PMF Program Notes - August 9, 2005

This concert is sponsored by Billie Kress

Program 4

Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra in E major, BWV 1042
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Composed around 1720.

Any father with twenty children is bound to have a problem at sometime or other. Papa Johann Sebastian Bach must certainly have had his share of family crises during his lifetime (more than half of his brood did not survive him), but one bit of puerile misadventure has, unfortunately, resounded on (or, more accurately, silenced) an important part of his musical legacy. At Bach’s death, many of his important manuscripts were divided between his two oldest living sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. Carl took loving care of his inheritance, but Wilhelm did not. Though, as a boy, his father had given him excellent training, and he held some responsible positions as a young man, Wilhelm was never able to fulfill his early promise. His presence of mind seems to have deserted him after his father’s death, and Wilhelm gave way in his later years to dissipation and pretty well made a mess of his life. The manuscripts from Johann Sebastian’s estate which came into his possession were lost or destroyed or perhaps sold for a pint of Asbach-Uralt. At any rate, it is known that Wilhelm let at least three of his father’s violin concertos slip through his unsteady fingers into oblivion. The three that remain were the ones passed on by Carl.

The violin concertos were written as part of Bach’s duties at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, where he was “Court Kapellmeister and Director of the Princely Chamber Musicians.” Since he was responsible for the secular rather than the sacred music at court, those years saw the production of much of his purely instrumental music. The Brandenburg Concertos, the Orchestral Suites, numerous suites and sonatas for solo instruments and clavier, the Sonatas and Suites for unaccompanied violin and violoncello, and much solo clavier music, including the French Suites and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, date from this time. Bach tried to present his noble employer with music that would be both of a high quality (the Prince was a good and appreciative musician) and in tune with the latest styles. For his concertos, Bach avidly studied the recent works of the Italian masters, most notably Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico, which had been published in 1712. He transcribed several of these compositions as solos or concertos for keyboard for his own use, and utilized their formal and technical components as the models for his original works in the genre. His idiomatic writing for strings grew not just from this study, however, but also from his own experience as a violinist. His son Carl wrote, “He played the violin cleanly and penetratingly. He understood to perfection the possibilities of the stringed instruments.” These violin concertos, among the earliest works in the orchestral repertory, are outstanding examples of Bach’s luxurious instrumental style. In the words of Edward Downes, “[This music’s] rhythms dance, its melodic line soars, its harmonies branch and blossom with a richness and a sense of inevitable growth in which Bach has no equal.”

The E major Concerto follows the traditional Italian model of three movements, arranged fast—slow—fast. In the opening movement, the violin is carefully integrated into the texture and melodic working-out of the material. The basic formal plan of the movement is ritornello — i.e., the frequent return in the orchestra of the opening music. (These returns are easily discerned in this Concerto by the three “hammerblow” chords that occur at the beginning of each.) The episodic sections between the recurrences of the ritornello, the places in which the soloist is dominant, are rather like windows separating these tutti columns supporting the structure. The overall construction of the movement falls into three distinct divisions, not unlike the operatic da capo aria so popular in Bach’s day. The center section shifts from the bright sunlight of E major of the opening to the introspective key of C sharp minor, and serves as an elaboration of the ideas from the initial section. This middle portion draws to a close with a few cadenza-like bars in slow tempo for the soloist. The closing section of the movement returns to the mood and material of the beginning.

The second movement, “perhaps the most poignantly beautiful Bach ever conceived,” wrote Boris Schwartz, derives its style from the world of opera, specifically the lament. The basses present a theme, full of pathos, at the outset that is repeated in various keys throughout the movement. Above this rises the touching melody of the soloist as counterpoint and commentary on the dolorous orchestral background. The finale, constructed in a strict rondo form, resumes the dancing spirit of the first movement. The opening tutti rondo theme, sixteen measures in length, returns without change four times. In between, the soloist also plays sections exactly sixteen measures in length (the last is 32 measures) that embellish the theme of the rondo. The final repeat of the rondo theme concludes this wonderful work that Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, characterized as “full of the unconquerable joy of life.”

