Bach: lord of the sonata
A few years ago, I played two concerts in Germany, one in Cöthen, the second in Leipzig. My colleagues and I drove from one to the other in a rickety van with a harpsichord bouncing around in the back. It occurred to me that Bach and his family had made that same journey in 1723, when he gave up as Cöthen’s court composer to become Kantor at St Thomas’s, Leipzig. They probably travelled the same route with their belongings and a harpsichord or two packed on to a wagon.
I think of this whenever I read the musicologists’ dry observation that Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord were begun in Cöthen but not completed until 1725 in Leipzig. Given that his duties there included organising the music in four churches, taking a daily singing class at St Thomas’s school, teaching instruments, providing music for weddings, funerals and civic occasions, as well as a cantata every week, plus the arrival of a fourth son in 1724, we should marvel that Bach finished them at all — and that they are such masterpieces.
Writing in the 1770s, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach still admired these pieces: ‘The six harpsichord trios are amongst the finest works of my dearly beloved father. They still sound excellent and give me great pleasure, although they are over 50 years old. There are several Adagios in them which even nowadays could not be set in a more singing style.’
Although J. S. Bach is best remembered as a composer, during his lifetime he was most famous for his prodigious keyboard skills. But he was also an accomplished violinist, as C. P. E recalled: ‘In his youth, and well into old age, he played the violin with a clear, penetrating tone, and kept an orchestra in better order that way than from the harpsichord.’
J S Bach’s first biographer (Forkel, 1802) wrote of the sonatas: ‘The violin part requires a master. Bach knew the possibilities of the instrument and spared it as little as he did his harpsichord.’
While they maybe don’t stretch the instrument quite as far as the solo sonatas and partitas, these sonatas lock the violin and harpsichord into a colourful marriage, at times in total agreement, at others doing battle, here mutely submissive, there stubbornly independent.
None of Bach’s sonatas was published until well into the 19th century but, judging by the surviving manuscript copies, the were highly prized and widely appreciated. On the present CD are two very different types. All of them have melody and bass lines, but the first two (BVWV 1015 and 1019) are for violin and obbligato harpsichord, while the last two (1021 and 1024) are for the more conventional pairing of violin and basso continuo. In both kinds the harpsichordist plays the bass line with the left hand, but in obbligato writing he is obliged to play a fully worked out, melodic part in the right hand, whereas in a continuo sonata he is only given a figured bass part — that is, a single bass line with numbers indicating what harmonies should be played above it with his right hand. C. P. E. Bach calls the obbligato sonatas ‘harpsichord trios’, because there are three independent ‘voices’: two upper voices — the violin and the harpsichordist’s right hand — and a bass. To confuse things further, Bach himself scribbled on one of the sources a suggestion that the bass line could be doubled by a viola da gamba.
Bach was the first to write obbligato sonatas like this, but as is not the case with most Baroque music, we have no idea why he wrote them. So it is doubly interesting that there are six of them. Sonatas and suites were commonly assembled in sixes (or twelves) for publication or private presentation. Could it be that the ‘harpsichord trios’ were at some stage intended for publication or to impress a patron? We will never know for sure. The very attempt to answer the unanswerable forces the performer to confront and attempt to understand Bach. The page of music is the easy bit: the musicologists sort out the whos, whats, whens and wheres, but they will not touch why. The answer ‘because it was there’ will not do. To have made it on to the page, it must have meant something. The music is an expression of Bach’s mental, emotional, spiritual activity, so its performance should not simply be a sybaritic wallowing in its pages but an attempt to glimpse the nature of Bach’s mind, heart and soul. As a performer, I have worked out answers which enable me to stand up and play with conviction. They are not theories I could defend in a musicological court, but fortunately, most listeners are fellow seekers rather than jurors.
Andrew Manze, BBC Music Magazine January 2000