Jean-Guihen Queyras

Six Suites—Six Echoes

New Perspectives of Familiar Ground

Anne do Paço

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello BWV 1007–1012 are among the greatest works ever written for a single cello. They represent the full range of technical possibilities of that string instrument at the time of writing— we should not forget that during the Baroque era the cello was rarely expected to do more than lend music a foundation. Within the popular form of the dance suite, Bach opened up a whole new range of artistic freedom in playing the cello. In their challenges to the player’s technique, interpretation, and stamina and their demand for extreme mental concentration, the Six Suites to this day have been regarded as a kind of essence of cello playing, leaving the performer entirely to his own devices, as every note is entirely exposed. No longer courtly dance music, but using the dance movements as a source of formal structure and rhythmical impulse, the Suites combine the highest artistic standards with the simplest elements: the search for the origins of a motif, a musical line or rhythm. At the same time, there is a sense of polyphony underneath the linear surface, revealing the depth of Bach’s compositional abilities. From the highly virtuosic to heartfelt intimacy, these pieces show the systematic approach to music so typical of Bach, his quest for musical expression beyond genres and styles, which also constitutes a return to the origins of music-making, to music per se—to art.

All of this may have contributed to the fact that the Suites were never publicly performed during Bach’s lifetime, nor until the first half of the 20th century, much less acquired a permanent place in the concert repertoire, although the first printed edition, published by Janet et Cotelle in France in 1824, was followed by numerous others. Highly esteemed by cognoscenti as a compendium of cello playing, their complexity at the same time gave them the reputation of being etudes, unplayable in public. Today, on the other hand, no cellist would shirk tackling Bach’s music on the concert podium, seeking his or her own way of interpreting these compositions and probing the infinite space for expressivity they open up.

The Canadian-born Frenchman Jean-Guihen Queyras presented a prize-winning complete recording of the Suites as early as 2007, but has also performed them as a cycle in concert, repeatedly exploring their musical content. He is convinced: “When you play pieces frequently, there is a tendency to push the boundaries further every time.” In 2017 he opened Bach’s Cello Suites to the art form they are based upon—dance—for the project Mitten wir im Leben sind, a collaboration with the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker first performed at the Ruhrtriennale festival. In today’s concert, on the other hand, he revives a concept first implemented during the 2005–06 season, breaking up the purity and unity of Bach’s cosmos by juxtaposing the Suites with contemporary music: each of the Suites is preceded by miniatures lasting only a few minutes. These “pre-echoes” were commissioned by Jean-Guihen Queyras from such different composers such as Ivan Fedele, Jonathan Harvey, Gilbert Amy, Misato Mochizuki, and Ichiro Nodaira. Only György Kurtág was unable to complete his commission, so Queyras decided to interpolate three short pieces from Kurtág’s anthology Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (“Signs, Games, and Messages”) before Suite No. 3. Little is known about the genesis of Bach’s Suites. Since no autograph has come down to us, two copies are the main sources. The first is commonly dated to 1726 and was made by the organist Johann Peter Kellner; the second one is in the hand of Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, and must have been made in 1731 at the latest. The works were presumably composed in Köthen around 1720. Young Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen had hired Bach in December 1717 as the conductor and director of his court orchestra. Bach felt at home in the art-loving climate of the princely residence, composing numerous works for official court events, but also the first part of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concerti, and the English and French Suites. His Six Suites for Cello were presumably dedicated

to Köthen’s resident cello virtuoso, Christian Ferdinand Abel—Bach may have considered them a counterpart of the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin BWV 1001–1006. The sequence of movements—prélude, allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue—is identical in all six Cello Suites. Variations only occur in the dances interpolated between sarabande and gigue: here we find minuets, bourrées, and gavottes. The level of difficulty, the wealth of expressive elements, but also the duration all increase from Suite to Suite. In an interview, Jean-Guihen Queyras explained that he has come to always play the Suites in the original order: “I used to do it differently, because I thought there had to be a balance. I tried to combine an early and a late Suite in order to create a better balance, because the Suites become mightier as they progress. The Sixth is almost twice as long as the First. Nowadays I am convinced that there is really a story here, a development that makes an incredible amount of sense in philosophical terms.”

A Flowing Love for Nature

With regard to the First Suite, Queyras emphasizes its “flowing, nature-loving character,” comparing the Prélude with its far-flung 16th-note arpeggios—which make the cello’s registers and their different fragmentations of sound gleam and also open the Courante and the Minuets, with slight variations—to a fast-flowing brook. Born in Lecce in 1953, Italian composer Ivan Fedele studied with Azio Corghi and Franco Donatoni in Milan; his Arc-en-ciel— which is based on a passage from his Arcipelago Möbius for chamber ensemble—reflects this musical formula, which is so characteristic of the first Prélude, in crystalline, ethereal sounds. One is reminded of a fragile fata morgana or a rainbow appearing suddenly in the sky.

A Melancholic Quest

Within the theory describing the characteristics of individual key signatures, D minor is considered “gently grieving,” a “lament from a beleaguered, but not feeble breast,” as Ferdinand Gotthelf Hand described it in 1837. D minor is the key of Requiem masses, but also that of melancholy—that state of mind which, to Romano Guardini, the philosopher of religion, has meaning only as “the agitation of man in the proximity of the eternal.” The D-minor chord opening the Prélude of Suite No. 2, and the chromatic convolutions in which it seems to rise up against fate in the following, both shape the painful, fragile tone of this composition.