Suite No. 2 for Flute, Strings and Continuo
in B minor, BWV 1067
Johann Sebastian Bach

Though the exact date of the Orchestral Suite No. 2 is uncertain, the years during which it could have been composed circumscribe the most productive phase of Bach’s career. The set of orchestral parts in Bach’s hand which serves as the principal source for the work has been dated through the evidence of the paper’s watermark to 1738 or 1739, though this is apparently a performance copy for his Leipzig Collegium Musicum concerts that he extracted from the earlier manuscript score, which is no longer extant. The eminent American musicologist Martin Bernstein conjectured that the Suite was written in the early 1730s for Pierre Gabriel Buffardin, first flutist at the court of the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland in Dresden, to which Bach was then actively seeking an appointment as composer. It has also been suggested that the Suite may have been composed soon after Bach arrived in Leipzig in 1723, when he fitted many of his cantatas with elaborate flute parts. The most widely accepted dating, however, is to the period between 1717 to 1723, when Bach was director of music at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig. Bach had met Buffardin in 1716 in Dresden through his (Bach’s) older brother Johann Jacob, who was a student of the flutist, and it seems likely that the Second Suite was composed for him sometime thereafter at Cöthen, a fertile period which also witnessed the production of the three other Orchestral Suites, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Violin Concertos and much of Bach’s chamber music. The Suite would have made the perfect vehicle for Buffardin, who was renowned for his breath control, nimble technique and limpid tone.

The Orchestral Suite No. 2 (Bach would have called it an “Ouverture” — French for “opening piece” — after its majestic first movement) follows the early 18th-century German taste of deriving stylistic inspiration from France. It was Jean Baptiste Lully, composer to the legendary court of Louis XIV, whose operas and instrumental music set the fashion. Lully filled his operas with dances to please the taste of his ballet-mad King. If the mood struck him, Louis would even shed his ermine robes and tread a step or two with the dancers on stage. (Reports, all — understandably — laudatory, had it that he was excellent.) For formal ballroom dancing or dinner entertainment or concert performance, Lully extracted individual dance movements from his operas, prefaced them with the opera’s overture, and served them up as suites. This type of work, virtually the only Baroque genre for orchestra that did not involve soloists or singers, was carried to Germany by one of Lully’s students, Georg Muffat (1653-1704). Bach’s cousin Johann Bernhard (1676-1749), a talented organist in Johann Sebastian’s hometown of Eisenach, was one of the German musicians who became acquainted with this recent bit of French fashion. He concocted four suites of dances in the Lully/Muffat manner for the local town band, and Bach probably learned the French style from him. When Bach came to compose his Orchestral Suites, he was familiar not only with the French tradition of Lully through cousin Bernhard, but also with that of Italy (many German musicians of Bach’s generation were trained in Italy), and he was able to synthesize these two great streams of Baroque art in music which is both surpassingly majestic and melodically inspired. C.H. Parry wrote that these Orchestral Suites show Bach’s genius “in a singular and almost unique phase: for none of the movements, however gay and merry, ever loses the distinction of noble art. However freely they sparkle and play, they are never trivial, but bear even in the lightest moments the impress of a great mind and the essentially sincere character of the composer.”

The Suite in B minor, for flute, strings and continuo, is an inventive hybrid of dance and concerto forms in which the wind instrument is treated as both a reinforcing tone color for the first violin and as a virtuosic soloist. The work begins with a grandiose Overture based on the type devised by Lully — a slow, pompous opening section filled with snapping rhythmic figures and rich harmony leading without pause to a spirited fugal passage in faster tempo. Though the second section begins in the accustomed imitative manner involving all of the instruments, it is soon transformed into a miniature concerto for the flute with the ensemble relegated to brief, ritornello-like interjections. The majestic character of the opening section (though not its music) returns to round out the Overture’s form. The delicate Rondeau is based on an old French form in which the opening motive is heard three times, refrain-like, to mark the progress of the piece. When the Sarabande emigrated to Spain from its birthplace in Mexico in the 16th century, it was so wild in its motions and so lascivious in its implications that Cervantes ridiculed it and Philip II suppressed it. The dance became considerably more tame when it was taken over into French and English music in the 17th century, and it was included as a regular movement of the instrumental suite by Froberger around 1650, when it had achieved the dignified manner in which it was known to Bach. The Bourrée was a French folk dance which was adopted by the court as early as the 16th century; the second of the two Bourrées here is a solo for the flute. The Polonaise seems to have originated in connection with Polish court ceremonies, and had become a separate instrumental genre by about 1700. Bach’s movement, stately and reserved, represents an earlier phrase of the form’s development than the familiar examples found in Chopin’s keyboard works and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. The flute is allowed a solo turn in a variant, or “Double,” appended to the main dance. The Menuet was the most famous and resilient musical remnant of the French court. Originally a quick peasant dance from southwestern France, it had became more stately and measured by Bach’s time. The closing Badinerie, whose name derives from the same etymological root as “badinage,” is a dancing showpiece of woodwind virtuosity.

