June 1721, a nineteen-year-old soprano arrived at the court of Cöthen to occupy a position that no woman had held there before her. Two and a half years later, already married to the Kapellmeister Johann Sebastian Bach, Anna Magdalena Wilcke would cease to receive a salary for the rest of her life. It was the first chapter of an erasure that lasted three centuries.
On September 21, 2026, we will be holding a free concert in Porto Alegre dedicated to Anna Magdalena, playing the repertoire that the Bach family played at home. Check out the details here .
Imagining the portrait of Anna Magdalena
No authenticated portrait of Anna Magdalena has survived to this day. But one did exist. Musicologist David Yearsley records that a good-sized painting by Antonio Cristofori , a musician and painter from Eisenach, was included in the catalog of the portrait collection organized by her stepson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , which described her as a sopranistin , singer, and second wife of Johann Sebastian. The painting was lost. Therefore, when the Bach Society Brazil decided to produce a reconstruction of her face using artificial intelligence , it didn't start from scratch: it reconstructed an object that existed and disappeared.
No source describes her face, body, or eye color. Every choice made in the image is, therefore, a stated inference, not a fact : fair skin and brown hair, the most common phenotype in early 18th-century Saxony. The portrait shows Anna Magdalena at the age of twenty-four , in 1725 , at the exact moment when she was transitioning from a salaried court singer to an unpaid wife in Leipzig: the same biographical tension that runs through the notebook that gives the concerto its name.
The clothing follows a documentary clue, not a stylist's assumption. Yearsley writes that "Anna Magdalena would certainly have worn a costume similar to Weigel's Sängerin, with a hoop skirt, when she held her post at court in Cöthen," referring to an engraving of a singer published by Johann Christoph Weigel in Nuremberg around 1720. From there came the fitted bodice, the moderate square neckline, and the discreet fabrics: no brocade, no Italian opera costume. In the inventory of Bach's estate , from 1750, the only jewels recorded are two gold rings ; no pearls. Therefore, the portrait retains only the wedding ring and a black velvet ribbon around the neck.
Beside her are a small harpsichord , a vase of yellow carnations, and a cage with a goldfinch. The three objects come from letters by her nephew Johann Elias Bach , who describes Anna Magdalena as a great lover of gardening and songbirds: she cared for the yellow carnations, he writes, with the same zeal one gives to a child. In her lap, closed, is Anna Magdalena's own Book of 1725 , with the initials "AMB" engraved in gold on the green cover, the only object in the painting that actually belonged to her.
Zeitz soprano: earning more than her father.
The first record we have of her is an accounting entry. On a page of the Zerbst court accounts, someone noted the payment for two guest musicians: six thalers for the trumpeter Wilcke, from Weissenfels, and twelve thalers for his daughter , who had sung a cappella a few times. The girl was nineteen years old and left with twice as much as her father had taken. Nothing else is known about that trip, nor what she sang. It is only known that she was worth twice as much.
Anna Magdalena Wilcke was born in Zeitz , Saxony, at the end of September 1701, and was baptized in the castle church, where an uncle was the organist. Music, in that family, was an inherited craft like a workshop: her grandfather had been an organist and schoolmaster; her father, Johann Caspar Wilcke , served as court and field trumpeter to the Duke of Saxe-Zeitz. Around the age of sixteen, she moved with her family to Weissenfels , whose court maintained a chapel of thirty musicians.
It was there, almost certainly, that she learned to sing with Pauline Kellner , one of the greatest German voices of her generation and the highest-paid member of that chapel. Kellner never married, continued to sing even after fifty, and was known in the city only by her first name, with the article, as was done with Italian divas: die Paulina . A woman could, therefore, live by singing and grow old singing. The girl from Zeitz had this example before her eyes every day.
The first woman of the Cöthen chapel.
In the summer of 1721, her name begins to appear in Cöthen 's books. The Church of St. Agnes records her as "Magdalena Wilckens, court singer"; in another document, as a chamber musician. The second designation is the one that matters. Kammermusicus was not just any chapel position: it was the highest category, reserved for those whom the court insisted on retaining.
Musicologist Christoph Wolff sums up what that meant without softening anything. She was the first woman hired full-time at that chapel, and became the highest-paid musician at court after the Kapellmeister himself, earning twice as much as the chamber musicians. By the following year's accounts, her salary had already risen to three hundred thalers , more than her father and brother had ever seen in their lives.
The marriage to Johann Sebastian Bach
Weeks before the wedding, a shipment of Rhine wine arrived at the house, purchased at the Ratskeller in Cöthen. It cost just over eighty thalers , roughly a fifth of the groom's annual salary. Johann Sebastian Bach, widowed for a year and a half, was not sparing any expense on the celebration.
They were married on December 3, 1721 , a Wednesday, the first after the first Sunday of Advent, so that the invited musicians could arrive home in time for Sunday services. The ceremony was held at home, "by order of the Prince," as recorded in the parish register. He was thirty-six years old; she was twenty.
