The music of Johann Sebastian Bach was strongly connected with the places where the author of Kunst der Fuge lived and worked. It is true that his stays at Armstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimarze, Köthen and, finally, Leipzig were not the decisive factor of style; yet they did influence the composer's choice of favourite genres in the consecutive periods of his biography. Although the Leipzig period was dominated by his work on cantatas and great vocal-instrumental forms, instrumental music was of comparable import then. In the middle part of this period, Bach agreed to serve as Head of the Collegium Musicum, which position he held, except for a short break in 1737-39, between 1729 and 1741. Regular concerts by the Bach-headed ensemble in Zimmermann's café and garden brought the composer's interests back to the instrumental concerto, a form he had forsworn since resigning from the post of Ducal Kappelmeister in Köthen. The Collegium Musicum was an association mainly composed of university students who had mastered the instrumental craft in high school but no longer had any professional contact with music (this is why they were described as dilettantes, a term then still unburdened by its modern pejorative connotations). Such musical associations were usually held together by the passion of its members alone and did not participate in professional musical life. The case of the Leipzig Collegium, founded by Georg Philipp Telemann in 1703, was somewhat different: its student members performed in church and in opera performances as well as during their collegiate meetings.
The period of Bach's leadership in the ensemble led to the emergence of an extensive repertoire of secular cantatas and instrumental suites and concertos. Although many of these have not been preserved, some must have permeated in the form of musical parodies into the religious pieces. Bach's work with the Collegium deepened his interest in the harpsichord, an instrument that had at last acquired solo status “thanks to” the solo concerto – in an unprecedented development in the history of the genre. Yet the development itself was quite understandable, since the instrumental concerto form was then in full bloom. The genre, created by Italian composers in the 2nd half of the 17th century, underwent a telling evolution in two directions at once: as the concerto grosso, with a well-defined group of concerting soloists set against an instrumental tutti, and as the solo concerto, in tempestuous development since the first formal experiments of Giuseppe Torelli, later supported by the imposing achievements of Antonio Vivaldi. In his own music, Bach entered an artistic dialogue with both forms of the Baroque concerto. During his stay in Köthen he developed both the concerto grosso idea – as evidenced by his Brandenburg Concertos – and the solo variety. The harpsichord part, at first invariably harnessed in the production of basso continuo, began a gradual process of independence already in Brandenburg Concertos; this tendency is best exemplified by the fifth concerto, with its virtuoso, nay, its quasi-equilibristic cadenza in the first movement. In fact, late-Baroque harpsichord virtuosity has left its mark even on the opera – as well as on various forms of instrumental music. It is enough to remember Georg Friedrich Händel's significant debut of 1711 and Armida's aria Vo’ far guerra from Act Two of Rinaldo, where virtuoso cadenzas of the concerting harpsichord take up as much as a half of the composition and visibly marginalise the all-too-often silenced soloist. The later periods of rococo, stile galant and early classicism are the swan song of the instrument, which had to wait for its revival until the 20th century.
Bach's harpsichord concertos written in Leipzig, with the exception of Concerto in C major BWV 1061 for two harpsichords, were not originally created for this instrument. Investigations by “musicological detectives” have shown that they are in fact new variants of concertos first written for a melodic instrument, composed in Köthen in the 1720s. While transcribing them to a keyboard instrument obviously required numerous modifications and interventions, including adding a left-hand part, the work itself, in the entirety of its cycle, remained unchanged. Incidentally, this inspired Bach scholars to follow a backwards procedure – to reconstruct the original form from the harpsichord transcript. The textures of concertos for two, three or four harpsichords, often highly sophisticated in their abundance of counterpoint, present many performance problems. These primarily revolve around the blending of colour of the particular instruments, a phenomenon not present on a similar scale when, say, the violin meets the oboe. Recent studies show that the early period of Bach's work with the Collegium resulted in his writing concertos for several harpsichords well into the mid-1730s. Bach’s sudden interest in multiplying harpsichords was probably the result of the presence in his ensemble of several talented musicians, above all his own sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. It is even more probable that the two young Bachs, Johann Ludwig Krebs (who studied with their father for nine years) and the composer himself performed Concerto in A minor BWV 1065 for four harpsichords. Bach commentators and monographers suppose that concertos for three and four harpsichords (as evidenced quite clearly by Concerto in D minor BWV 1063 for three harpsichords) were to motivate the two eldest sons of the composer for even more practice. The solo harpsichords concertos were created later, during the last phase of the composer’s work with the Collegium; they are usually dated at 1738-42.
