In 1720 Johann Sebastian Bach made a fair copy of six works he had composed for unaccompanied violin. This manuscript, in its beautiful, clear, thoughtful calligraphy, reveals the shape of the music more expressively than could any printed copy. The title page states in a splendidly flamboyant hand:
"Sei Solo - a violino senza Basso accompagnato - Libro Primo da Joh. Seb. Bach ao.1720"
and the pages that follow are laid out as carefully as possible to avoid page turns. As J.N. Forkel in his 1802 biography of Bach writes of "the six solos for violin and the six others for the violoncello", it is presumed by most scholars that the "Libro Secondo" would have been Bach's own fair copy of his six 'cello suites, which has been lost for at least two centuries.
What did Bach mean by "Sei Solo"? Was this simply a mistake by someone whose Italian was fluent but not perfect - "Sei Soli" would be the correct way of saying "six solo works" - or was it a sad pun on the death in July 1720 of Johann Sebastian's beloved first wife and cousin Maria Barbara Bach, while he was away in Carlsbad with his employer? "Sei Solo" actually means "Be Alone".
We cannot be sure when the works were composed, and scholars argue about their origin - some saying that for stylistic reasons they were composed earlier, and others feeling they were written in 1720. With the lack of a composing manuscript or any earlier copies, we can only be sure that they could not have been composed later than 1720.
Bach was thirty-five years old in 1720 and had been happily employed since 1717 as Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, described by Bach in later years as "one who loved and understood music, playing the violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord". While Bach was a staunch upholder of the Lutheran form of Protestant Christianity, Prince Leopold was a Calvinist and Bach's main work in Cöthen was to compose and to perform chamber music for his patron rather than to produce concerted religious music, as the Calvinist form of worship only permitted congregational psalmody and hymns.
250 years after Bach's death it seems astonishing that these extraordinary works should have not been part of the common knowledge of European culture, but, though there is no record of their ever having been performed in Bach's lifetime, copies were made and circulated among musicians in Germany from the 1720s onwards. In 1774 C.P.E. Bach, who was corresponding with Forkel about his father, wrote that "he understood perfectly what was possible on all stringed instruments and this is exemplified by his works for solo violin and solo violoncello. One of the greatest violinists has told me that he knows of nothing more perfect for learning to become a good violinist".
The complete set for violin remained unpublished until 1802 when Simrock published the first edition - now very rare and hard to find, but the major vehicle for the works' dissemination, as we find in the letters of the English Bach enthusiast Charles Wesley that copies were owned by both Salomon and Bridgetower in London in the first decade of the 19th century. From Wesley's letters we also know that the fascinating character George Bridgetower was famous for his performances of the solo works to the Bach circle in London in the period around 1810-1815, but no record of his performing them in public concerts has yet come to light. Ferdinand David, who had given the first documented public concert performances of some of the music, prepared an edition in 1843, without however being able to consult Bach's fair copy, which was still in the possession of Johann Sebastian's grand-daughter Louisa Bach, the daughter of his penultimate son, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach.
The six works were treated by the major violinists of the nineteenth century as a mine from which to quarry gems, with individual movements being slipped into recital programmes or performed as encores. Even Joseph Joachim, whose edition was very influential in spreading familiarity with the set, usually performed selected movements, and it has only been in the second half of the twentieth century that violinists have been performing complete Sonatas and Partitas with any frequency.
It seems extraordinary that any composer would set out to write a major set of works for unaccompanied violin, but there were precedents in the musical circles with which Bach was associated. As a young man, not yet eighteen, in March 1703 Bach appears on the records of the minor court of Weimar as a lackey and violinist. The most prominent musician associated with this court was Johann Paul Westhoff (1656-1705), a colourful character who performed his own suites for solo violin around Europe, and had in 1696 printed a volume of six suites, each consisting of an Allemande, Corrente, Sarabande and Gigue, one copy of which was discovered in 1971 in the Somogyi Library in Hungary. We have no way of knowing for sure that Bach encountered Westhoff's works, nor the Sonata for solo violin of 1716 by Vivaldi's pupil Johann Georg Pisendel, with whom Bach had been acquainted since 1709, but whatever it was that sparked his imagination caused an explosion of ideas that lifted the Sonatas and Partias into a realm that remains unequalled in music for unaccompanied violin.
