Sonata BWV 1015 — Johann Sebastian Bach | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

Johann Sebastian Bach was most celebrated in his day not as a composer – his towering genius in this respect would not be recognised until a hundred years after his death – but as a virtuoso of the organ. Throughout his professional life, however, he also played the violin, an instrument first taught him by his father. In fact he was a respected violinist “in his youth and,” as his son Carl Phillip Emanuel recalled, “well into his old age.” His earliest professional appointment was as a violinist at the court of Duke Johann Ernest of Saxe-Weimar and among the effects left on his death, including no fewer than ten string instruments, was a valuable Steiner violin. He might not have been as accomplished on the violin as he was on keyboard instruments but, at the very least, he knew the instrument well enough to score highly effective violin parts in his concertos, sonatas and numerous other works.

The crucial question, however, is whether he was violinist enought to cope with the awkward polyphonic textures, in the fugal movements in particular, of the six solo sonatas and partitas that he finalised in fair copy in Cöthen in 1720. And, if not, did he know anyone who was? Opinions range from unqualified assertions that, of course, Bach could play them to the theory that they were written for principal violinist at Cöthen, Josephus Spiess, and to the interesting idea that they are purely speculative responses to a supreme technical challenge. Bearing in mind the barely realistic twelve-minute Chaconne of the Partita in D minor, which is featured at the end of this programme, the last notion certainly has its attractions. On the other hand, the dynamic markings intended to create echo effects in these works – few though they are – surely confirm that they were meant to be heard and not just seen.

Sonata No.2 in A minor for solo violin BWV 1003

Grave

Fuga

Andante

Allegro

An interesting sidelight on the controversy about which violinist, if any, the solo sonatas and partitas were intended for comes from one of the composer’s students, who remembered that Bach frequently played them on the clavichord. Indeed, there is a keyboard arrangement, the Sonata in D minor BWV 964, of today’s Violin Sonata in A minor. The structure of the opening Grave is actually more effective in the keyboard version because the all-important bass line – which in the original is formed only with difficulty by the bottom notes of double-stopped or spread chords and which is less coherent to the ear than the melodic proliferation above it – is so much more clearly defined.

The fact that Bach found so little to add to the Fuga in the keyboard arrangement, apart from making explicit what is necessarily implicit in the violin version, indicates what a brilliant achievement it is in the original. While it is not as long as the Fuga of the Sonata No.3 in C major, its nine-note theme is scarcely under-developed either in its original shape or in the inversion introduced after the second non-fugal episode.

Only a little decorative embellishment is added in the keyboard version to the Andante, which needs nothing to enhance the tension sustained between its freely expressive melodic line and the rigorous rhythmic consistency of its ostinato accompaniment. Derived as it is from the Italian concerto tradition, the virtuoso figuration of the Allegro last movement – which begins with one of the rare examples of echo cololuring – is far more effective in the violin version than in the comparatively unambitious keyboard arrangement.

Sonata No.3 in E major for violin and harpsichord BWV 1016

Adagio

Allegro

Adagio ma non tanto

Allegro

The six sonatas for violin and harpsichord, which were probably also written at Cöthen, present the violinist with far fewer problems. Examples of double-stopping here are rare – and when they occur they are more colouristic than harmonic in intention – while there is no need to apply the bow to two or more contrapuntal voices at once. Carl Philipp Emmanuel, considered them “among the best compositions of my dear departed father,” in spite of what must have seemed to him their old-fashioned construction. His description of them as “trio sonatas” does not imply, incidentally, that he thought that three instruments were involved. It is a reflection of the composer’s textural thinking in scores where the violin, the right hand of the keyboard and the left hand each has a distinct role to play.

As it happens, the opening Adagio of Sonata No.3 in E major is not so much an example of a “trio” scoring as a violin solo. The keyboard right hand is by no means inactive but it is obsessively concerned with one short motif and has nothing to do with the shapely rising theme introduced by the violin in the opening bars and then developed in a wealth of melodic variation and flexibly bowed decorative detail. The following Allegro, on the other hand, is a clearly defined three-part conception, a fugue based on what sounds like the beginning of a`popular tune extended into an eight-bar subject. Although the left hand gets to play that subject only once in the opening section, and although it never touches on the contrasting theme exchanged between the violin and the right hand in the central episode, it does have the function of making the first reference back to the fugue subject in the transition to the closing section.

