There is a genogram in which almost every entry carries the note "musician", and if one contemplates it long enough, one begins to wonder whether talent is inherited or whether families are simply very persuasive at teaching their members who they are supposed to be.
The Bach family is probably the most striking example of this puzzle – a family tree that is simultaneously a score, and that raises the question of where nature ends and nurture begins, without ever answering it.
Across seven generations, the Thuringian family produced professional musicians as though it were a law of nature. Beginning with Veit Bach (c. 1550–1619), a baker and miller from the Kingdom of Hungary who fled as a Protestant from the Habsburgs to Wechmar in Thuringia and there played his cittern – a lute-like instrument that he apparently took with him when he left everything else behind. Continuing through Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who drove the family's musical genius to a peak from which music history has not quite recovered, down to his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, who themselves became significant composers – as though in this family one simply could not do otherwise.
What Would a Genogram of the Bachs Show?
At the genealogical level one finds a family with at least 53 professional musicians – organists, cantors, and town musicians – in which the profession was passed on almost as naturally as the family name. In Thuringia, "Bach" temporarily became a synonym for "musician", which is one of those rare cases in which a family name actually becomes a programme.
At the systemic level one sees a family network that functioned as a perfectly oiled training system: children learned from uncles, cousins stepped in as teachers, marriages were preferably contracted within musical families. A genogram would reveal a dense web of mentoring relationships that resembles less a family than a guild – or, in more modern terms, a franchise operation for baroque church music.
At the emotional level it grows quieter. Johann Sebastian Bach lost his mother in 1694, his father only eight months later in February 1695 – he was just nine years old and grew up thereafter with his older brother Johann Christoph. In the genogram: an early double loss, which may have intensified the ardent devotion to the one thing that remained of the family – the music.
The Bach family shows why genograms are so much more than family trees: they make the connection between external facts and inner patterns visible. A family tree would only have shown that many Bachs were musicians. A genogram asks: Why? And it also raises the question that never appears in family trees: what did it cost those who were not?
