Johann Sebastian Bach: Trio Sonatas, for Flute and Piano

In spite of being called “Trio” Sonatas, Bach’s works now identified as BWV 525-530 were conceived as solo works for the organ. According to Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, these “Six sonatas or trios for two keyboards” (i.e. the two manuals of the organ) “with obbligato pedal” had been composed by Bach “for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann”, and had a pedagogical, along with an artistic goal. “By practising them”, Forkel claims, Wilhelm Friedemann “prepared himself to be the great organist he later became”. Forkel also adds a significant aesthetic judgement: “It is impossible to say enough about their beauty. They were written when the composer was in his full maturity and can be considered his principal work of this kind”.

Though they constitute today a cornerstone of the organists’ repertoire, it is true that some of them are Bach’s own reworkings and arrangements from previous works. In their definitive form for the organ, these Trio Sonatas were probably written between 1727 and 1730, during Bach’s time in Leipzig; however, some movements are related to other works, including the Concerto for flute, violin and harpsichord (BWV 1044), whose slow movement reuses the material of BWV 527, and the Sinfonia opening the second part of Cantata BWV 76, but possibly other original instrumental and chamber music pieces were rewritten by Bach with the purpose of giving a definite and consistent shape to this beautiful collection.

If Bach, then, felt free to transcribe from varied instrumental media in order to create his organ masterpieces, later musicians felt equally free to do the same with his works, and to transform them into chamber music pieces. Indeed, Bach seems to have had a particular interest in the timbre of the flute, which is in fact evoked by some of the softest-sounding and ethereal of the organ stops. Moreover, Bach was well acquainted with the particular features of flute playing and technique, also by virtue of his experiments in the years immediately before the supposed composition date of the Trio Sonatas, which culminated in his original Flute Sonatas.

It is in fact possible that one of the greatest flutists of the time, the Dresden court musician Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, spent some of the summer months of 1724 in Leipzig, and likely became acquainted with Bach and his music. A supporting element in favour of their cooperation is that Bach’s Cantatas dating from that period feature prominent flute parts, which Buffardin may have played as a soloist. Buffardin is also remembered as the teacher of Johann Joachim Quantz, who not only was in turn among the leading musicians of his time, but also left a fundamental treatise, On Playing the Flute (1752), from which invaluable information about Baroque performance practice has been transmitted to our times.

After Bach’s death, knowledge of his music and of his figure was quickly confined to a restricted circle of professionals, who were able to appreciate the masterly features of his art; his music was less widely performed outside these circles. In this bleak panorama, a few “Bach-cities” provided laudable exceptions to the rule, particularly thanks to enthusiastic individuals who cherished Bach’s music and disseminated it among their pupils and acquaintances. One of these “Bach-cities” was certainly Dresden, where a virtually uninterrupted “Bach-cult” is observed. Among its promoters was Moritz Fürstenau (1824-1889), who had studied the flute in Munich with Theobald Böhm, who had created and developed the modern flute. Fürstenau, who was an admirer and supporter of his contemporary Richard Wagner, also had the merit of rediscovering or keeping alive the tradition of older music, and was famous for teaching Bach’s Flute Sonatas to his students in the 1860s, at a time when few other flute teachers could be said to do likewise.

Indeed, France, the fatherland of Buffardin and of many other of the leading flutists of the 18th-19th century, was one place where Bach’s flute works were seldom taught or performed. This was also due to a lack of performing material: only in the 1860s were Bach’s Flute Sonatas included in the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe (those with continuo accompaniment would have to wait until 1894, while the Trio Sonatas for the organ were published in the same edition in 1867), and at about the same time the Leipzig-based Peters publishing house issued what is considered the first instructive edition of BWV 1030-1035. Significantly, the first French instructive edition appeared only in 1925, for Durand Cie., with performing indications by Louis Fleury (1878-1926), a former student of Claude-Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) and the dedicatee of Debussy’s Syrinx. Taffanel, who is the acknowledged founder of the modern French flute school, was in turn one of the first to perform Bach’s Sonatas, pioneering the rediscovery of Baroque music for the flute in the late nineteenth century.

In spite of this, the enormous treasure of eighteenth century flute music remained mostly neglected, and only exceptionally performed in public concerts (one exception being Bach’s Second Orchestral Suite, which soon gained a place in the standard repertoire of the twentieth century). It can be said, therefore, that the merit for the flute “Bach-Renaissance” can largely be attributed to Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000), who popularized Bach’s works in his capacity as a star performer, an appreciated editor, and a leading teacher.

