Pamela Frank - Program Notes

Notes on the Program

By Aaron Grad Six Sonatas for Violin and Keyboard, BWV 1014-19 [c. 1720-23] JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig, Germany When Bach worked as a church organist in Weimar from 1708 to 1717, he had few opportunities to write or perform secular music with ensembles, even as his library overflowed with inspiration from abroad. The innovative sonatas and concertos being produced by Italian composers were just starting to arrive in trading hubs like Amsterdam and Utrecht, and the well-traveled members of Weimar’s royal court eagerly stocked up on the latest published scores and bootleg copies to expand their court musicians’ repertoire. Those foreign sources had an immediate impact on Bach’s style, as seen in the harpsichord transcriptions he made in Weimar of Italian concertos.

Bach took a new job in 1717 as the music director for a young prince in Cöthen, and for the next six years his primary duty was to provide the court’s secular entertainment. With the support of a music-loving patron, and with top-notch professional musicians at his disposal, Bach put his Italian influences to use and produced many of his surviving sonatas and concertos, along with many more works that have disappeared. Most likely he wrote his six sonatas for keyboard and violin toward the end of his tenure in Cöthen, before he accepted a prestigious new post in 1723 that brought him to Leipzig to manage the city’s church music and train its young choristers.

In some respects, Bach’s violin sonatas were textbook examples of the prevailing Italian style known as the sonata da chiesa or “church sonata,” as mastered in Rome by Corelli.

Such works were not actually meant for religious use; the label came from the fact that it was acceptable to play them in churches because they did not include dance music. With the exception of the sixth sonata (which was reconfigured several times), Bach’s scores all followed Corelli’s standard pattern of four abstract movements, alternating between slow and fast tempos.

Where Bach broke new ground was in his distribution of the musical lines. Earlier violin sonatas with accompaniment used two musical staves: one for the violin part, and the other for the open-ended bass line known as basso continuo, which could be shared by harpsichord, viola da gamba, and any other number of low instruments. There was no specific duty for the keyboard player’s right hand in such a sonata, other than to improvise and fill in the harmonies. When composers did add a second treble line (often a second violin), such works were known as trio sonatas, and they required at least three players. Bach departed from that norm by writing independent parts for both the right and left hands of the keyboard player, in addition to the violin part—in essence constructing a trio sonata for two performers.

We take for granted now that the keyboard player in an accompanied sonata will share the melodic duties. In fact, there was even a period later in the eighteenth century when such sonatas tilted heavily toward the keyboard part, with the violin treated as an optional ornament. But Bach was ahead of his time in treating the harpsichord as a melodic instrument, and his approach would not have worked if not for recent advances that gave the instrument a louder and more penetrating tone. We can only imagine how delighted he would have been to play this music on a modern piano, with its wide dynamic range and long sustain!

The Adagio that begins the Sonata No. 1 in B Minor is a stunning showcase of Bach’s new approach to keyboard writing. Gliding over an austere bass line in the left hand, the right hand actually plays two parts simultaneously, initially in close harmony, and later in counterpoint. The violin only arrives in the fifth measure, and its elongated tones support the continuing keyboard melody without overpowering it. Bookending the graceful Andante that again introduces the violin with one long note, the sonata’s two Allegro movements exemplify the fast fugal writing of the sonata da chiesa style.

There is no tempo heading for the first movement of the Sonata No. 2 in A Major, but both musicians are instructed to play dolce, or sweetly. This time the violin introduces the theme, and the keyboard follows in the manner of a canon: first the right hand at the same pitch, and then a measure later the left, placed an octave lower. In the fast fugue that follows, the voices enter in the same order, driving toward virtuosic streams of sixteenthnotes that fill all three parts in idiomatic ways. The third movement returns to the device of a unison canon between the violin and right hand, with the left hand supplying an accompaniment that is to be played “always staccato.” The sonata closes with another three-voice fugue in a jubilant Presto tempo, including a funny bit in the second half when the violin barges in right after the keyboard brings back the fugue subject, as if to protest losing its place at the head of the line.

For the Adagio that begins the Sonata No. 3 in E Major, the violin uncoils a rhapsodic melodic line over an extended pedal tone and shifting chords, a sound grounded in Bach’s long history of organ improvisations. After a cheery fugue in the first Allegro, the contrast between static layers and dynamic motion returns in another intense slow movement. Pulsing chords provide the constancy this time, surrounded by flowing triplet melodies and the persistent quarter-notes of the bass line. The virtuosic patterns in the fast finale underscore Bach’s enduring love of Vivaldi and the Italian concertos where such violin pyrotechnics were first conceived.

The Sonata No. 4 in C Minor begins with the slow, pastoral lilt of the siciliano, making it the only movement in the whole cycle where Bach explicitly identified a dance style.

After a vigorous fugue with structural details borrowed from concerto practice, the Adagio relaxes the mood by moving to the relative major key of E-flat for a noble violin melody that glides over the subtle rhythmic friction of a triplet accompaniment in the keyboard’s right hand. A hanging harmony at the end links back to C minor for a brusque concluding fugue.

Extant manuscripts show no tempo marking for the imposing first movement of the Sonata No. 5 in F Minor, but it is usually interpreted as an Adagio or an even slower Largo. While the two hands of the keyboard part elaborate a four-voice fugue, the violin waits patiently to intone long, spacious phrases separated by ample pauses, until an unresolved cadence surges directly into a fast fugue propelled by racing sixteenth-notes.

The Adagio third movement offers a window into Bach’s ongoing process of revising his works: Both surviving versions assign pulsing double-stops to the violin, but the later version increased the kinetic energy by doubling the speed of the keyboard figurations, squeezing in four notes for each violin pulse. Within the dancing flow of the Vivace finale, a mischievous fugue subject cuts against the rhythmic and tonal expectations by making a staggered climb through a series of foreign tones.

The Sonata No. 6 in G Major has an unusual five-movement shape, beginning with a fast movement that, if orchestrated, would have sounded right at home in the violin concertos Bach was writing in the same period. A brief Largo over a walking bass follows, with the right hand initially following the violin in a canon. Bach enriched the keyboard textures in this movement when he revised this sonata, and he tried several different configurations for the remaining movements, finally landing on a virtuosic third movement for solo keyboard. An austere Adagio in B minor provides a harmonic conduit back to G major for the rollicking finale, set in a triplet pulse reminiscent of the gigue style that often capped Bach’s dance suites. Š 2019 Aaron Grad.