Concerto for Harpsichord, Strings and Continuo in F major, Wotquenne 33 (Helm 443)
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)

Composed in 1755.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was among the most influential musicians of the 18th century. Mozart said of him, “He is the father, we are the children. Those of us who have a thing or two know it from him.” Haydn added, “Anyone who knows me well must realize that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I studied him industriously, and understood him.” C.G. Neefe, Beethoven’s teacher, was one of Emanuel Bach’s most dedicated admirers, and he passed his enthusiasm on to his talented pupil. Emanuel, Johann Sebastian’s fifth child and his third (second surviving) son, gained fame with his contemporaries as a composer in the most advanced style of the time, a keyboard player of unsurpassed ability, and the author of an important treatise on contemporary performance style, as well as a man of wit, broad education and winning personality.

Emanuel could hardly have avoided the musical atmosphere of the Bach household as a boy, and he learned the art directly from Johann Sebastian. (“In composing and keyboard playing I never had any other teacher than my father,” he noted in an autobiographical sketch.) After three years as a student at Leipzig University, he enrolled in 1734 to study law at the University of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, where he earned a meager living giving keyboard lessons and composing and leading works for special occasions. In 1738, leaving behind the legal profession but immeasurably enriched by the excellent general education it had brought him, he joined the musical establishment of Frederick the Great of Prussia in Berlin. Frederick, one of the 18th century’s most enlightened rulers, promoted and participated in a wide range of intellectual and artistic endeavors. His special talent was playing the flute, and it was Bach’s job to accompany him at the keyboard. Such notable musicians as Franz and Johann Benda, C.H. and J.G. Graun and J.J. Quantz (who died while composing his 300th concerto for the flute — each new piece meant a supplement to his salary as Frederick’s flute teacher) were Bach’s colleagues at the court. Many of his greatest keyboard works, notably the “Prussian” and “Württemberg” Sonatas, date from the years in Berlin, as does the Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, an indispensable source for information about 18th-century performance practice.

Emanuel Bach was not completely happy in Berlin. Though he found the atmosphere of the court stimulating and valued his circle of cultured friends, including the poet Lessing, he realized that the conservative Frederick was not sympathetic to the new style of his music, and would not encourage its production or performance. (It is indicative of the monarch’s attitude that Emanuel was paid less than any other important member of the court’s musical establishment.) In addition, Frederick’s enthusiasm for his earlier pursuits was greatly diminished by the rigors of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). He depleted his musical establishment to such a degree that Emanuel was obliged to look elsewhere for a more promising position. He left when Georg Philipp Telemann, director of music for the city churches of Hamburg and Emanuel’s godfather, died during the summer of 1767, and Bach was appointed to take his place.

In Hamburg, Bach’s position was similar to his father’s in Leipzig. He was responsible for the music in five churches, including over 200 regular performances a year as well as countless special occasions. He handled his administrative duties with ease, and provided a large amount of music for the services. He throve on all this activity, and was still able to compose, produce and conduct an independent concert series, and even to accept additional commissions for new works. Beside his liturgical compositions, he also completed in Hamburg six collections of sonatas, rondos and fantasias for keyboard, ten symphonies, a dozen keyboard concertos and many chamber works. As in Berlin, he collected a circle of respected and well-educated poets, dramatists, philosophers, clergymen and musicians as close friends, and was renowned for his hospitality and the sparkling quality of his conversation. He died in Hamburg in 1788.

Bach’s music was known and admired throughout northern Europe, and he was regarded as one of the pioneers of the budding emotionalism that augured the Romantic age. Friedrich Klopstock, whose poems paralleled Bach’s music in trying to stir the emotions, was among the composer’s Hamburg friends, and the works of the two were often compared. Of their styles, Edward Downes wrote, “Like Klopstock, Philipp Emanuel became famous for having discarded what was now regarded as the plodding rationalism of an earlier age as well as the playful superficiality of a fashionable Rococo, replacing both by a new depth of feeling and spontaneous personal expression.” This new tonal language, the harbinger of the explosive subjectivity of 19th-century music, was dubbed Empfindsamkeit (“Sentimentality”). Bach himself summarized simply the intent of his compositions: “It appears to me that it is the special province of music to move the heart.” Perhaps the dominant characteristic of his works is their sudden and frequent changes of mood, almost like surprise twists in the plot of a stage play. Unprepared modulations, unusual harmonic progressions, abrupt dynamic shifts and unexpected rhythmic variations abound. Even in pieces in a generally bright mood, minor keys and chromatic harmonies frequently appear, as if a dark cloud were obscuring the sun. The texture of the music, based in part on his father’s unsurpassed contrapuntal technique, is often intricate, especially in its use of motives shared among the voices. Emanuel Bach’s works are consistently of interest — they are composed with masterly skill, true individuality and, often, deep inspiration.

