People used to be so scared of coffee that Bach wrote a mini opera about it

coffee

Amid clinking beer glasses and the chatter of the mildly drunk, a robust baritone belts out: "With children, aren't there a hundred thousand aggravations!"

A few moments later a lilting soprano answers, literally singing the praises of the habit that has angered her father: coffee drinking.

"Father, sir, don't be so harsh. If I couldn't three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish, I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat. ... Ah! How sweet coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses, milder than muscatel wine."

So begins Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (“Be Still, Stop Chattering”), commonly called the Coffee Cantata by Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, a light-hearted and relatable “mini-opera” about the struggles of parenting and how a father, Schlendrian, tries to save his daughter Liesgen from her own desires.

When we read it today, it reveals how intensely people feared coffee, which was regarded as a devilish drink unfit for children, women, and men concerned about their virility. Yes, coffee, the thing you might be drinking at your desk right now while reading this.

On a gray afternoon, in Durham, North Carolina, the Duke University Bach Chorale was performing the 20-minute piece in Fullsteam Brewery, an ideal place because, as chorale director Brian Schmidt put it, "we know that Bach loved his family, God and sacred music. And we also know he loved beer, brandy, and coffee."

Bach wrote the cantata (with lyrics by a librettist known as Picander) in the 1730s, and The composer wrote it when he was living in Leipzig, a German city with a burgeoning coffeehouse scene—Saxony’s answer to the Bay Area or Brooklyn.

lady coffee painting Though coffee had made its way to the city and much of Western Europe decades earlier, the drink was still eyed with as much suspicion as the Turks who helped spread coffee culture through trade, warfare, and travel.

Melanie King, author of Tea, Coffee & Chocolate: How We Fell in Love with Caffeine, said, “Early critics of coffee felt that Englishmen [particularly] were too prone to copying the Turks, whom they thought originated coffee.

coffee cantata

Coffee was described as a ‘mere decoction of the Devil” and supposedly tasted like the ‘syrrop of soot’ or the ‘essence of old shoes.’”

It didn’t help that coffeehouses could be rowdy. Musicians played and partied, men and women mingled without proper chaperones, people told dirty jokes, and, if early European rulers’ conspiracy theories were more than just theories, political plots were born.

So, in the eyes of the fictional overprotective dad Schlendrian, coffee was no beverage for a girl from a "good" family and coffeehouses were no place for respectable women. In seventeenth-century England, women were often barred from entry and, in Germany, female loitering in coffeeshops was discouraged enough that some women organized all-female Kaffeekranzchen (coffee circles) that provided a place for women to drink, play cards, and dish.

In fact, the cantata’s chorus ends with the hint that Liesgen had probably picked up her coffee infatuation from her female relatives: “Cats do not give up mousing. Girls remain coffee-sisters. The mother adores her coffee habit. And grandma also drank it. So who can blame the daughters?”

Schlendrian pulls out all the stops to make Liesgen give up her coffee habit. He cajoles. He tries to ground Liesgen to no avail, telling her she’s banned from attending weddings and parties. There will be no more baubles: no whalebone dress or flashy silver ribbons for that bonnet (poor thing!). Liesgen, though, is unfazed, jousting amicably with her father. But then he ups the ante: Until she gives up coffee, there will be no husband. (Spoiler alert: Liesgen wants both coffee and spouse, and finds a way to get both.)

It seems extreme now, but many of Bach's contemporaries believed coffee had serious side effects, as well as medical benefits. Doctors and medical shysters alike thought it alleviated constipation, or cured chronic swelling or even the bubonic plague.

But much like the present where there’s a study to tout the benefits of, say, eggs, for every study that slams them, listeners in Bach’s time would have also heard dire warnings about coffee. Rumors said that coffee could literally “unman” its male consumers.

Bach’s cantata fits in the category of coffee humor, which included written satires positing that hanging out in coffeehouses ruined the marital union by providing public “man caves” where husbands hid to avoid their wives and domestic duties. Pundits of the composer’s era seesawed between seriously believing that coffee could stir male sexuality or cause impotence. German doctors even fretted that coffee could cause sterilization.

While caffeine was not identified as coffee’s active ingredient until a century later in the early 1830s, its stimulating properties got the attention of early European politicians, who feared its ability wake the sleepy and the sluggish.

On the other hand, officials also worried that coffeehouses encouraged male dawdling and sloth, not industry and work—a criticism later echoed by anti-alcohol temperance campaigners worldwide. The very name of Bach’s uptight father character “Schlendrian” can be translated to mean “lazy” or “lacking motivation to work.”

Bach may have been poking fun at his own city Leipzig, where officials had previously passed edicts limiting coffeehouse hours and railed against coffee, especially for young men and women. They feared it could be a gateway drug of sorts, pushing youth to temptation and depravity.

Even as Bach mocked a father who would try anything banish coffee from his daughter’s diet, he understood his time’s cultural ambivalence about the drink. He lived among people who thought the caffeinated brew could cure chronic disease, encourage revolutions (Tea Party, anyone?), work like Viagra (or cause men to need erectile “enhancement”), fracture families, and corrupt the impressionable.

And all this in Liesgen’s three cups a day—ironically, according to the National Coffee Association’s 2013 survey, the average amount of coffee consumed daily by Americans.