How they met, nobody knows. What remains of their intimacy is contained in half a dozen letters from their nephew and secretary , Johann Elias Bach , and what these letters show is a husband on the hunt for gifts: a singing robin bought in Halle, six yellow carnations that his wife tended to, writes the nephew, with the same care given to children, so that none would wilt.
In May 1723 , four carts loaded with furniture crossed the road from Cöthen to Leipzig . For Bach, it was the promotion that would lead him to the most visible position in German Lutheran music. For her, it was the end of her job. In Leipzig, women did not sing in divine services, and there was no exception for the wife of the music director, even though she was certainly one of the best sopranos in the city.
Their career didn't die all at once: it withered. The accounts of the Cöthen court record the couple returning to sing, first in 1724, then in 1725, and always paid as a duo. There was also a trip to Kassel and another to Weissenfels, the two of them together, over the following years. After that, the books are silent.
Anna Magdalena and Bach's children
In 1730 , writing to an old school friend, Georg Erdmann , Bach describes the household with evident pride: they are all natural musicians, he says, and it's already possible to form a voice and instrument ensemble within the family itself, "especially since my current wife sings a good, clear soprano, and my eldest daughter doesn't do badly either." It's one of the few sentences in which we hear her voice being described by someone who heard her every day.
The same household accumulated another set of records. She had received four young stepchildren initially and had thirteen more children in nineteen years, six of whom reached adulthood. Of the first eight, born in the first decade of Leipzig, only two lived past the age of four: a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, a three-year-old girl, and a newborn who lived for two days. This fate was hardly the average for the time, even for the 18th century.
The last time she sang in public
Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen died in November 1728, a few weeks after the Bachs buried their three-and-a-half-year-old son. The prince's body remained in a crypt throughout the winter, and the funeral rites only took place in March 1729 , in the Jacobikirche. Bach, who held the honorary title of capellmeister of that court, was in charge of the funeral music and asked his wife to sing it.
The work itself is lost. Picander's libretto and the distribution of parts survived, and it is this distribution that tells us what we need to know: three demanding arias were assigned to the soprano, as many as to the bass, and the last solo word of the piece belongs to her. In one of them, the soul of the dead man speaks in the first person, without basso continuo supporting the voice, only the high instruments floating above. When that soul sang, it sang in a woman's voice.
Anna Magdalena was twenty-seven years old and had already buried three children when she went up to say, musically, that death was a consolation. It is the last time the documents record her singing in public.
The erasure of Anna Magdalena
Her forgetfulness was not an oversight. It was built up, step by step, and it's possible to follow each one.
Four years after Bach's death, the obituary that would fix the composer's image for posterity was printed, written largely by his stepson Carl Philipp Emanuel . It is the only time she appears in print while still alive. The text records her marriage, her thirteen children, the six survivors, and concludes with four words: "The widow also still lives." Her father's position is there, named in full. The position she herself held in Cöthen, more prestigious than her father's, is not. In the foundational document of Bach's biography, written by someone who lived with her throughout her childhood, Anna Magdalena is listed as the daughter of a trumpeter.
Thirty years later, the lexicographer Ernst Ludwig Gerber , son of a Bach pupil, was the only man of the 18th century to record in writing that she had talent. He called her an excellent soprano, and added that she had died without ever having made public use of this talent. He was off the date of death by three years, and he got the essential thing wrong: she had been a salaried court singer and had sung in Zerbst, in Cöthen, and at the funeral of a prince. But Gerber searched for records in Leipzig, found none, and concluded what the absence of paper seemed to say. It was this phrase that posterity inherited.
In 1802, when Johann Nikolaus Forkel published the first biography of Bach and definitively created the figure of the solitary German genius, he solved the problem in another way: he did not mention either of his two wives. The silence was functional. A man whose genius owes nothing to anyone could not have had anyone copy his scores.
The fourth stage is the strangest, because it was done with affection. In 1925, an English writer named Esther Meynell published *The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach* , an entire novel narrated in the voice of the widow. The first edition was published without an author's name and without a preface, beginning directly in the first person; the note warning that certain episodes were imaginary was hidden after the last page. Five years later, the German translation was published , completely omitting Meynell's name , with the consent of the author and the English publisher, and the little book became a birthday gift for young women, a Christmas present, and a Lutheran confirmation gift throughout Germany. Meynell was only credited in 1949, in small print, on the verso of the title page.
There is also a fifth stage, and this one has no date because it is an absence. No authenticated portrait of her has survived. An inventory from 1790 records an oil painting by Cristofori, which belonged to Carl Philipp Emanuel; the painting disappeared and was never found. All the images that circulate today with her name are later inventions, the work of artists who never saw her. We know how much she earned, what she sang, how many children she buried, and on what street she died. We don't know what her face looked like.
The widow of Hainstraße
Bach died in July 1750 without leaving a will. She was forty-eight years old, with five children still at home and two weeks to petition the city for the six-month grace period to which the widows of cantors usually had a right. They used to have it, but they didn't: Leipzig granted the sum as "voluntary aid," paid it six months late, and only after she handed over to the city council the performance parts of an entire cycle of her husband's cantatas. They didn't even leave her the apartment during that six months, because the school needed to renovate it for the successor's family.
