Angela Hewitt Bach Odyssey IX (May 14, 2019) 92nd Street Y Notes by Harry Haskell JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) English Suite No. 1 in A Major, BWV 806 Prélude Allemande Courante I Courante II Sarabande Bourrée I Bourrée II Gigue English Suite No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 807 Prélude Allemande Courante Sarabande Bourrée I Bourrée II Gigue English Suite No. 3 in G Minor, BWV 808 Prélude Allemande Courante Sarabande Gavotte I Gavotte II Gigue Suite in F Minor, BWV 823 Prélude Sarabande en Rondeau Gigue Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 894 Johann Sebastian Bach Born in Eisenach, March 21, 1685; died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750
English Suite No. 1 in A Major, BWV 806 Composed before 1717; 31 minutes English Suite No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 807 Composed before 1717; 25 minutes English Suite No. 3 in G Minor, BWV 808 Composed before 1717; 23 minutes Although Bach spent most of his life as a hard-working church musician, a job that entailed conducting, teaching, and administrative tasks as well as composing, he was best known to his early eighteenth-century contemporaries as a virtuoso on the organ and harpsichord. By all accounts his keyboard technique was as economical as it was prodigious. According to his early biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, “Bach is said to have played with so easy and small a motion of the fingers that it was hardly perceptible. Only the first joints of the fingers were in motion; the hand retained even in the most difficult passages its rounded form; the fingers rose very little from the keys, hardly more than in a trill, and when one was employed, the other remained quietly in its position. Still less did the other parts of his body take any share in his play, as happens with many whose hand is not light enough.” Both Bach’s playing and his keyboard music were strongly influenced by the French Baroque school. He studied and admired the works of François Couperin and his fellow claveciniste composers, whose harpsichord music demanded exceptional lightness and evenness of touch to achieve their characteristic blend of delicacy and brilliance. These same qualities are evident in the many works for solo harpsichord that Bach wrote in the years before and just after his move to Leipzig in 1723, including the Inventions and Sinfonias, the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and the so-called English and French Suites. The latter, Forkel informs us, received their nicknames “because they are written in the French taste. By design, the composer is here less learned than in his other suites, and has mostly used a pleasing, more predominant melody.” Compared to the French Suites, the six English Suites--which date from Bach’s years as cappellmeister, or director of music, to the ducal court in Weimar between 1714 and 1717--are more substantial in proportions and more overtly virtuosic in character. Yet they are no less indebted to the florid French idiom and may owe their misleading moniker to the fact that they were “made for an Englishman of rank,” as Forkel suggested. (Another theory is that they were modeled on harpsichord works published in London.) In fact, Bach himself doesn’t appear to have used the title by which the suites are now known; he called them simply “Suites avec Préludes”—French for “suites with preludes”—as distinct from the later and lighter-weight French Suites, in which the introductory movement is omitted. In all other respects, however, the English Suites conform to the classical pattern of the instrumental dance suite as it evolved in France, Germany, and elsewhere in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Each suite is built around a core group of courtly dances consisting of a stately allemande, a vivacious courante, a broadly lyrical sarabande, and a bouncy gigue. By convention, all four of these dances within a given suite are in the same key, although they are seldom related thematically. Bach varies the
standard pattern by inserting other dances, chiefly of a lighter character, after the obligatory sarabande: both the First and Second English Suites feature pairs of lively bourées, while the Third Suite has two more-relaxed gavottes. The flexibility of the suite format also gave Bach license to insert special companion movements. The Sarabandes of the Second and Third Suites, for example, are followed by richly ornamented variations in the French manner known as doubles. The dance element is sublimated in the Prélude to the A-Major Suite, with its nonstop current of triplets and full-bodied contrapuntal textures. The movement’s quasiimprovisational feeling serves the dual purpose of fixing the listener’s attention while giving the performer a chance to stretch her or his fingers. The Allemande’s clipped opening–a quarter note preceded by a sixteenth-note upbeat--accentuates the solid, foursquare character of this traditional “German” dance. A similar upbeat figure launches the first of the two fleet, triple-time Courantes. The second is followed by not one but two doubles, illustrating Forkel’s observation that Bach “introduced so much variety in his performance that under his hand every piece was as it were like a discourse.” A richly chromatic Sarabande and two