For his Pre-echo for Jean-Guihen, written in 2003, Jonathan Harvey chose the Prélude in D minor as his point of reference. The English composer, whose work is influenced by the Second Viennese School, the serialists, and especially Karlheinz Stockhausen, but who also studied Buddhism and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy intensively, considered most of his music a search for other or higher planes of consciousness. With a C sharp that opens and ends the piece and functions as a leading tone, his Pre-echo builds a direct bridge to Bach, while the interior of the composition is characterized by soft sounds from the upper regions of the cello, which Harvey sends plummeting downwards with increasing dynamics. The numerous “empty” agglomerations of fifths, however, offer no security, no inner reassurance whatsoever.

Playful Joy

Bach opens his Third Suite with a grand gesture, a downward motion spanning two octaves, from which an ascending and descending line in the manner of a sequence splits off, finally building up to a large-dimensioned arc of arpeggios above a pedal point. While the following dance movements are characterized by a brilliant C major of great virtuosity, the Sarabande adds a ceremonious note of pathos to the composition.

György Kurtág’s three little cello pieces—Az hit… (“Faith”) is the transcription of a work for solo soprano from the large-scale song cycle The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza— offer a strong contrast: they tell of discovering diversity within small forms, of the essence between only two tones and the creation of a musical system of communication through elementary acoustic gestures. His work-in-progress Jelek, játékok és üzenetek, from which Jean-Guihen Queyras has selected these three works, is a kind of musical diary Kurtág has been keeping since 1989. Here, various “In memoriam” compositions commemorate friends and artists, such as the great Hungarian cellist Miklós Perényi in the piece Árnyak (“Shadow”), but he also refers to the music of other composers, to films and poems, spinning a quasi-secret network. One of these poems, by János Pilinszky, is about the suicide of the great French poet Gérard de Nerval, featuring a “riverside which is not a riverside,” of a “memory that has never been a sunrise,” a “moat” and a “fiery pin in the head.” Before this backdrop, Kurtág has the solo cello evoke an almost Bach-like atmosphere, with descending chromatic sighs.

Solemnity and Love

Parisian composer and conductor Gilbert Amy, who studied with Darius Milhaud, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, called his “pre-echo” for the Fourth Suite En-Suite. It is music that deconstructs the harmonic sequence of the Prélude and extracts its basic gesture from the original context, in a manner that makes the familiar suddenly sound irritatingly strange. As in a picture that is out of focus, the listener can only guess at what previously seemed so well-known.

Jean-Guihen Queyras describes Bach’s Suite No. 4 as a “wonderful mixture of solemnity, vertical form, and love.” The voluminous Prélude is divided in two: the first half is based on the principle of broken chords, which start on a basic tone, then launch a cascading descent over 49 measures until a fermata finally bids them stop: a sudden halt from which rapid 16th-note runs peel off, as if the music were suddenly making an urgent escape. In the cheerful Allemande and the Courante (the latter highly sophisticated in its interchanging of binary and triple rhythms) these runs are combined with the broken chords from the first half of the Prélude. The Gigue is extremely virtuosic—a kind of perpetuum mobile finale which might repeat in endless loops, ad infinitum.

Drama and Simplicity

To Jean-Guihen Queyras, the Fifth Suite is “the most dramatic—with a real rupture in the very metaphysical Sarabande.” Indeed, Bach breaks new ground here, to which the Prélude in the French style, also divided into two sections, already points: a solemn, slow introduction with majestic syncopations is followed by a fugue, the realization of which requires an unusual effort from the cello and its single voice. In the original notation, Bach calls for a scordatura, or re-tuning, of the highest string by a whole note downwards, from A to G, enabling other than the usual harmonies and shifting the cello’s resonance to a darker color. The Allemande, Courante, and Gigue harken back to the syncopated rhythms of the introductory Prélude. The Sarabande, on the other hand, is deeply moving in its simplicity—the melancholy heart of the entire cycle. The Japanese composer Misato Mochizuki, who studied with Emmanuel Nunes at the Paris Conservatoire, among others, evokes this in her Pré-écho: with great gentleness, unfolding in many nuances around the dominant of G.

A Declaration of Love

The fact that Suite No. 6 is indeed “a declaration of love for the entire world,” as Jean-Guihen Queyras would have it, is demonstrated even by its Prélude, with its overabundant reveling in virtuoso challenges and sophisticated sounds. Over a swinging pedal point, chords as well as rising and falling melodic lines are interwoven in an intense dialogue. But the other movements of this work, which was originally composed for a five-string instrument with an additional high E string, are also full of demanding Baroque playfulness.

The music of the Japanese composer Ichiro Nodaira has been influenced by György Ligeti, Franco Donatoni, Peter Eötvös, and Brian Ferneyhough. In his “pre-echo” entitled Enigme, festive virtuosity seems to have been transferred to filigree realms of extreme height, which are repeatedly interrupted by almost pompous fields of sound in which Bach’s motifs, rhythms, and sounds rub against each other like stranded ice floes.

Six Suites, Six Echoes: the juxtaposition of Bach’s Cello Suites with contemporary music is a sensuous promenade between Baroque and present times, devised by an artist who not only studied historically informed performance practice with the Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma and performed with ensembles such as the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, but was also a member of Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble intercontemporain for many years. And it is more than that: Jean-Guihen Queyras extends a fascinating invitation to sharpen our senses and our ear. When one kind of music leaves its traces in the other, yesteryear echoes today, but the erstwhile is also enriched by the here and now. As listeners, we learn that the intensity of perception knows no boundaries.