Johann Sebastian Bach: Sämtliche Klavierwerke X – Präludien, Fughetten, Duette, Menuette, Sonaten

Description

Bach was keen to organise many of his works into sets, frequently marked by a number of pieces which had a symbolic value. The most obvious example is the “Forty-Eight”, i.e. the double set of twenty-four Preludes and Fugues each which constitute the Well-Tempered Clavier. But there are also the sets of six English Suites, six French Suites, six keyboard Partitas; or the six Cello Suites, the six Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin, the six Brandenburg Concertos, or the Sonatas for chamber ensembles.
Bach was not alone, in this: the use of grouping a homogeneous set of works into collections of (preferably) six was widespread at his time. However, one remarkable feature of Bach’s oeuvre is that such groupings are very common even among pieces he did not publish during his lifetime. In other words, he selected and collected similar works by half-dozens even when he had no planned publication in mind. This demonstrates that such an endeavour was practically a need for him, something which qualified and determined his attitude to music. It expressed his desire for order, found even in the simplest organization of the musical material for his own use.
In some cases, we know that he began writing pieces in a given genre with the explicit purpose of compiling a set of six. In many other cases, he happened to collect some earlier works. When this happened, the most frequent situation was that he could find that he lacked one or more items in his collection, and he proceeded to write them in order to complete the set. However, as concerns some genres, he could instead find that he had too many pieces of a genre, and therefore he had to proceed to a selection. Occasionally, this meant favouring his best pieces over those he felt to be perhaps less interesting. But this was not always the case. His criteria of selection could depend, for instance, on a piece’s key. Not only did he like to construct a set by collecting a given number of pieces, but he also wished the set to possess some intrinsic tonal ordering. Thus, some excellent works which happened to be in the “wrong” key, or in a key incompatible with the planned tonal structure, were left aside without being necessarily less interesting than the selected ones.
This is the case with several of the works recorded here. This double CD comprises, in fact, the “leftovers” of Pietro Soraci’s masterful recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete keyboard works on the piano. It will be immediately evident that these “leftovers” are by no means minor works, but are masterpieces with the same high quality of all other works by Bach.
Some of the pieces recorded here were intended for performance on the lute, and/or on the Lautenwerk. This does not impinge on the possibility of satisfactorily performing them on the piano. Just as all other keyboard works by Bach are commonly played on the piano, so can these. It is, in all cases, a transcription: the piano has the possibility of rendering shades of volume, tone, timbre, and sound, which are not comparably realizable on the harpsichord. Still, it has been observed by many in the course of music history that Bach’s music somehow transcends timbre. Frequently, of course, Bach used purposefully and meaningfully some special timbres in order to convey a musical or extramusical meaning (suffice it to think of the role of oboe d’amore in the mystical works by Bach). However, many works by Bach tolerate perfectly well the transposition from one to another sound medium. Soraci’s long adventure with Bach’s keyboard works bears witness to this; and, just as most of the pieces he recorded come from the harpsichord repertoire, so also the works originally conceived for the lute can be beautifully played on the piano.
This is the case with the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro BWV 998. It is a composition with (possibly) Trinitarian resonances, suggested by the key (E-flat major, with three flats) and the tripartite structure. The prelude is simple and suave, with a slight improvisational flavour but also conveying a distinct image of perfection and accomplishment. The Fugue is much less elaborate than many other similar works by Bach and seems to flow spontaneously from the Prelude and from its very subject. The concluding Allegro is a brilliant piece, similar to a perpetuum mobile. Still, it does not sound properly “virtuosic”, but merely overflowing with joy and light.
Among the other major works found in these two CDs are the four Duets BWV 802-805. Their origins are worth remembering, since they constitute a very singular set within Bach’s oeuvre. Firstly, there are four of them: as we said above, this is not very common, since most sets of Bach’s time were composed by a number of pieces which could be divided by three. (True, there are the Four Orchestral Suites, but these are, for several reasons, the exception which demonstrates the rule). Secondly, they belong in the small portion of Bach’s keyboard works which was printed during the composer’s lifetime. Among the pieces recorded by Soraci, these include the Six Partitas, the Italian Concerto and French Overture, and the Goldberg Variations. These works constitute three out of the four volumes of the so-called Clavier-Übung (the “exercise for the keyboard”), a set of four books whose publication was directly supervised by Bach and which represented his self-presentation as a keyboard player and composer. These three volumes are all composed by works explicitly designed for performance on the harpsichord – in some cases, Bach even specifies that it has to be a two-manual harpsichord.
