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What's the matter? Oh I'm sad. Sometimes you remember sad things.
The last time I was in Carlsbad, playing music, eating too much, and back at the castle my
wife was dying. God. There was no telephone for them to tell me she was sick.
There was no airplane so I could fly to her. Oh, Maria Barbara, thirty-five years old.
Beautiful. The mother of my children.
Dead. That's too long to remember those things.
That's awful. Ja ja awful. The children, Johann Gottfried
Bernhard was only five. And now-
It wasn't your fault. Yeah, I tried to make it up to them. I spent
a lot of time with them. I gave them music lessons.
Didn't you play with them? Of course, of course.
I played the harpsichord, and they played... No, I mean games. Didn't you play games with
them? Yeah, like baseball. Hockey. Monopoly.
What about tag? Didn't you have fun with them?
But Elizabeth, for us music was fun. We played games with music.
I wrote the Klavier-Buchlein, uh how do you say, the little book for the keyboard, for
my oldest boy, Wilhelm Friedemann. Naturally all the children used it.
In the beginning the pieces were very easy, and then they were not so easy, and then a
little harder, but always they were fun to play.
Do you like chords? Chords...oh you mean like skipping ropes?
No, like musical chords. I love chords. I wrote this for my two older boys.
See, I can open them up
and spread them out.
And now back they go into chords again.
It's a game you see. We played games.
Ah, you make it sound so easy.
The thing about music is that you must love to play it.
Make it a game. Why can't I play it like you?
You have five fingers on each hand don't you? Yes.
How many fingers have I got? Ten.
Right, like you. So practice, that's all you have to do. Practice.
Practice? Practice, practice...
Boys! And what did you write for your girls?
Girls? Who needs them? Well you see Elizabeth, I'm sorry but in those
days, girls were different. Girls were supposed to grow up to be mothers.
It was very nice if they could play an instrument or if they could sing.
If they played, they played for the family. If they sang, they sang for the children.
The didn't have the vote, they didn't wear pants. And that's the way it was.
But why? That's, just the way it was.
Now, my boys, they were terrific. Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich, Wilhelm
Friedemann and Johann Christian, my youngest, he even played with Mozart. All of them were
composers. My father was a musician too. He taught us
the violin. There were seven of us children. I remember, we sat in the kitchen and played
music and sang. I had a very good voice. I used to sing in the school choir.
Were you as good as us? Of course he was.
Why of course he was because this is Mr. Bach.
Ja, I'm Mr. Bach.