Rejoice, rejoice – good and beautiful. Come on, praise the days in which the ritual visit to the Christmas Oratorio is due. But central questions arise around the major musical event: Is the church heated? How long does it take this time? And who should follow in the footsteps of Johann Sebastian Bach, who set the Christmas story to music almost 300 years ago? At least the last question can be partially answered: Bach didn’t have that big feet.
The nuclear medicine doctor Andreas Otte from Offenburg University and the forensic doctor Marcel Verhoff from the Frankfurt University Hospital measured Bach’s foot bones and recently published their results in the journal Archives of Criminology published. Bach was known during his lifetime as a composer and as an outstanding organ player, which was probably also due to his extraordinary pedal playing. “With his two feet he could perform such movements on the pedals that many an unskilled piano player would find hard enough to make with five fingers,” said a contemporary.
For their analysis, Otte and Verhoff used the image of Bach’s skeleton, which was made in 1895 after a church renovation made exhumation necessary. The feet were not completely preserved and toes were missing, but the shoe size could be reconstructed using imaging techniques. In 2018, the researchers had already measured Bach’s upper extremities and found that the musician had unusually large hands with a body length of 167 centimeters – the average male length in the Baroque period. This obviously benefited his outstanding organ playing. Bach was able to play duodecims, i.e. twelve pitches.
Large hands promote brilliant organ playing like that of Johann Sebastian Bach, but large feet do not.
(Photo: imago images/Leemage)
The composer’s feet, on the other hand, had normal dimensions; the researchers determined shoe size 41. Now one could ask Erich Kästner what humanity gets from such findings: “They split atoms. They cure incest. / And through stylistic studies they determine / that Caesar had flat feet.” But for Bach fans, this brings with it some insightful insights. After all, many of Bach’s pieces require demanding pedal playing. “From a technical point of view alone, the feet must be neither too small nor too large for such a game. Feet with a shoe size of 41 can be considered almost ideal,” write the authors. “The normal shoe size is a particularly interesting detail,” says Andreas Otte. “If he had had feet as large as his hands, this would not have been advantageous for playing the organ; Bach would then have pressed several pedals at the same time, so to speak.”
It remains unclear how Bach, who was known to be a good walker, was able to play the organ pedal with such virtuosity. Which leads to the question of which shoes he wore. Did he wear relatively sturdy shoes and only play with the toe, or did he prefer relatively soft shoes with high heels, especially for legato? Perhaps Bach also gave his feet free rein and simply played barefoot.