Of Bach’s solo harpsichord concertos, the one in D minor BWV 1052 is performed the most frequently. Its texture, belying its violin origins, is of remarkable richness. Interestingly, the material for the first and second movements of the concerto already appeared in the earlier cantata “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal” BWV 146, while that of Movement Three in the initial Sinfonia in another cantata, "Ich habe meine Zuversicht” BWV 188.
Concerto in D minor is characteristic in its unison majestic themes of the first two movements. Movement One, with developmental elements is of a quasi-Beethovenian unity of substance, overlaid with improvisational arabesques of the freely concerting soloist. The harpsichord with its own toccata structure independent of the orchestra comes into constant dialogue with the strings, which, in combination with the consistent outline of harmony and modulation of the whole, becomes the prime mover behind this part of the piece. An analogous idea underlies the structure of Movement Three, with similar motoric and virtuoso features. Movement Two is based on a straightforward bass line which appears at the beginning and the end in its unadulterated form, thus binding the whole. The bass theme appears four times in this movement and its initial motif continues to recur in a memento, teamed with the improvisational cantilena of the harpsichord. The dominating mood of painful meditation is quite understandable since the music, already used once in the earlier Cantata BWV 146, accompanied the lyrics: “We must suffer much injustice to enter the Kingdom of God”. After the composer’s death, performers seemed to forget Concerto in D minor for quite some time. It was revived by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in 1832, almost a century after its creation; Robert Schumann, enchanted, described it as “one of the greatest masterpieces”.
Concerto in C major BWV 1061 for two harpsichords is the only original one, a composition composed, since the very start, with the harpsichord sound in mind. The two solo instruments conduct an unrelenting argument, and the expansiveness of their parts pushes the accompanying strings far into the background. The structure of the whole is eminently polyphonic (the least so in the first movement) and this cumulates with particular strength in the finale, a bright concerting Fugue, presaging Mozartian finales of Piano Concerto in F major KV 459 and “Jupiter" Symphony. The great potential of texture that stems from the participation of two musicians, or four hands, in this fugue, allows the composer to observe an absolute polyphonic strictness of multivocal structure, unhampered by greater interval leaps and crossing voices. At times, the composer’s precision and the domination of the combinatorial element bring to mind inescapable associations with Bach’s late masterpieces, above all with Kunst der Fuge. The string ensemble often falls silent entirely; this led Johann Nikolaus Forkel to formulate the thesis that the entire work was originally conceived as a harpsichord duet alone, somewhat along the lines of the solo Italian Concerto.
Concerto in D-minor BWV 1063 for three harpsichords is an example of transcription that reorganizes the work's inner structure so far as to make it impossible to recover the original in both instrumentation and key. The harmonic side of the piece has surprisingly rich chromatics, imparting on the whole composition a dark and highly expressive colour.
The straightforward unison main theme of the first movement exhibits many similarities with Concerto BWV 1052, even if the motoric features recede before an easier flow of musical narration. The development of this part brings about a gradual intensification of motion, erupting in toccata virtuosity towards the end.
The middle movement is a siciliana with a tremendous volatility of modulation and kaleidoscopic variations of tonality. The cantilena-like development of this section has been perfectly attuned with motoric elements. The motivic growth of the main theme seems almost an unendliche Melodie, an illusion of experiencing infinity.
Polyphony determines the development of the final movement, where structural conciseness combines completely with concerting elements, full of improvisational fantasy.
Concerto in A minor BWV 1065 for four harpsichords is a faithful transcript of Vivaldi’s Concerto in B minor Op. 3/10 for four violins. The extreme movements of the concerto consist in a play of string ritornellos that bracket the whole, combined with highly mobile solo sections, a feature typical of the Venetian master. The middle movement, framed by a tempestuous recitativo concitato with strongly punctuated rhythm, contains, in its central fragment, a motoric progression, where each soloist produces a different kind of arpeggio.
This piece is an exception in the catalogue of Bach’s compositions, a seeming hommage a Vivaldi, a monument to one of the most important rule-givers for the form of the concerto, whose groundbreaking opus 3 in the times of Bach’s Kapellmeister days in Köthen served as a model and, more importantly, a very powerful impulse for his own development as a composer.
Marcin Gmys