Bach composed over sixty concertos and concerted “sonatinas” for harpsichord and orchestra, all but a handful dating from his tenure in Berlin, which were intended for performance at court (with the composer as soloist), public concerts and less formal gatherings. Bach’s concertos, standing chronologically between the Baroque species of the genre represented by the works of Vivaldi, Telemann and Sebastian Bach and the Classical symphonic concerto perfected by Mozart, exhibit a thorough blend of conservative and progressive techniques in which the episodic form of ritornello was crossbred with the incipient motivic development and key structure of sonata-allegro to sire a structural hybrid perfectly suited to the needs of the budding Classical style.

The Harpsichord Concerto in F major (No. 33 in the pioneering 1905 catalog of Belgian musicologist Alfred Wotquenne; No. 443 in the modern catalogue raisonné of University of Maryland professor Eugene Helm) was composed in 1755, during Bach’s tenure in Berlin. Most of the motives from which the opening movement is spun, as in the typical Baroque concerto, are presented in the orchestral introduction: a gracious melodic phrase; a quick turn figure punctuated by a loud chord; dotted rhythms in various configurations; and descending unison statements for the entire ensemble. Unlike the typical Baroque concerto, however, these elements are characterized by the clear phrasing and textures of the emerging Classical style, shared and developed by both soloist and orchestra, and worked into the balanced exposition–development–recapitulation progression of sonata form that would come to dominate instrumental music during the following two decades. The Adagio is in three large stanzas, all based on the spacious strain presented at the outset; the second stanza is darker in its harmonic coloring and more expressive, while the third is somewhat compressed and allows for a cadenza for the soloist. The form of the finale is a quick-tempo analogue to that of the three-stanza slow movement, though its spirit is brighter and the soloist is entrusted with even more of the musical argument.

Suite No. 3 for Orchestra in D major, BWV 1068
Johann Sebastian Bach

Composed around 1720.

From 1717 to 1723, Bach was director of music at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig. He liked his job. His employer, Prince Leopold, was a well-educated man, 24 years old at the time he engaged Bach. (Bach was 32.) Leopold was fond of travel and books and paintings, but his real passion was music. He was an accomplished musician who not only played violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord well enough to join with the professionals in his house orchestra, but also had an exceptional bass voice. He started the court musical establishment in 1707 with three players (his puritanical father had no use for music), and by the time of Bach’s appointment the ensemble had grown to nearly twenty performers equipped with a fine set of instruments. It was for this group that Bach wrote many of his outstanding instrumental works, including the Brandenburg Concertos, the Orchestral Suites, the Violin Concertos and much of his chamber music. Leopold appreciated Bach’s genius, and Bach returned the compliment when he said of his Prince, “He loved music, he was well acquainted with it, he understood it.” Though the exact dates of Bach’s Orchestral Suites are uncertain, all four were composed during or immediately after the Cöthen period.

Each of Bach’s four Suites is scored for a different orchestral ensemble. Three trumpets, two oboes and timpani join the strings and continuo (bass and keyboard) in the Third Suite. Each Suite comprises a grandiose Overture followed by a series of dances of various characters. The aptly named “French” Overtures are based on the type devised by Lully — a slow, almost pompous opening section filled with snapping rhythmic figures and rich harmony leading without pause to a spirited fugal passage in faster tempo. The majestic character of the opening section returns to round out the Overture’s form. The chain of movements that follows varies from one Suite to the next, though Bach’s sense of musical architecture demands that they create a pleasing balance of tempos and moods. The first such movement in the Third Suite bears the title Air, a general term used during Bach’s time for an instrumental piece in slow tempo with a sweet, ingratiating melody in the upper voice. This haunting, bittersweet music is one of Bach’s best-loved creations. Next is a pair of Gavottes, a dance of moderate liveliness whose ancestry traces back to French peasant music. The Bourrée, also of French origin, is joyful and diverting in character, and, when danced, was begun with a brisk leap, which is mirrored in Bach’s quick upbeat pattern. The Gigue was derived from an English folk dance, and became popular as the model for instrumental compositions by French and Italian musicians when it migrated to the Continent.