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Around 1734, Johann Sebastian Bach turned a domestic row about coffee into music for the public of Leipzig. The work, known as the Coffee Cantata, runs about twenty-five minutes, depending on who performs it. Its likely setting was Gottfried Zimmermann's coffee house, where the Collegium Musicum gave concerts while the place served drinks.
Bach composed the music for "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht", BWV 211. Christian Friedrich Henrici, who signed himself Picander, wrote the text published in 1732. Three voices take part: a narrator, the father Schlendrian and his daughter Lieschen.
Schlendrian wants the young woman to give up coffee. He takes away her walk, the hooped skirt everyone is wearing that year, the silver ribbons on her bonnet and even her permission to look out of the window. Lieschen holds out through all four. When he threatens to stop looking for a husband for her, Lieschen promises to give in. The solution seems good enough for the father, who sets off ready to find a suitor.
The libretto printed by Picander ends before the two final numbers preserved in the score. Nobody knows who wrote that addition; it may have been Bach or someone else. In those pages, Lieschen puts about the condition that voids her father's victory: she will only accept a man who grants her, in writing, the right to drink coffee whenever she likes.
The plot fitted an argument the audience would recognise. In the Germany of the time, coffee drinking was debated, and there was particular anxiety about women taking it up. The cantata moves that argument into a kitchen and lets the father keep raising the price.
Women did not go into the coffee houses of Leipzig on an ordinary day, but they were admitted to the Collegium Musicum concerts. Which means Lieschen defended her cup in front of women whom that same establishment turned away for the rest of the week, and who could listen to Schlendrian fail while ordering another.
In the final number all three sing together that mothers, grandmothers and young women drink coffee. Schlendrian included.