Johann Sebastian Bach: Clavierübung I – Sechs Partiten

Description

When Johann Sebastian Bach resolved to set in print the six Partitas known as Clavier-Übung I, he enacted a form of self-representation that was at once rare and unmistakably programmatic. The keyboard is transfigured into a volume of reputation: on the title page the dedication to the Liebhaber stands alongside the formula In Verlegung des Autoris (at the author’s expense), together with the motto Denen Liebhabern zur Gemüths Ergoetzung (for the refreshment of the spirit of music lovers), which proclaims a pleasure conceived as the education of taste, not as a frivolous diversion. In a Leipzig where manuscript circulation remained the norm, print becomes a declared taking of sides: to fix a personal canon and to consign it to the market under the seal of the author.
The Partitas appeared in Leipzig in separate fascicles between 1726 and 1730; in 1731 they were gathered into a single complete edition, printed from the same plates, in oblong format, with pagination and titles standardised (Partita 1, Partita 2, etc.). The first state of the title page indicates sale on commission beneath the Rathaus, at the premises of the daughter of the widow Boethius; that reference disappears in a subsequent issue, and a third is recognisable by the engraved alphabetical pagination. The detail implies a succession of states that mirrors distribution, corrections, and the market’s rebalancing, as happens when music inhabits a real economy. Engraving, in turn, delineates a geography of expertise. According to Gregory C. Butler, Partitas 1 and 2 were engraved by Balthasar Schmid, then a student in Leipzig, whereas Partitas 3 and 4 were engraved by Johann Gotthilf Ziegler, an organist in Halle and already a pupil of Bach in Weimar. The finishing of the 1731 edition, from the title page to the pagination, is attributed to the Leipzig copper-engraver Johann Gottfried Krügner, whose family is found to have been involved in the sale of the first issue. An entanglement of workshop practice, city life, and personal connections, remote from the abstract image of the isolated genius.
Within this practical modernity there operates a strong consciousness of tradition. Bach models the outward form of the publication on the Neue Clavier-Übung of the predecessor Johann Kuhnau, taking up both the general title and the designation Partita. The tonal design, B-flat major, C minor, A minor, D major, G major, E minor, alludes to a complete scale: an announcement of 1 May 1730 suggests that Bach intended to publish, at the Michaelmas Fair, not only a sixth but also a seventh Partita. Why the definitive Opus 1 remains at six is unknown; yet the idea of a larger order persists as a watermark, all the more eloquent for being left unproclaimed.
Not all the material, moreover, comes into being for the first time with a view to print. Traces of early versions appear in a family manuscript of Kleine Clavier-Stücke; Partitas 3 and 4 open the Clavierbüchlein of Anna Magdalena; and two movements of Partita 6, Corrente and Tempo di Gavotta, derive from the original version of the Sonata BWV 1019a for violin and obbligato harpsichord. At the moment of the appearance of Partita 1, a copy was dedicated to Emanuel Ludwig, the newborn son of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen: the domestic suite, for an instant, becomes a gift and a memory of a courtly season that continues to reverberate beneath the Leipzig rigour. The year 1731 does not coincide with a definitive pronouncement, but rather with the beginning of a further phase of control. For the collected edition Bach had the plates corrected and had numerous performance indications, ornamentations, slurs, staccato marks engraved; yet the print remains rife with oversights. With the assistance of collaborators, various surviving copies were then corrected by hand: the critical editions describe a group of annotated exemplars with convergent aims, ranging from readability to the correction of errors, and onwards to the addition of articulations, tempi, and above all a dense ornamentation often concentrated in specific movements. The copies that have been preserved and catalogued, now accessible also in digital form, restore this work as an editorial artefact no less than as a repertoire: title, extent, script, and layout become part of its cultural meaning, because they show how Bach wished to be read even before being played.
On the musical plane, Bach takes the structural backbone of the suite (Allemande, Courante or Corrente, Sarabande, a final movement in the form of a Gigue) and treats it as a grammar capable of generating different worlds. Each Partita opens with a prologue whose name and gesture change (Praeludium, Sinfonia, Fantasia, Ouverture, Praeambulum, Toccata), almost as a different way of crossing the same threshold: now by French ceremony, now by improvisatory freedom, now by ardour of invention. The order of movements presented here follows the division into two CDs.
In Partita 1 in B-flat major (BWV 825) the Praeludium invites with a luminous clarity already charged with inner motion. The core Allemande-Corrente-Sarabande articulates three distinct degrees of concentration, and the triptych Menuet I, Menuet II, with the return da capo, constructs a symmetry that is not social display but form. The concluding Gigue, lively and tightly wrought, closes like a line of reasoning in full flight rather than a mere dance-step.
Partita 2 in C minor (BWV 826) announces itself with a Sinfonia that sets gravity against movement, immediately steering the suite towards a theatre of argument. After Allemande, Courante, and Sarabande, the Rondeaux places the idea of return in the foreground, yet within a climate anything but pacified: the refrain measures the distance between stability and deviation. The concluding movement, in the form of a Capriccio, replaces the Gigue and ends with a gesture of controlled freedom, as though the conclusion were required to stand as a final proof of intelligence.
In Partita 3 in A minor (BWV 827) the opening Fantasia realises freedom as discipline: from a germinal idea there arises a texture that never ceases to transform itself. The galanteries Burlesca and Scherzo are rhetorical displacements, irony and surprise within a rigorous organism. The Gigue recomposes the whole within a logic of pursuit, in which play is serious precisely because it is watched over.
Partita 4 in D major (BWV 828) is the realm of representation. The Ouverture adopts the French ceremonial gesture and translates it into keyboard orchestration, making the harpsichord into a theatre. The Aria, placed after the Courante, opens a space of intimate cantability; the Sarabande concentrates the weight of affect, and the Gigue concludes with a brilliance that is, first and foremost, clarity of texture.
Partita 5 in G major (BWV 829) advances in a more open air: the Praeambulum suggests a concertante energy translated into pure keyboard gesture. The Tempo di Minuetta and the Passepied articulate two ideas of lightness, the one regulated, the other sprightly, before the Gigue relaunches the motion, as though the end were required, by nature, to remain on the move.
Partita 6 in E minor (BWV 830) is perhaps the most discursive of the book. The Toccata alternates free gesture and demonstration, and the Air introduces a restrained cantability, almost an inner radiance. The Sarabande carries weight as an affective nucleus, whereas the Tempo di Gavotta, born from pre-existing material and reinvented in its new context, shows how Bach transforms memory into function. The final Gigue seals the whole with discipline, without extinguishing the imagination.
In this first book of the Clavier-Übung the word exercise is to be understood in its highest sense: the cultivation of judgement and taste. It is scarcely surprising that Bach, after publication, continued to intervene in the text and in its embellishments, as though he wished to leave to readers not an immobile relic, but a living machine. In the subsequent volumes of the Clavier-Übung he would extend the idea into a self-portrait in multiple panels, from the Concerto italiano and the Ouverture to the great organ architectures and the final variations; yet everything begins here, where tradition is respected and simultaneously surpassed, with a calm authority capable of being ancient and, at the same time, startlingly future-facing.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026