Partita No.2 in C minor BWV 826 — Johann Sebastian Bach | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

Partita No.2 in C minor BWV 826

Sinfonia: grave adagio – andante – [allegro]

Allemande

Courante

Sarabande

Rondeaux

Capriccio

Although the six Partitas were the first of Bach’s keyboard suites to be published – they were issued on a yearly basis between 1726 and 1731 and then collected together as Part I of the Clavierübung – they actually represent the culmination of his work in this form. Some are less ambitious than others, it is true. No.1 in B flat major and No.3 in A minor are comparatively short and comparatively light. But there is nothing in the earlier English Suites or French Suites to equal the stature of Partitas No.4 in D major and No.6 in E minor, both of which are comparable to the late sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert in their structural breadth and sustained thought in keyboard terms.

The spectacular, boldly dissonant opening of Partita No.2 in C minor is no less dramatic than that of No.4 in D major and seems to be designed as an introduction to a similarly ambitious structure. It is a work that defies expectations, however, and not only in that respect. Instead of leading straight into a fugue in the manner of the French overture, the short but imposing Grave is followed by a slender two-part Andante, its decorative melodic line poised over a walking bass. It is only after a short cadenza that (although no tempo change is actually marked in the score at this point) a two-part fugue sets off in a brisk triple time.

Expectations are met at least in that, as in the other partitas, the second, third and fourth movements are, respectively, an Allemande, a Courante and a Sarabande. But, coming between two two-part dannces flowing in smoothly articulated semiquavers, the French-style Courante is a surprisingly truculent inspiration in a rhythmically complex three-part texture. The Rondeaux, the only movement of its kind in the six partitas, is a witty little piece, again in two parts, based on a theme of leaping sevenths. Whereas the five other partitas end with a Gigue, this one ends with a Capriccio – so called perhaps because of the teasing tenths in a main theme which turns out to be the subject of a fairly strict but always entertaining three-part fugue.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sonata in D major Op.28 (“Pastoral”)

Allegro

Andante

Scherzo: allegro vivace

Rondo: allegro ma non troppo

The autograph manuscript bears the inscription “Gran Sonata, Op.28, 1801, da L.van Beethoven” and that is more or less how it was published in 1802. The “Pastoral” title is almost as old as the work itself, however, since it appeared in an English edition as early as 1805 – more than thirty years before the Hamburg publisher Cranz, who is usually given the credit for it, issued Op.28 as “Sonata Pastorale” (and Op.57 as “Sonata Appassionata”). Beethoven was aware of the English edition and apparently didn’t object to it. Certainly, spurious though it is, the title is by no means inapt: the first movement opens with a quietly happy melody over a rustic drone bass and it ends in much the same way. So, though in a rather more animated way, does the Rondo finale.

“Pastoral” would be misleading, however, if it was taken to imply that the work is inspired by the same kind of mood as that which prevails in the authentically titled “Pastoral” Symphony of 1808. For one thing, the Sonata in D major is harmonically more eventful, not least in the intriguingly round-about way taken through the second subject of the first movement. For another thing, it is actually quite grim in places. The often minor-key development of the same movement, clinging tenaciously to the now not so serene opening theme, is an early example of that. There is something very serious also about the D minor outer sections of the Andante – a piece the composer often played to himself, incidentally – where an air of resignation is carried in the right hand over the staccato bass in the left. The brighter mood introduced by the D major middle section (the material of which Beethoven was to use again in the slow movement of the Second Symphony just a few months later) is negated by its melancholy transformation in the final bars.

If the brief waltz-like Scherzo in D major is too brusque and too obsessive to qualify as a country dance, the last movement begins in unmistakably pastoral mode with a shepherd’s pipe melody played over a gentle ostinato figure in the bass. But here too there is an intense and increasingly dramatic development. Although the care-free atmosphere is re-established after only a short pause, it is finally swept aside by the impetuously più allegro coda.

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

Fantasiestücke Op.12

Des Abends (In the evening)

Aufschwung (Soaring)

Warum? (Why?)

Grillen (Whims)

In der Nacht (In the Night)

Fabel (Fable)

Traumes–Wirren (Dream Visions)

Ende vom Lied (End of the Song)

For Schumann “Fantasie” – which appears in as many as ten of his titles between 1837 and 1853 – was a term with significant reverberations. It reminded him, for example, of the improvisatory pieces of one of his musical heroes, J.S. Bach, and it was associated too with the fanciful fictions of one of his favourite writers, E.T.A. Hoffmann. While it is unlikely that the Fantasiestücke Op.12 were directly inspired by Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, the idea of compiling a suite of short, sharply contrasted “Fantasie” pieces – as distinct from the large–scale Fantasie in C major that he had begun in 1836 and had still not finished a year later – might well have derived from that erratic collection.