Bach did not simply wish to write music that was melodically or harmonically pleasing, like the later Fantasias for solo violin by his friend Telemann. He took what was generally considered a melody instrument and set himself the challenge of composing large-scale works which were harmonically self-sufficient, whether playing double-stopped polyphony or flowing monodic passages. That he wrote fugues for the violin is surprising, that he composed some of his most complex and lengthiest of fugues for it is astonishing. Johann Mattheson in 1737 wrote of the subject for the A minor fugue: "Who would believe that these eight notes could be so fruitful as to engender counterpoint for more than a single sheet of paper, without unusual extensions and completely naturally?" and yet, from these eight notes Bach created a majestic fugue of 289 bars which is much longer and far more elaborately worked out than the majority of his fugues in the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier .
While Bach's polyphonic writing for the violin in double and treble-stopping inspires awe in composers and audiences (and not a little trepidation in the violinist attempting to play them), the subtleties of his single-line writing are sometimes taken for granted because of the ease with which his art is concealed. In spite of calling them 'Sei Solo Senza Basso', they are never in fact without a bass line, as Bach integrates the bass line and the harmonies into his single-line structure. What becomes apparent, the better one knows these works, is that he is often exploiting and revelling in the absence of a clearly defined bass line. The ambiguity that can exist when the bass is implicit rather than explicit enables him to set up expectations of harmonic movement that can become shifted sideways when he does choose to define the chords. To take as an example the first cadence point in bar six of the D minor Allemande, it becomes clear that, needing three notes to define a D minor chord, his deliberate placing of the D last, as the third note, after the A and F at the head of the bar, following the C7 at the end of the previous bar, is a wonderfully subtle way of creating an unconscious musical tension for the listener, by leading the mind to expect a modulation to F major. People who are not practising musicians might say that they would not be aware of this, and that they therefore could not feel it, but so much of the language of Western music is ingrained into our subconscious that we feel the tension whether or not we are consciously aware of it.
The three sonatas are modelled after the form that arose in Italy in the seventeenth century as the Sonata da Chiesa - the church sonata (as distinct from the Sonata da Camera - the chamber sonata) to be played during long services and break up the liturgy with periods of meditation. Pisendel is described as having played unaccompanied violin works during church services in Dresden, and many people would like to find evidence that he played Bach's sonatas there. Bach used the Sonata da Chiesa form for most of his chamber music for more than one instrument, but it is extraordinary that he chose it as a structure for music for unaccompanied violin, while his only surviving keyboard work in this form is a D minor arrangement of the A minor Sonata for solo violin.
The four-movement form has a slow introductory movement, which in the first two sonatas have wonderful examples of the style of richly melodic ornamentation that Bach himself would have improvised and probably varied with each performance. Most composers of Bach's time would not have written this out, expecting performers to bring their personal style of ornamentation to the interpretation, and, until the wealth of research over the latter half of the twentieth century into eighteenth century performance practice, these movements were played at a tempo and with a serious stolidness that removed their fluid, improvisational grace. Since contemporary eighteenth century ornamentations to the published works of composers such as Corelli, Vivaldi and Pisendel have become available for modern performers to study, it is easier for us to see that some of Bach's writing is of the "graces" and elaborate cadential trills that would generally have been left to the performer's whim.
