The concert is a special event based on the life of Anna Magdalena Bach, Bach’s second wife. It features a sequence of poems written by Jane McKinley interspersed with chamber music by J. S. Bach and others, performed by Lisa Terry, cello and viola da gamba, and Webb Wiggins, harpsichord. Anna Magdalena was a well-paid, professional singer at the court of Prince Leopold in Cöthen where Bach was serving as Kapellmeister when his first wife Maria Barbara died in July 1720, leaving him as a widower with four young children. When he married Anna Magdalena in December 1721, she was only 20. She bore him thirteen children, only six of whom survived past the age of five. Very little is actually known about daily life in the Bach household; the poems rely on surviving letters and documents as points of departure. Subjects include Anna Magdalena’s famous Notebook, written requests by Bach’s cousin for carnation plants and a caged bird, and some “extra fine” chamber music performed in the Bach home when his son Wilhelm Friedemann visited from Dresden in 1739.