The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach

David Schulenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136091544
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach provides an introduction to and comprehensive discussion of all the music for harpsichord and other stringed keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Often played today on the modern piano, these works are central not only to the Western concert repertory but to musical pedagogy and study throughout the world.
Intended as both a practical guide and an interpretive study, the book consists of three introductory chapters on general matters of historical context, style, and performance practice, followed by fifteen chapters on the individual works, treated in roughly chronological order. The works discussed include all of Bach's individual keyboard compositions as well as those comprising his famous collections, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, the English and French Suites, and the Art of Fugue.

1
Bach’s Keyboard Music
An Introduction

Bach’s keyboard works form one of the oldest and most important repertories of instrumental compositions that have remained in use since their conception. Although most of his vocal music was largely forgotten soon after his death, his keyboard works continued to be highly valued and assiduously studied, at first by a relatively small circle of pupils and admirers, then in ever-widening circles that now encompass virtually everyone who has ever performed or listened to Western art music.

Nevertheless, the performance and interpretation of Bach’s music for more than two and half centuries have hardly constituted a uniform or unbroken tradition. Every generation has had its own image of Bach’s music and of Bach himself. The image presented in this book has been shaped by modern Bach scholarship and colored by modern Bach performance. Since 1950, Bach studies have been one of the richest and most active spheres of musicological activity, producing a new edition of his collected works as well as discoveries that have overturned previously held convictions about their dating, their manner of performance, and their relationships to eighteenth-century music and culture in general. Performers, drawing on this scholarship and on the work of instrument builders, on research into historical performing practice, and on practical experience, have revealed new aspects of the works and revised the ways in which their sound and their expressive content are understood.

The first three chapters of this book provide introductory matter that will be especially useful to those who are not professional Bach specialists. The remaining chapters furnish a commentary on Bach’s keyboard works. The commentary includes essential historical background on each work as well as discussions of relevant editions, literature, and the music itself. The works treated in each chapter are roughly contemporary with one another and belong to the same or closely related genres; for example, chapters 4–7 deal with early works (suites, fugues, toccatas, etc.), chapters 10–12 with the Well-Tempered Clavier and compositions leading up to it, chapters 13–15 with the later suites and partitas. The reader is invited to skip forward to discussions of whichever pieces are of the greatest interest.

The Repertory

The boundaries of the subject covered in this book have been the subject of considerable debate. Here, “keyboard music” means those compositions for a single keyboard instrument that lack a full-fledged pedal part and do not fall into any of the genres that imply the use of the organ, such as the pedaliter chorale prelude. Roughly two hundred of Bach’s pieces meet this definition, falling into three general categories: (1) suites, partitas, and similar works; (2) preludes and fugues, including pieces under such titles as fantasia, toccata, and sinfonia; and (3) a miscellaneous group containing variation sets, sonatas, a concerto, and transcriptions of works originally composed for other instruments.

Although Bach’s intentions regarding the instrumentation of his ensemble works were usually very precise—far more precise than was once thought—he rarely designated an exact medium for the music discussed here. These works have long been regarded as being for the Clavier, but the meaning of that term has changed with time. During Bach’s lifetime it was probably a generic term for any musical keyboard, although by the later eighteenth century some German writers used it with the specific meaning of “clavichord,” and in nineteenth-century Germany it became synonymous with “piano.” Today, although pianists everywhere play this music, the works are most often regarded as having been meant for the harpsichord. But eighteenth-century documentation for this view is surprisingly sparse, and Robert Marshall (1986) argued that, although some of this repertory really was conceived for the harpsichord, much of it was not. He therefore proposed a division between works for harpsichord—essentially, group 1 in the list above—and generic “clavier” works comprising most of the remaining pieces. He argued further that many of the “clavier” works were meant for organ without pedals.

The first part of Marshall’s hypothesis had the substantial merit of corresponding with Bach’s intentions insofar as they can be discovered from explicit indications of medium in the most authoritative sources. But a composer’s expressed intentions are not the only way in which to understand a composition, nor the only possible basis for an interpretation. That many of the “clavier” works were, in practice if not in principle, composed for some type of harpsichord is argued in chapter 2 and in the discussions of individual pieces. Nevertheless, the term “keyboard music” is adopted here as the best English expression that can be applied to the repertory without making questionable assumptions about the intended medium.