At the probate hearing, she was present but silent. As a woman, she could not speak for herself and was represented by a guardian. To retain custody of her own children, she had to swear in writing that she would not remarry.
The division of the estate gave her a third of the spoils; the rest was divided among her nine children. However, the inheritance consisted of furniture and tools, not money, and transporting them to Halle and Berlin cost more than they were worth, so she had to pay the heirs the appraised value of what remained in her possession, selling hastily and below market value. When the accounts were settled, she was left with eleven groschen and eight pfennigs , less than half a thaler, enough to feed the household for a week. The household income had fallen to a fraction of what it had been.
She lived off what the city, the university, and some private bequests passed on to her, an annual sum equivalent to what a gatekeeper in Leipzig earned. In 1752, the city council paid her extra aid to alleviate her poverty, and in return took the copies of *The Art of Fugue* that were still in her possession. Four years later, the Seven Years' War dried up the main part of her private bequests, and the last three years of her life were the worst. She and her two youngest daughters lived in an inn on Hainstraße , a street where many of the beneficiaries of public assistance lived, who usually paid part of their lodging by working for the house. It is likely that she supported herself by sewing and copying documents, with the same beautiful and reliable handwriting that she had used for thirty years to copy her husband's musical scores.
She died in February 1760 , at the age of fifty-eight, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Johanniskirche cemetery, where seven of her children already lay. Only a quarter of the Thomaskirche choir sang at her funeral, without the shrouds and banners that would have been due to the widow of a long-serving employee. In the burial register, someone recorded her as Almosenfrau : a woman supported by charity.
Less than a month later, the university accountant opened the list of beneficiaries and, out of habit, wrote down the name "Bachin." He then remembered that she had died, crossed out the word, and wrote underneath the name of the next kantor widow.
The Animation: Episode #17 – A New Consolation
Amidst the grief over Maria Barbara's death, Sebastian finds comfort in meeting a new soprano; meanwhile, his patron faces difficulties that threaten the stability of the court. The episode dramatizes the moment when Anna Magdalena enters Bach's life, and it is precisely the framing of this entry that this post examines in light of the documents. (Channel: youtube.com/@BachTheAnimatedSeries.)
About the series Bach: The Animated Series
This episode is part of an independent series created and animated by artist Peter Fielding . Born in Flanders and based in Italy, Fielding explored the biography of Johann Sebastian Bach through a visual narrative that humanizes the composer's challenges.
The Bach Society Brazil presents the videos from the series as part of its outreach initiative. To understand the behind-the-scenes production and the author's creative process, read our exclusive interview with Peter Fielding .
Real or Fiction?
The animation's chronology is correct and more accurate than much of the information available on the subject. Maria Barbara died in July 1720; Anna Magdalena appears in Cöthen's records in June 1721; the wedding was in December. Approximately fourteen months separate the mourning period from the new beginning, exactly the interval suggested by the episode. And she was, in fact, a singer who had recently arrived at court.
What the dramatization softens is her status. She wasn't "a choir soprano," but a court singer with a chamber position and the second-highest salary in the chapel, hired before the marriage and on her own merit. The narrative of the grieving man finding solace in a woman inverts the order of events: first came the hired professional; the marriage came later. And there's a limit that any dramatization needs to overcome to tell the story, because we don't know how the two met. Every scene of their first encounter is invention, which is perfectly legitimate in fiction, as long as it's not read as a document.
Suggested Listening
Nine movements for solo soprano, approximately twenty minutes long, with a decidedly virtuosic vocal line. It's the kind of music no one writes without envisioning a singer capable of sustaining it. Some suggest that BWV 202 was sung at the Bachs' own wedding, or at Prince Leopold's a week later; the occasion remains uncertain. What is certain is that it is the closest sonic portrait we have of what Anna Magdalena was capable of. The distressed shadows recede, spring replaces winter, and a woman's voice announces the change.
The recording is from the Bach Society Brazil , at the concert "Cantata do Casamento" (Wedding Cantata), held at MARGS on September 4, 2021, with period instruments: Cintia de los Santos , soprano; Natalia Chahin , baroque oboe; Giovani dos Santos and Márcio Cecconello , baroque violins; Leonardo Bock , baroque viola; Diego S. Biasibetti , cello; Alexandre Ritter , violone; and Fernando Cordella on harpsichord and musical direction.
Bibliographic References
BACH-ARCHIV LEIPZIG . Calendarium: A Timeline of the Life of Johann Sebastian Bach.
DAVID, Hans T.; MENDEL, Arthur; WOLFF, Christoph (Ed.). The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1998.
GARDINER, John Eliot. Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
WILLIAMS, Peter. JS Bach: A Life in Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
WOLFF, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2000.
Audiovisual Production: FIELDING, Peter . Bach: The Animated Series . 2024. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/@BachTheAnimatedSeries .
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