Written in 1837, the Fantasiestücke Op.12 were dedicated on their publication in 1838 to Anna Robena Laidlaw, a gifted and attractive British pianist who had visited Leipzig in 1837 and with whom, it has been suggested, Schumann might have found some consolation for his then strictly enforced separation from Clara Wieck. Whatever the nature of his relationship with Ms Laidlaw, the thematic identity of the first piece in the collection, Des Abends, gives a clear indication that Clara was still very much on the composer’s mind: the stepwise descending line delicately traced by the right hand in the opening bars is one of many variants of a melodic message Robert and Clara both understood. Its introduction here is all the more poignant for the insecurity of its apparently triple-time rhythms in a basically duple–time metre and its two modulations from D flat major to an unlikely E major.

In accordance with the “Eusebius” and “Florestan” duality consciously cultivated by Schumann in both his critical writings and his music at this time, Aufschwung is as impulsive as Des Abends is dreamy. Although the contrast is compounded by the strict rondo form applied to the second piece, Schumann retains a link between them by including comparatively lyrical episodes in D flat and B flat major within an urgent F minor context. There is a similar contrast between the tender Warum? in D flat major – a harmonically inspired reminder that Chopin had made a memorable visit to Leipzig in 1836 – and the intermittently gruff but mainly good–humoured Grillen in the same key.

In der Nacht is a miniature tone poem said to be based on the story of Hero and Leander. O it could be Clara and Robert separated by the Hellespont of her father’s implacable hostility to any relationship between them. Certainly, there is a palpable sense of a struggle against the elements in the F minor outer sections which surge round and occasionally intrude on the vulnerably expressive middle section in F major. The prominent presence of the stepwise descending motif is a sure indication of the identity of the unhappy protagonists.

In fact, In der Nacht – the fifth movement of what was originally to have been a nine–movement construction – is so central to Schumann’s thinking that it definitively shifts the tonality from D flat to F. After Fabel, which alternates poetic reflection with animated activity in C major, Traumes–Wirren offers innocently virtuoso outer sections in F major round a strategically placed D flat major middle section, neatly reversing the harmonic relationship prevalent in the first half of the work. Ende vom Lied celebrates the new situation with a sturdy march in F major – but only to be beset by last–minute doubts which are no more than tentatively resolved in a hesitant and brooding coda.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

Ballade No.4 in F minor Op.52

The one form which Chopin can be said to have invented is the ballade. It was “inspired,” he told Robert Schumann, “by the poems of Mickiewicz, ” the Polish nationalist poet in exile at the time and a member of the composer’s circle in Paris. Chopin surely did not mean, however, to suggest that his ballades were directly based on the stories in Mickiewicz’s Ballady i romanse. It is not entirely impossible but the likelihood is that what he owed to them was a useful title, the general idea of a poetic narrative and, above all, a solution to the problem endemic to the romantic composer: where to find the dramatic or epic form which could be sustained by lyrical material.

By the time he came to write the fourth in the series of Ballades, in 1842, Chopin’s mastery in integrating melody and form was complete. Although the ballade conventions – the 6/8 metre, the narrative style, the bardic prelude – are retained, the F minor work is even more liberated in form than its predecessor in A flat major and is on a larger scale. One of Chopin’s greatest works, it is a structural masterpiece and, like all the best examples of story-telling, never predictable.

The main theme – introduced after the short narrative prelude with its characteristically recitative-like repeated notes – sounds like a fragile stray from one of the nocturnes. Although it at first gives no hint of the epic trials it is about to withstand, it proves in a spontaneously motivated succession of variations to be an adaptable melody, capable of carrying a weight of passionate expression, before it is relieved by the entry of a happier, less complicated theme in B flat major. The burden of the main climax, after a development featuring the bardic narrator as well as the two thematic protagonists, is borne by this more robust second subject, now in D flat major. But the brilliant coda, beginning after the slow and quiet chords which bring the music temporarily to rest on C major, is yet another transformation of the mercurial main theme.

The Fourth Ballade is dedicated to Baronne Charlotte de Rothschild who, as a fervent admirer of Chopin’s music and one of his favourite pupils, was no doubt well able to appreciate a work that many of even the most sophisticated of her contemporaries regarded as incomprehensible.