The three fugues grow in size and complexity from the G minor to the C major. The G minor, a work existing in transcriptions both for solo Lute and for Organ, is a dense, single-subject fugue, with wonderfully changing harmonising of its subject. The A minor fugue is considerably longer and, as well as its main subject, has a further secondary subject, extracted from part of the opening statement's initial cadence. The C major fugue is enormous, not only the longest of the three, but among the longest of any of Bach's fugues. The subject, related to the Chorale "Komm Heilige Geist," is also the longest subject of the three fugues and, as in the A minor fugue, Bach uses a descending chromatic line to tie together the voices of the four-part fugue. The third sonata's fugue is in effect three fugues: an exposition fugue in C major, a stretto fugue with its cadence in E minor, a fugue al riverso in G major, and a recapitulation of the opening C major fugue, the four sections joined by single-line passage work, culminating twice in a powerful double-stopped statement of the theme over a pedal open string, before the G major riverso fugue and before the final Da Capo of the exposition fugue.
Each Sonata has its third movement in another key: the G minor's Siciliana in B flat major; the A minor's Andante in C major (giving a whole bar of tonal ambiguity; as it starts with just a C and an E, it feels as though it is perhaps still in A minor until the G and B define the key of C in the second bar); and the C major's wonderfully calm and short F major Largo.
The fourth movement of each sonata returns to its tonic key for a fast movement in running semiquavers. Sometimes broken chords, sometimes scalic figures make up the structure, but there is always an audibly apparent bass and harmonic structure integrated into what looks on the page like a single-line movement.
The Partitas or Partias, as Bach calls them in his manuscript, are three very different works that all purport to be in the French Suite style. Confusion abounds over the misleading naming of Bach's three great sets of keyboard music as English Suites, French Suites and Partitas; each of these sets of six works (and also the six suites for solo 'cello) is in fact in the form that Bach derived from the basic group of dances, standardised by the seventeenth century as the French Suite: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue. While most composers of the day (for instance J.P. Westhoff) kept to this form, Bach was not content to stay within these constraints, and in all of these works and in the Partias for solo violin, he varied their structure and added other dance movements to extend the set.
The E major Partia, which comes last in Bach's manuscript as Partia no. 3, has no Allemande, no Courante and no Sarabande and becomes a collection of dances, starting with a Preludio that Bach twice reused in orchestrated versions, transferring the solo violin part to the right hand of the organ for an obligato for the opening Sinfonias to Cantatas. Cantata 120a has a version for organ and strings, and in his Town Council Inauguration Cantata no. 29, Bach again gives the violin's line to the right hand of the organ, but further enriches the texture by accompanying it with trumpets, oboes, strings and drums.
For the B minor Partia Bach used a form which in his surviving music is unique to this work. While staying with the conventional movements of Allemanda, Corrente and Sarabande for the first three movements and substituting a Tempo di Borea (or Bourré) for the Gigue, he follows each movement with a Double, a movement that takes the same harmonic progressions as its preceding movement but reshapes them into a new structural pattern. In his keyboard suites Bach sometimes places a Double after a movement, as for instance after the Sarabande of the sixth English Suite, but these are more usually ornamented versions of the movement, rather than this total restructuring, and in no other case does he append a Double to each movement of a suite.
With the D minor Partia he changes the proportions in another radically different way. After the conventional Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabanda and Giga he adds a Ciaconna, a movement so extraordinary in its form, scale, architecture and imagination that it has been isolated from the rest of its body for much of its performance history, being played as a separate work, not just by violinists, but also by pianists, guitarists and symphony orchestras. At its most basic a Ciaconna (or chaconne) is a set of variations on a Sarabande-like theme, but with his genius, Bach transcends the sensation of variations, creating a tripartite minor-major-minor structure that both echoes elements of the preceding four movements and makes them appear to have been inevitably building towards it. At its simplest, the theme of the variations is just four descending notes: D - C - B flat - A (which in an ornamented form is also the backbone of the C major fugue theme), but as Bach takes this through elaborations flowing organically from one variation to the next, the artifice is concealed by the inspiration.
Legend has it that when Mendelssohn was reintroducing Bach's music to the cognoscenti of the nineteenth century, he persuaded Ferdinand David to perform the Ciaconna for the first documented time in public. Just before the performance, David decided that he was unable to play an unaccompanied work of such unprecedented length, so Mendelssohn improvised a piano accompaniment for him at the concert. Whether or not this is true, Mendelssohn did publish a piano part for it, setting off a whole series of unlikely couplings, with Schumann writing piano accompaniments for all six works. Providing a defined bass, when Bach had gone to such trouble to avoid one, seems strange to us nowadays: Brahms' piano arrangement of the Ciaconna for left hand alone being much more in keeping with its spirit and its element of titanic struggle, which for violinists will always be one of its most fundamental aspects.