The remaining volume of the Clavier-Übung (which is actually numbered as the third) is instead conceived for the organ, and in most cases the pieces cannot be played but on the organ, since they involve the obligatory use of the pedals. Furthermore, virtually all of the pieces are “sacred” works. The third volume of the Clavier-Übung opens with a grandiose Prelude in E-flat major and closes with an equally majestic triple Fugue, again in E-flat major (and in this case the Trinitarian implications are obvious). In between, there is a collection of organ works constituting an instrumental Mass setting (in two versions, manualiter and pedaliter, i.e. respectively without and with obbligato pedal part) plus pieces based on the Lutheran Catechism and sacraments.
After the pieces focusing on the Eucharist, there come the four Duets. Several scholars and musicians have argued that these four Duets seem out of place. Firstly, they seem at least as suited for performance on the harpsichord as on the organ (but this does not imply that they sound bad on the organ!). Secondly, they appear akin to the two-Part inventions (more on this later). Thirdly, they have no obvious relation with anything sacred, different from all other pieces of the Clavier-Ūbung III. However, it seems at least very odd, for a composer with such a systematic mind as Bach, to have inserted four entirely extraneous pieces within a collection which was clearly aimed at presenting his oeuvre in the best possible light, in the most accomplished and organic form. Furthermore, the similarity between the Duets and the two-part Inventions is very superficial, inasmuch as both collections are written in two parts with an extensive use of imitation. But, on the technical, musical, and spiritual plane, there is a pronounced difference of level between the Inventions and the Duets. Whilst the Inventions – beautiful as they are – are clearly conceived for educational purposes, and manage to obtain the maximum musical result with the minimum technical effort, the Duets are demanding pieces, starting from their length (which vastly exceeds that of the Inventions, which are also very homogeneous under this viewpoint) and of course considering their musical and intellectual requirements.
The most convincing hypothesis as to the meaning of these pieces and as to their positioning within the Clavier-Ūbung, at least in my eyes, is that which takes into account their specific place after the “Eucharistic” pieces. It has been argued, in fact, that these Duets might represent the intimate dialogue between the Soul and its mystical Bridegroom, the Christ, who has just come into the faithful soul through the Eucharistic Bread. Within the corpus of Bach’s Cantatas, it has been observed that there are basically just two kinds of duets: either soprano/bass duets, or duets for adjacent voices (soprano/alto, alto/tenor etc.). The soprano/bass duets are virtually always duets between the Soul and her Bridegroom. This may well be the case here too.
Other works in this recording include youthful pieces by the composer. Some reveal more clearly their early date of composition (and others are of doubtful attribution), but there are also many beautiful examples of Bach’s genius as a young man. They also show how international and cultivated were Bach’s musical horizons, in spite of his sedentary life. For instance, the set known as Praeludium et Partita del tuono terzo BWV 833 is clearly influenced by French music, even if it is much more complex and demanding from the musical and intellectual viewpoint than its contemporaneous works from France.
Other pieces were conceived for pedagogical purposes, some of them written for Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, and his first attempts at the keyboard. Here, as in the Inventions (but even more pronouncedly, given the lower technical demands), Bach shows an amazing skill in realizing an extremely complex and beautiful musical texture notwithstanding the technical simplicity of his scoring.
Another piece which deserves albeit a short discussion is the D-major Sonata BWV 963 (it is Bach’s only keyboard piece labelled as “Sonata”). It is a multi-movement piece, alternating moments of virtuosity, of expressiveness, of polyphony, and culminating with the most curious keyboard piece by Bach. The composer – who was nineteen at the time of its composition – creates a delightful Fugue “all’imitatione della Gallina Cuccu”, i.e. imitating the chicken and cuckoo. Just as happens with the Capriccio sopra la lontananza del Fratello dilettissimo, where the doleful sounds of the friends’ lamentation give way to a fanciful Fugue on the postman’s call, here too Bach enjoys employing his contrapuntal skills for “ennobling” some bird-calls.
All the pieces collected here contribute to a three-dimensional portrait of Bach as a keyboard composer, showing his exceptional gifts and also the path of growth and maturation he had to walk – with patience, time, skill, and with his incredible genius.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024