Johann Sebastian Bach is remembered as the stern architect of sacred music and fugues, but BWV 211, the Coffee Cantata, is a comedy about a young woman who will not give up her coffee. In 1729 Bach took over the Collegium Musicum, the ensemble founded by Georg Philipp Telemann in 1702, which performed weekly at Gottfried Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig. At a time when German traditionalists treated coffee as a dangerous vice for the young and especially for women, Bach, whose day job was writing church music for a conservative town council, turned that moral panic into an inside joke for the very people drinking it.

With librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici, known as Picander, Bach built a three character story: a tenor narrator, the blustering father Schlendrian, whose name means something like stick in the mud, and his defiant daughter Lieschen. The father threatens her clothes, her meals, and her place at the window, and she only gives in when he forbids her a husband. Then comes the twist: she secretly lets every suitor know the marriage contract must guarantee her coffee. Bach never wrote a formal opera, yet this piece works like a miniature comic one and is often fully staged today.

• Before coffee, Europeans often started the day with weak beer or even beer soup, because water was not always safe to drink.
• The cantata opens with the narrator telling the noisy coffee house crowd to be quiet, breaking the fourth wall.
• Schlendrian’s vocal lines move in heavy, repetitive leaps, while Lieschen’s flute accompanied arias sound like a caffeine buzz.
• Lieschen’s joke about shriveling like roasted goat meat mocks the pseudoscience that coffee dried out the body’s humors.
• The closing trio declares that drinking coffee is as natural as a cat chasing mice.