Like most violinists, I studied Bach's solo works as a student, initially with Sascha Lasserson, who had been a pupil of Leopold Auer at the same time as Mischa Elman and Efrem Zimbalist. Times change and interpretations change, and I am grateful for all the research that has been done into the performance practices of Bach's time. In 1985 I decided that I would perform the six works as a pair of concerts, as it appeared to me that they were still relatively unknown in performance to the general musical public, and I started to relearn them, working from a facsimile of Bach's beautiful manuscript that had been given to me in 1965 by the American composer, Bernard Herrmann.
I have tried to keep as close as possible to Bach's original bowings, though even his elegant fair copy has places where the bowing is incomplete and decisions have to be made. The much used Bärenreiter Urtext edition of 1958 has some very questionable editorial decisions about Bach's bowings and in a few places has misprints and changes of notes from Bach's manuscript [ the newly published revised version of Bärenreiter's Urtext edition is much better, correcting most of the old mistakes, but it still does not always make it absolutely clear when an editorial decision has been made about questionable bowing indications or questionable notes ].
A system must be decided upon by each performer for the paradox with which Bach has presented violinists involving chordal playing and vertical and linear rhythm. Contrary to the previously expounded theories of Albert Schweitzer and Emil Telmanyi, the baroque bow and violin were never able to sustain more than two strings at once without gross tonal distortion, anymore than can the modern Tourte style bow. It is not, and never has been possible to play three-part or four-part chords on the violin with the notes speaking simultaneously for longer than an instant; so, if the harmonies are to be clearly audible to listeners who don't already have the works in their memories, the chords somehow need to be spread, which therefore will endanger the rhythmic stability of the thematic line. The performer must also decide for reasons of consistency, which notes in chords to sustain and which to shorten, as Bach seldom bothers to be specific in his manuscript.
I discovered a copy of the facsimile of Bach's later version of the E major Partia which is perhaps for lute, perhaps for Lautenclavicymbel, a kind of gut-strung harpsichord; scholars are unable to decide with certainty. I was surprised to find some quite radical appoggiatura ornamentation in the Loure and a few "graces" in the following movements, which I had never heard anyone, even Baroque specialists, incorporate into their performances, so I add these for the repeats. Fairly early on in this relearning process, while working on the B minor Partia, I began to feel uncomfortable about the fact that while both the Allemanda and Sarabande have a first-time bar at their mid-point double bar, they lack it at the end of the movement to facilitate the transition back from the final tonic to the mid-point dominant. I decided that Bach would have expected the player to create an appropriate first-time bar and have incorporated this into performances for many years.
Johann Friedrich Agricola, who had been a pupil of Bach's in Leipzig, wrote in 1774 that Bach "often played the six solos for violin on the clavichord, adding as much in the nature of harmony as he found necessary". Bach was famous for arranging and embellishing music by other composers as much as his own, and the whole idea of music being fixed for one way of performance, or even of its having fixed notes, was during his lifetime still a concept of the future. Suffice it to say, that I am responsible for any other added ornaments and all editorial decisions.
The order of the works on the CDs is the order that I have found most satisfactory for the pairs of concerts of the complete set that I have been giving during the last twelve years. The recording was made in six nights from 28th September to 3rd October 1998 in Binham Priory in North Norfolk and I am most grateful to Binham P.C.C for allowing me to use this wonderful building, where I had enjoyed performing the set over many previous years. Binham Priory was founded in 1090 by the Benedictine Order and contains some superb historical and architectural features, in spite of its having been roofless and in ruins for the two centuries before Bach wrote his Sonatas and Partias for solo violin.
Benedict Cruft, March 2000 |
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