From Status to Contract: The Unhappy Case of Johann Sebastian Bach

This essay, of course, is not about Bach's musicology: it is about the partially overlapping stories of Bach and of contract. The overlap concerns the legal relations between the creative, entrepreneurial artist and the community he joined and resented; the tensions, ironies and contradictions-but also usefulness-of contract as a way to tell and reinterpret movement along the proverbial status to contract narrative of modernity; what Bach found there, and how this may serve as both a specific story of artistic genius in the shadow of law and a case study for the contractual organization of relations in a transformative period of early modernity.