The Bach Family – Flute Sonatas

Description

In the eighteenth century the transverse flute enters the workshop of the Bach family as an instrument of metamorphosis. In the hands of Johann Sebastian it becomes the vehicle of concertante writing of exceptional density, precisely at the moment when it gradually supplants the recorder and enlarges both the timbral palette and the range of expressive possibilities. In the generations that follow, that same wooden voice accompanies the passage from a world founded upon counterpoint to one governed by periodic gesture, North German sensibility and galant grace. The itinerary linking Sonata in B minor BWV 1030, Sonata in E minor Fk 52 by Wilhelm Friedemann, Hamburger Sonata in G major Wq. 133 by Carl Philipp Emanuel, Sonata in D major BR B15 by Johann Christoph Friedrich and Sonata in D major op. 16 no. 1 by Johann Christian traces a genealogy of style, from Leipzig to Hamburg, from Bückeburg to London, in which the flute registers every mutation of accent, phrasing and the relationship between melodic line and bass. Within this genealogy the name Bach denotes a constellation of responses to one and the same problem, how to give new form to line, breath and musical conversation.
Sonata in B minor BWV 1030 occupies an eminent place within the output of the father. Together with the orchestral Suite in the same key, it represents the highest point of the relationship between Bach and the literature for flute. An earlier version in G minor survives only in the harpsichord part and leaves open the question of the instrument intended to converse with the keyboard. The B minor redaction, transmitted in autograph, unfolds instead a fully accomplished conception, in which the obbligato harpsichord assumes an almost concertante freedom from the very opening Andante. Here the flute moves through a dense, mobile and ceaselessly generative texture. Bach brings to fulfilment one of his most fertile intuitions, the emancipation of the keyboard from the function of mere support, so that the dialogue between the two instruments becomes the true motor of the form. The Largo e dolce in D major, shaped upon the rhythm of the siciliano, entrusts the melodic line almost entirely to the flute and opens a zone of absorbed cantabile, its timbre already inclined towards the sensibility of the elder sons. The finale, with its fugato Presto followed by a Gigue, impresses upon the sonata a seal rare even within the Bachian universe. The severity of contrapuntal invention and the joy of dancing motion coexist without friction, as though the science of form here attained a lightness already transfigured.
Wilhelm Friedemann, the restless firstborn and one of the most unpredictable figures of the lineage, lived within the tension between paternal inheritance and the emerging empfindsamer Stil. His music, often described by contemporaries as impetuous and singular, combines Baroque discipline with audacious modulations, rhythmic dislocations and a melodic imagination that eludes symmetry. Sonata in E minor Fk 52 offers a compelling condensation of this temperament. The opening movement preserves the idea of a threefold dialogue, yet the discourse proceeds with nervous mobility and with a continual harmonic inquietude. Every figure seems on the point of deviating, and precisely this instability generates the fascination of the page. The Siciliano is the most intimate region of the sonata. Its veiled sweetness has the fragility of recollection and reveals an essential trait of the composer, the capacity to transform a dance type into lyrical confession. The reappearance of this movement in a harpsichord sonata shows how close, in Wilhelm, was the bond between keyboard invention and chamber writing. The concluding Vivace restores the material to a horizon of brilliance and retains that unpredictability which renders his voice so personal. The brilliance springs from a restless harmonic intelligence and from an imagination that prefers surprise to regularity.
In Carl Philipp Emanuel the Bachian workshop shifts its centre of gravity. A leading figure of early Classicism and the foremost representative of northern sensibility, he carries the instrumental monologue towards a language of emotional dislocations, suspended phrases and sudden harmonic torsions. The Hamburger Sonata in G major Wq. 133 belongs to the final season of his musical life and introduces eloquent novelties. The movements are two, an Allegretto and a Rondo. Presto, joined by a brief bridge, according to a conception already looking beyond the tradition of the three-movement sonata. The virtuosity is extrovert, driven into the highest register of the instrument and conceived for a player of great agility. The Allegretto renounces the rhetoric of the concluding cadence and demands a continuous, almost speaking flow; the Rondo. Presto instead sets forth a rapid, scintillating energy, nourished by surprises. The page belongs to the Hamburg maturity, when Bach, having succeeded Telemann, developed that bolder vein which played so large a part in opening the European musical language to the future. Within the context of the disc, the sonata marks the moment at which paternal inheritance is interiorised and becomes the sentimental sinew of the musical Enlightenment, in a writing that seems to think aloud and to transform instrumental gesture into psychological eloquence.
Johann Christoph Friedrich, the Bach of Bückeburg, represents another response to the lesson received at home. His career, stable and secluded at the court of Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe, allowed him an orderly passage from the late Baroque to early Classicism. The Sechs Sonaten for flute and continuo dedicated to the Count still rank among the pages most frequently encountered in his chamber music. In Sonata in D major BR B15 this courtly equilibrium is visible from the very two-movement design. The Allegretto proceeds with measure, like an elegant conversation that entrusts to the flute the task of brightening a sober and well-proportioned texture. The writing favours clear contours, immediate responses and the transparency of symmetries. The Minuetto restores the invention to the social sphere of dance and seals the page with a gesture of composed urbanity. Within this formal brevity there lives a precise idea of style, music destined for distinction and clarity, nourished by measured grace and by an equilibrium rich in tenderness. After the restlessness of Wilhelm Friedemann and the expressive fractures of Carl Philipp Emanuel, this sonata offers a different centre of gravity, founded upon decorum, proportion and a cantabile quality enclosed within a perfectly defined perimeter.
With Johann Christian the genealogy reaches its cosmopolitan outcome. Formed first within the Berlin milieu of his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, then in Italy under Padre Martini, and subsequently a protagonist of London musical life, the youngest of Bach’s sons carries the domestic tradition into an international light. Sonata in D major op. 16 no. 1 belongs to a collection for harpsichord or pianoforte with accompaniment of violin or flute, dedicated to Miss Greenland. Such an editorial indication already reveals his world, the cultivated salon, urban conversation, the public elegance that profoundly impressed Mozart. In the Allegro assai the discourse advances with theatrical promptness and with a sense of periodicity that announces the full Classical age. The melody presents itself with immediacy, the cadences breathe naturally, the flute participates in an entirely new musical sociability. In the Andantino grazioso the cantabile line distils an Italian softness, leaving to the harmonic support the task of defining perspective and breath. One senses in filigree that operatic and cantabile taste which made Johann Christian a central figure in London musical life and made his art one of the most effective vehicles of the new European style.
The value of such a programme lies in its capacity to show how the name Bach, in the second half of the eighteenth century, designates a series of rapid and profoundly far-reaching transformations. In the father, the flute sonata is still a contrapuntal architecture of almost organ-like breadth; in Wilhelm Friedemann it becomes an interior scene; in Carl Philipp Emanuel it is transformed into a theatre of the affections; in Johann Christoph Friedrich it assumes the measure of courtly civility; in Johann Christian it opens towards the cosmopolitan rhetoric of nascent Classicism. Continuity remains perceptible in the cult of line, in the attention given to the dialogue between upper part and harmonic support, in the capacity to make of the flute a voice capable of thought. Listening to the programme thus comes to resemble a biography in the form of sound. Each sonata illuminates one face of the family, and all together show how, from one and the same origin, there may arise within the space of a few decades different ways of conceiving time, affect, form and musical conversation. It is a family novel without words, in which each new stage preserves the memory of the previous one and bends it towards another idea of eloquence. The flute, with its voice at once noble and vulnerable, unites these worlds and renders them contiguous in listening.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2025