sprightly Bourées (in major and minor keys, with the first repeated after the second) lead to a vivacious Gigue, in which the two voices twine around each other in contrary motion. The same pattern is broadly replicated in the A-Minor Suite. This time, though, Bach treats us to a longer and far more substantial Prélude in fugal style, whose intricate contrapuntal puzzles unfold at leisure. Listen for the leaping three-note motif that threads in and out of the closely woven contrapuntal fabric, signaling the serial reappearances of the fugue’s principal theme. The other six movements of the suite alternate as usual between duple and triple meters at various tempos. The sedate, measured strains of the Allemande neatly complement the Courante’s restless kinetic energy. The Sarabande is predominantly chordal, highlighting the dance’s stately formality, in contrast to the sinuous melodic lines of its ornamented double. The two high-stepping Bourées (another minor–major pair) and the brisk Gigue are both rounded off by da capo style reprises. The G-Minor Suite starts off with another magisterial peroration, its smoothly flowing passagework propelled by an insistent pulse of three beats to a bar. After a majestic Allemande and a somewhat skittery Courante, the slow-moving harmonies of the Sarabande give way to the rippling roulades of its companion double. Bach proceeds to vary the mix by inserting two strutting Gavottes in duple meter, the first in the home key, the second in the parallel major (and featuring a mesmerizing bagpipe-like drone). The Third English Suite ends as it began, with an athletic, densely contrapuntal Gigue. The opening bars of the movement’s two sections are mirror images of each other: Bach starts by presenting the fugal subject right-side up, then slyly flips it on its head, a standard contrapuntal procedure that is nonetheless ingeniously effective. Suite in F Minor, BWV 823 Composed before 1715; 7 minutes Bach experimented with many different combinations of dances and other pieces in constructing his forty-five-odd suites for various instruments. But the abbreviated three-movement design of the Suite in F Minor is almost unique in his, or any other composer’s, oeuvre. Indeed, BWV 823 was long assumed to be a fragmentary survival, and even Bach’s authorship has never been definitively established. Little is known about
when or how this intriguing miniature came to be written, but it was probably composed not long before the English Suites. The Prélude is built on a repeating eight-bar pattern in the bass, similar to a chaconne. This is one of several stylistic features that hark back to the keyboard suites of Purcell and other seventeenth-century composers. In combination with the work’s somber F-minor tonality, it gives the opening movement a sense of stern inexorability that contrasts sharply with the more free-spirited Préludes of the English Suites. The intensely expressive Sarabande en Rondeau, with its poignant harmonies and highly embellished melodic line, is laid out in modified rondo form (AABA), with the first section repeated three times. The concluding Gigue is likewise characterized by a simple, repetitive bass line—so simple that some scholars speculate that it originated as a lute piece—set against an angular melody in jittery dotted rhythm. Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 894 Composed ca. 1715-25; 10 minutes The pairing of an improvisatory, free-form prelude or fantasia with a strictly contrapuntal fugue appealed to Bach throughout his life. The dating of this comparatively little-known specimen is uncertain, but most authorities believe it was written around the time Bach was working on the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Whereas the WTC—a set of preludes and fugues in all twenty-four major and minor keys--had a specifically didactic purpose, the bravura character of BWV 894 suggests that it was intended largely to showcase Bach’s digital legerdemain. The lengthy and extremely elaborate Prelude is replete with racing triplets and other virtuoso passagework. The melody flits back and forth between the two hands, punctuated by restatements of the emphatic motto heard at the very beginning. Midway through the movement, Bach inserts the first of several improvisatory-sounding cadenzas that interrupt the music’s unrelenting momentum. The last of these extended flourishes modulates incrementally from the subdominant (D minor) to the tonic (A minor), building harmonic and rhythmic tension in preparation for the exhilarating approach to the final A-major cadence. The Prelude’s characteristic triplet figurations carry over into the equally brilliant Fugue, giving the diptych a sense of rhythmic as well as tonal unity. The fugal subject is a sequence of rapid arpeggios and scales, from which Bach extracts a slower-moving fournote motto (first stated as A, G-sharp, A, E) that recurs throughout the movement as a kind of subordinate theme. Despite the marked resemblance between the work’s two movements, Bach avoids monotony by skillfully blending contrapuntal and chordal textures, scalar and arpeggiated motion. Years later, he recycled elements of BWV 894— including the opening theme of the Prelude and the subject of the Fugue—in the first and last movements of his Concerto in A Minor for Flute, Violin, and Harpsichord, BWV 1044.