Sixty Beans, Fifty Cups, and Lots of Fortes…
Coffee and the Great Masters
A few years ago I inherited a pile of old records, one of which is a recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concertos (concerti? Cappuccini?) for 3 and 4 Harpsichords, (harpsichordi? Sorry, I’ll stop now.) (By the way, the Allegro from the A minor concerto is a choooon). In the translated album sleeve notes is a reference to the Zimmermann Kaffeehaus in Leipzig, an 18th Century haunt for the ‘middle classes and gentlemen’ of the time; no women allowed; “we don’t want you female, coffee-drinking types in here, thank you very much.” I’ve long been fascinated with the historical importance of the humble coffee shop, and one of the reasons I adopted the name of ‘Penny Roaster’ was, in part, a nod to the so-called Penny Universities of 17th Century London where, for the cost of a penny, one could gain access to coffee, conversation, newspapers and, ultimately, knowledge.
(Very much like today, if you substitute the penny for £3.40, conversation and newspapers for free Wi-Fi and you aren’t too bothered about the knowledge; I’m getting very cynical in my old age). Anyway, the impact on the socio-economic framework of the time was incredible.
Café Zimmermann, as it will be called from now on was, by all accounts, a pretty amazing place. The proprietor, Gottfried Zimmermann, did not charge musicians to perform or the public admission, and relied solely on the sale of coffee, which was still a rare delicacy at the time. Another musical ‘big-wig’ of this period, (quite literally), was Georg Philipp Telemann, who had formed a a group of students and professional musicians know as the Collegium Musicum, and by 1729 Bach was the director.
Situated on the most elegant street in Leipzig, Café Zimmermann became the perfect spot for this group of elite musicians to meet and perform, and Bach, as well as contemporaries such as Handel and Telemann, would also often appear at the venue. The concerts ceased on Zimmermann’s death in 1741, and the building was demolished in an Allied air raid in December 1943.
Notable compositions of Bach that would have been aired, even premiered, in the venue include his violin concertos and the appropriately titled Kaffee-Kantate, which I have alluded to in an earlier blog. Written between 1732 and 1735, this work is essentially a mini comic opera, and includes a line about the protagonist’s need to consume at least 3 cups of coffee every day. The work tells the story of a father embroiled in arguments with his daughter about her excessive coffee intake – think 18th Century vaping and you’ll get the gist. The father, Schlendrian, tries to ween his daughter, Lieschen, off the Devil’s Bean with bribes and suggestions of marriage, which she cleverly out-manoeuvres throughout the work. Unusually for opera there is a happy ending, as the father is eventually duped by the clever young lady into allowing 3 cups of coffee per day to be written into her marriage contract. The cantata was well received at the time, partly due to the perception by the older, more conservative members of Leipzig society that coffee-drinking was a bad habit that needed to be broken. (I know, chill-out, granddad).
Bach, it seems, didn’t believe his own propaganda, and was reported by some to have consumed up to 30 (some sources say 50) cups a day, (which pales into insignificance when compared to the eight-gallon beer bill he rung up on a 1713 trip to Halle). Rightly or wrongly, coffee consumption in the 18th Century is believed by some to have contributed to the proliferation of the baroque and classical music scene, as the the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven was also reported to have been an avid coffee fan.
Beethoven’s daily ritual began with a cup of coffee that contained exactly sixty coffee beans, which he instructed his house keeper to count out before grinding, brewing in boiling water and drinking, (grinds and all), before exclaiming:
“Ah! How sweet coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses, milder than muscatel wine.”
I mean, we all like coffee, but c’mon…
Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1922) was also fond of the good stuff, but was also notoriously absent minded, and once stirred a cup of coffee with a lit cigarette, mistaking it for a spoon, and then blew a mouthful of coffee across the room, mistaking it for cigarette smoke… I’m sure we’ve all been there.
Stepping out of the musical world and into the literary scene, the French novelist and playwright, Honore de Balzac (1799 – 1850) who inspired, amongst others, Charles Dickens and Karl Marx, was reported to have consumed 50 cups a day for 25 years.
He believed that he achieved a more intense mental state, which helped him write his best work whilst off his gourd on caffeine, and he would even chew the grounds between cups. His final output included 8 plays, 12 novellas, 18 short stories and 47 novels. One of his works was titled ‘The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee’, which you can find a translation of at:
https://urbigenous.net/library/pleasures_pains_coffee.html
In the relatively short work, he talks of how coffee ‘roasts your insides’ and ‘makes boring people even more boring’, which I think would make an excellent slogan for a certain chain of coffee shops.
An acquaintance of Balzac was the composer Gioachino Rossini (1792 – 1868) (you’ll know him for either William Tell or the Lone Ranger) who told Balzac; “Coffee is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera.” He wrote 39 of ‘em.
Slipping deftly back into the Classical Period, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s enjoyment of coffee should be mentioned, too. In a letter to his wife in 1791, the year of his untimely death at that age of 35, he wrote to his wife about how, in one day, he had played billiards, sold his horse, drank some black coffee and then smoked a pipe of ‘wonderful’ tobacco. Oh, I almost forgot to mention – he also orchestrated almost the entirety of the third movement of his Clarinet Concerto in A major. (Talk about “caffeine + nicotine = protein” ©️John Daly). Coffee also features heavily in at least two of Mozart’s operas; Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutti, with Act 1, Scene 1 of the latter set in a coffee house, where the subject of female nature is discussed. Interestingly, the prevalence of coffee in his later works replacing, to a point, the earlier influences of wine in his earlier output pays testament to coffee’s growing popularity during this period.
Poland’s Frederic Chopin (1810 -1849) was a drinker of coffee from his teenage years, regularly frequenting coffee shops in Warsaw, but severe lung disease caused him to note “I don’t drink coffee nor wine – only milk; I wear warm clothes and I look like a girl.” One of his haunts, Café Honoratka, is still trading today as a restaurant, and dines out on the fact that Chopin ‘liked to visit our doorstep once.’
Finally, the German composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854 – 1921), (not to be confused with Arnold George Dorsey, AKA Britain’s Engelbert Humperdinck of the 1967 hit ‘Release Me’ fame), also paid homage to the Black Gold in his 1898 Moorish Rhapsody, which features a movement set in a cheerful coffee house in Tangiers.
So, there is a very good chance that coffee was the fuel behind some of the world’s best-loved music. Good, eh?
