Ricercar in six parts from the “Musical Offering”

The “Musical Offering” is one of the three monumental creations, alongside the “Goldberg” Variations and the “Art of Fugue,” written in the last few years of Bach’s career. They are all, in a sense, variations on a theme. Only one of them is actually in variation form but each of the other two is based on one just one idea – the “Art of Fugue” on a subject by Bach himself, the “Musical Offering” on a melody supplied by no less a personage than Frederick the Great of Prussia. Persuaded no doubt by the composer’s son, Carl Philip Emmanuel, who was a court musician there, the King invited Johann Sebastian to Potsdam in 1747. As a musician himself, he was eager to test Bach’s famed skill in improvisation and presented him with a theme which, in its length and its chromatic profile, does not lend itself at all easily to the fugal treatment he would have been expected to apply to it.

It is thought possible that the Ricercar in three parts, the piece that opens the work as it was eventually published and dedicated to His Majesty, was improvised on the spot on one of Frederick’s new Silbermann pianos. The rest of it -– including another Ricercar, six canons, and a Trio sonata in four movements – was written within a few weeks of Bach’s return to Leipzig. It seems unlikely, on the other hand, that this second Ricercar (or fugue) was intended to be performed at the keyboard since it is written on six staves, one for each voice in the texture. Certainly, however, it is one of the most majestic works of its kind not least, as Bach himself observed, because of the regal quality of the theme. Frederick’s melody is actually heard twelve times, six times in the long opening exposition and then in alternation with a series of ingeniously varied episodes. Its last and most splendid entry is in the bass in the closing bars.