Richard Todd wrote:

>Kevin is correct; Bach got the job too.  The contacts he made as a
>result eventually served him well in an interesting way.  When the
>pettiness and interference of the Leipzig petty bureaucracy eventually
>became insufferable, he appealed to his friends at court.  They appear to
>have to have applied enough pressure in the right places that Bach was able
>to do more or less as he wished for the remainder of his career.

Wrong!  He did not get the job, and was very disappointed by the matter.
I quote from Christoph Wolff:

   "Work with his Collegium Musicum must often have been, for Bach,
   a welcome diversion from the difficulties which loomed up in the
   church music field and of which neither the school authorities nor
   the city council showed any real understanding. His position was
   indeed considerably improved by his nomination as court composer to
   the king of Poland and the elector of Saxon in 1736 (as a consequence
   of his dedication of the Kyrie and Gloria in the Missa in b minor in
   1733 to the king in Dresden); yet this removed no problems from his
   path, as for example the long smoldering dispute about the prefects,
   in which Bach insisted on his right to appoint the leader of the
   school choral group himself."

The nomination to the position temporarily put the fear of God into the
town council, however, Bach never worked at the court in Dresden except
perhaps in a purely token honorific sense, as he is known to have composed
a few congratulatory cantatas for the Elector during his later years in
Leipzig.

To say that Bach was "able to do whatever he wished" is simply incorrect.
Instead he found an "out" as it were by directing the Collegium as a
diversion from the day to day pettiness of the Leipzig government which
dogged him for years.

Kevin Sutton