Keyboard music, so understood, forms one of the four main divisions of Bach’s output, the others being organ works, works for instrumental ensemble, and vocal music. The distinction now made between organists and harpsichordists, and thus between organ music and “keyboard” music, might have surprised Bach and his contemporaries, who appear to have been equally at home on both types of instruments.¹ Nevertheless, the distinction between organ and “keyboard” music is a real one, based on differences in style and genre that are usually quite clear. Moreover, the keyboard works have a somewhat exceptional place in Bach’s œuvre, for they were the one part of it that was not written in direct fulfillment of any of Bach’s official duties.

If we discount his school years and a brief early stint as a “lackey” (Lacquey) at Weimar, Bach began his professional career as an organist, serving in the cities of Arnstadt (1703–7) and Mühlhausen (1708) and at the ducal court of Weimar (1708–14). He was then promoted to Concertmeister at Weimar, subsequently serving as Capellmeister to the Prince of Cöthen (1717–23). From there he went to Leipzig, where he remained Director musices (director of church music) and Cantor of the St. Thomas School for the rest of his life. Except at the St. Thomas School, where his position as Cantor was that of a teacher, in each of these posts Bach was expected to produce music of a particular type. Thus, most of his organ works date from the Weimar years and earlier, although many were revised at Leipzig. At Weimar and Leipzig he also wrote church cantatas on a regular basis, at least for a portion of his tenure in each city.² The music for instrumental ensemble was long thought to have been written mainly at Cöthen, but some of these works must date from Weimar, others from Leipzig.

Keyboard pieces, however, flowed from Bach’s hands in substantial numbers throughout his career. This must reflect a continual association with stringed keyboard instruments, especially the harpsichord. Bach was officially employed as a keyboard player—that is, an organist—only at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, and from 1708 to 1714 at Weimar. But titles could be misleading. Although designated a mere lackey while serving at Weimar in 1703, Bach went from there to Arnstadt, where he was described as having been the Weimar court organist.³ When he returned to Weimar in 1708, now officially as court organist, he must have participated in rehearsals and performances as a harpsichordist.⁴ This he certainly did at Cöthen and Leipzig, in instrumental works like the Brandenburg Concerti, in secular cantatas composed for the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, and occasionally in sacred works as well. The only contemporary report of a specific performance in a church mentions Bach playing harpsichord—that is, directing the ensemble while improvising a basso continuo realization—in the Trauerode (BWV 198) of 1727.⁵

Yet there is little if any evidence for Bach’s having performed solo “clavier” pieces in public or as part of his official duties anywhere. It is reasonable to suppose that Bach would have played solo keyboard music during private palace performances for princely patrons, or on special occasions such as the aborted contest with Marchand in 1717.⁶ But only the organ had a tradition of use in public recitals during Bach’s day, and Bach’s public appearances as a “clavier” soloist might have been confined to the occasional keyboard concerto. The music considered in this book would have been used primarily for private practice and study, even if certain pieces (such as the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue) might have been played occasionally in public.

Sources

In order to consider the history and text of Bach’s keyboard works in any detail, it is necessary to pay some attention to their sources, that is, the manuscripts and early printed editions in which they are preserved. Source studies have been a prime area of Bach research. The sources are not only documents for the music; they open a window onto the working habits and even the personalities of those who produced them, starting with Bach himself. Apart from helping to establish the reading of a disputed passage, or in following Bach’s thought as he corrected details of counterpoint or reorganized whole sets of pieces, study of the sources has led to insights into how Bach’s music spread beyond his own circle: who played what, how widely individual pieces were disseminated, and how those outside Bach’s circle understood (and misunderstood) what he had written.

Only a fraction of Bach’s keyboard pieces were published during his lifetime. Most, even the few that appeared in print, circulated mainly in manuscript copies. Bach’s own manuscripts (autographs) survive for some works, but autographs are lacking for most, including almost all of the earlier pieces. Some early works are preserved in but a single manuscript copy, and this is one reason for the disputes that have arisen over Bach’s authorship of certain pieces. Even where autographs do survive, these are generally fair copies or revision scores, not first drafts, making it difficult to establish when the pieces were originally composed.⁷ Still, it is fascinating to reconstruct the process of correction and revision that can be seen in some of the autographs. Even in pieces for which no autograph survives, it is often possible to trace the course of Bach’s revisions by comparing the readings of copies made from different versions of his score.