Rampal, the son of another flutist from Marseille, started his career as an orchestra performer but gained overnight fame thanks to a live broadcast at the French National Radio in 1945. The following year, at the Conservatoire of Paris, Rampal met with pianist and harpsichordist Robert Veyron-Lacroix, with whom he established a lifelong duo performing worldwide.

Indeed, the Rampal/Veyron-Lacroix duo undertook a pioneering initiative: in 1949, they rented the Parisian Salle Gaveau for a recital devoted to flute chamber music, helping to gain acceptance for this repertoire on the same footing as violin or cello Sonatas. This programme featured, among others, Bach’s G-minor Sonata, as well as contemporary music.

Rampal, thus, was able on the one hand to become the first internationally acclaimed and worldwide famous flute soloist, and, on the other, to influence deeply and to significantly broaden the standard repertoire for his instrument. He was a passionate researcher and rediscoverer of forgotten works, particularly of the Baroque era; he maintained that the transparent beauty of Baroque music was almost therapeutic for a world which was slowly and dolefully emerging from the catastrophes of World War II. Between 1947-1950, Rampal was the first to record the whole set of Bach’s Sonatas for Boîte à Musique (individual Sonatas had been recorded by René Le Roy, Georges Barrère and Georges Laurent in the 1930s), and he frequently performed them as a mini-series of two Bach recitals. Rampal’s fascination for Baroque music was not limited to Bach, however; he studied Quantz’s treatise carefully, performed works by many other Baroque composers, and founded the Ensemble Baroque de Paris whose activity lasted for more than thirty years.

The duo also championed Robert Veyron-Lacroix’s transcription of Bach’s Trio Sonatas from their original organ scoring for flute and a keyboard instrument, recording them together in the late 1970s. He also contributed to the dissemination of these works through his teaching (the leading flutists of the following generation were mostly his students) and through his fundamental editorial activity. Even though he was a thoughtful performer and fastidious researcher, Rampal always performed Baroque music on modern instruments, proudly employing all of the expressive and technical resources of his famous golden flute in the service of his artistic view of Bach’s music. Similarly, his editions have no claim to a philological approach to editing, and are admittedly “instructive editions”, conveying, through musical notation, interpretive suggestions, technical advice, performance ideas and aesthetic perspectives of the editor.

The enthusiasm for Baroque music, prompted also by the pioneering activities of musicians of Rampal’s standing, encouraged in the following decades the emergence of the “historically informed performance” movement, which employed period instruments and refrained from using editions other than the most up-to-date Urtext. To record Bach’s Sonatas today on modern instruments and using the version associated with Rampal and Veyron-Lacroix as the reference text is, therefore, an operation which might initially raise a few eyebrows. In fact, this is not a naive choice which deliberately ignores the latest discoveries of the authenticist field; rather, it can be understood as a further development of the same concern for historical awareness. By this view, the Veyron-Lacroix transcription championed by Rampal, played on modern flute and piano, is seen as a work of art in itself, as a creative engagement with Bach’s works which produces an interpretation whose historic and aesthetic importance cannot be underestimated.

For generations of flute players, Rampal’s performances and his edition were the lens through which Bach’s works were first known, approached and studied. To perform on these editions today, therefore, is to critically and creatively engage with a tradition to which, on the one hand, we are all indebted for making Baroque music part of today’s musical landscape, and, on the other, must be historicized in turn, after nearly three quarters of a century. In his editions, Rampal transmitted the quintessence of his musical thought and of his view of Baroque music; thus, by studying them, we can appreciate the foundations of Rampal’s aesthetics, and engage creatively with them in turn. These editions, arrangements and transcriptions, therefore, are not just crucial documents for the history of flute performance practice, but also works of art in their own right, with which contemporary musicians can in turn interact in a creative fashion. Rampal’s performed and written interpretations are art; and so is the performance of these editions which this CD proposes to the musical world today.

Album notes by Chiara Bertoglio; English wording revised, with factual clarifications.

Recording Credits

Recorded: Sudestudio, Lecce, Italy, August 2018
Studio: Stefano Manca
Sound engineer: Marco D’Agostinis
Cover: Davide Faggiano
Flute: W. S. Haynes 14K
Piano: SK-EX
Version for flute and piano: Robert Veyron-Lacroix
Production, design and art direction: Da Vinci Publishing