The Adagio ma non tanto in C sharp minor, another trio-sonata conception, is founded on a bass line which, rather like a chaconne theme, retains its regular crotchet rhythm and its distinctive melodic shape throughout. Above it, the keyboard right hand and the violin alternate in providing a chordal accompaniment as the expressive melodic line passes between them and through a variety of harmonic situations. The closing Allegro is a witty inspiration. Beginning apparently as a fugue based on a theme in brisk semiquavers, it includes an extended episode where the violin introduces a new idea in quaver triplets which only after repeated and urgent reminders of the semiquaver theme makes way for a resumption of the fugue and a brilliant coda.

Sonata No.2 in A major for violin and harpsichord BWV 1015

Dolce

Allegro

Andante

Presto

There is a particularly attractive example of “trio” scoring at the beginning of the first movement of the Sonata No.2 in A major: the violin introduces the graceful main theme which is then taken up in canon by the harpsichordist’s right and left hands in turn. Although the process is repeated, the theme now passing from the harpsichordist’s right hand to the violin and then the left hand, the canonic texture does not last beyond the first half of the movement. The second half is concerned more, on the left hand’s insistence, with one short phrase from the opening theme and at the same time with seductively harmonised duets for violin and right hand.

The Allegro presents a three-part fugue in the outer sections and a resourcefully scored middle section which from time to time abandons counterpoint for instrumental virtuosity and brilliant colouring, including a passage of echo effects. As an admirer of his father’s slow movements in these works, Carl Philipp Emmanuel must have been particularly fond of the Andante. A melodious dialogue in F sharp minor between for violin and right hand is sustained over an accompaniment of staccato semiquavers in the left, the dry articulation of which so effectively offsets the expressive phrasing above it. The concluding Presto is another fugue in three parts. In this case, however, the left hand has less of the melodic interest, particularly after the halfway point, where the right hand introduces a new theme which immediately passes to the violin but which the left hand manages to get hold of only in the closing bars.

Chaconne in D minor for solo violin

from Partita No.2 in D minor BWV 1004

No one understood Bach’s Chaconne in D minor better than Johannes Brahms. Although he described it to Clara Schumann as “incomprehensible” as well as “wonderful,” he was aware that its greatness derives essentially from its limitations: “On a single staff, on a small instrument the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings.” That is why when he transcribed it for piano in 1877 rather than lavishing the whole range of keyboard resources on it, as Busoni was to do twenty years later, he scored it for left hand only. Playing it that way, he said, made him “feel like a violinist!”

Exactly how a real violinist feels when faced by much the longest and most challenging of all Bach’s pieces for a solo string instrument, with or without the four preceding movements of the Partita in D minor, only he or she could say. For the listener, however, it is an inexhaustible source of fascination, not least because there are so many different ways of listening to it on so many different levels. Few will hear it, in detail, for what it fundamentally is: a series of 64 four-bar variations on a four-chord harmonic progression. The composer probably did not intend that it should be heard that way, since he never presents the progression in its basic form. Although its is expressed in an elaborated melodic form as the bass line of the sarabande theme introduced in the first four bars and more or less clearly repeated in that form in the first eight variations, from that point onwards the bass line is more often disguised than immediately recognisable.

What Bach surely did intend, however, is that the ear should perceive at least the overall symmetry of the piece, which is divided into two equal halves with the opening four-bar sarabande theme repeated in its original form after the first thirty variations and again at the end. The structure could, on the other hand, be heard as a ternary pattern: after the return of the sarabande theme in the middle of the piece, the key changes to D major and remains in that key long enough to form a distinct and substantial middle section before the return to D minor.

As for the variation techniques Bach uses, did he really intend us to register all his inversions, retrogrades, retrograde inversions, diminutions and augmentations? Whatever one’s approach to it, however – as a monumental intellectual exercise at one extreme, a spontaneous improvisation at the other extreme, or as something more realistically in between – the Chaconne in D minor remains an indisputable masterpiece and a supreme example of its kind.