Since 1950, Bach scholarship has gone to extraordinary lengths to identify the handwriting, paper, and other aspects of the sources. Scholars have traced watermarks in the paper to specific paper mills, providing dates for the manufacture of the material, and they have codified the gradual changes over time in the handwriting of individual copyists, including Bach himself. Through such research has come steady improvement in our understanding of when pieces were written, how they were revised, and which copies are closest to Bach in time and place and therefore most authoritative. Because of the sheer number of Bach’s keyboard pieces and of the sources containing them, the “clavier” works have been the most difficult of the four main groups of Bach’s works for scholars to investigate from the point of view of sources. Many questions pertaining to dating, compositional history, and even Bach’s authorship remain open and perhaps unanswerable.

The manuscripts range from single sheets of paper inscribed with a few lines of music to massive compilations of separate manuscripts that have been bound together. Manuscripts may be in Bach’s hand (autographs) or in the hand of someone else (copies). Many extant manuscripts of Bach’s works are in hands known to be those of his pupils, who probably paid for the right to make copies (a common practice); some pupils seem to have served Bach as apprentices, making copies not for themselves but for sale or archival use by Bach (see Beißwenger 2002, 13–4).

Today the greatest concentration of Bach manuscripts is in Berlin, but there are major collections in other European cities (Leipzig, Dresden, Göttingen, Vienna, Brussels), and important sources can also be found in London, New Haven, Washington, and Tokyo.⁸ Among the copyists are pupils and associates of Bach who were important musical figures in their own right. Other copyists have yet to be identified by name although the distinctive features of their handwriting have been recognized. Scholars continue to make progress in matching the handwriting of such personages as Anonymous 5 and Anonymous 300 with that of actual figures named in court or university records.⁹ The most important manuscripts are autographs and contemporary copies made by members of Bach’s immediate circle. But for certain works the only surviving manuscripts were made by peripheral figures, sometimes of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such manuscripts were not necessarily copied from autographs; in many cases they were derived from lost manuscripts of doubtful accuracy, and editors must puzzle out what Bach’s original readings might have been. A few copyists were responsible for assembling large manuscript collections, and as these are cited frequently they are described at the end of this chapter.

The printed sources that interest us are primarily those published (or prepared for publication) by Bach himself, beginning in 1726 with the Partitas and ending with the posthumously issued Art of Fugue. With a few minor exceptions, no further publications of Bach’s keyboard music came out until the early nineteenth century, when editions of previously unpublished works began to appear in profusion. Music printing and publishing in the first half of the eighteenth century were different enterprises from those of today or even the later eighteenth century; how this bears on our understanding of the music will become clear in chapters 15–18.

Catalogs and Editions

Since 1950 the thematic catalog by Wolfgang Schmieder (BWV) has been the basic reference source, listing Bach’s works as well as providing dates, bibliographic entries, and much other useful information. Despite the ongoing production of an even more massive compilation of data—the Bach-Compendium (BC)—Schmieder’s BWV numbers remain the standard way of referring to both authentic and inauthentic works that have been attributed to Bach. The BWV numbers are not chronological; compositions are listed by medium, beginning with vocal works, then music for organ, music for “clavier,” and finally works for other instruments and for instrumental ensemble.¹⁰ Within each group are subdivisions for various genres. Ordering within the subdivisions follows no obvious principle, although at times it reflects the arrangement of pieces in the old Bachgesamtausgabe (BG).

That edition, produced between 1850 and 1900 by the German Bach Society (Bach-Gesellschaft), was one of the first and most successful scholarly editions of any composer’s complete works. It remained the basis for most subsequent editions of Bach’s keyboard music until the late twentieth century, and it remains indispensable for Bach scholars. But the New Bach Edition (Neue Bach-Ausgabe, or NBA), begun in the 1950s and by 2006 largely complete, presents the findings of more recent Bach research, and its texts are usually superior to those of the BG. This is especially true for the keyboard works, although publishers continue to put out reprints based on the BG and other nineteenth-century editions. Some of these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Bach's Keyboard Music: An Introduction
• 2 Some Performance Issues
• 3 Bach's Style and Its Development in the Keyboard Works
• 4 The Early Suites
• 5 The Early Fugues
• 6 Miscellaneous Early Works
• 7 The Manualiter Toccatas
• 8 The Concerto Transcriptions
• 9 The Virtuoso Fugues
• 10 The Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Related Works
• 11 The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part 1
• 12 The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part 2
• 13 The English Suites
• 14 The French Suites
• 15 Clavierübung, Part 1: The Six Partitas
• 16 Clavierübung, Part 2, and Other Works
• 17 The Clavierübung Continued
• 18 The Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue
• Appendix A Works of Uncertain Authorship
• Appendix B The Clavier-Büchlein vor Anna Magdalena Bach
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index