COMMENTS
by Richard E. Rodda
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born March 21, 1685; Eisenach, Germany
Died July 28, 1750; Leipzig, Germany
Partita No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 826
COMPOSED around 1730
Much of Bach’s early activity after arriving in Leipzig in 1723 to direct the music at the city’s churches was carried out under the shadow of the memory of his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, a respected musician and scholar who had published masterly translations of Greek and Hebrew, practiced as a lawyer in the city, and won wide fame for his keyboard music. In 1726, probably the earliest date allowed by the enormous demands of his official position for new sacred vocal music, Bach began a series of keyboard suites that were apparently intended to compete with those of Kuhnau. In addition to helping establish his reputation in Leipzig, these pieces would also provide useful teaching material for the private students he was beginning to draw from among the university’s scholars, who were less hampered by bureaucratic exigencies than their superiors in recognizing Bach’s genius. (Several of his secular cantatas were written for commissions from the university
students.) The Partita no. 1 in B-flat major, BWV 825, issued in 1726, was the first of his compositions to be published, except for two cantatas issued during his short tenure in Mühlhausen many years before (1707–08). Bach funded the venture himself, and he even engraved the plates (to save money) with the help of his teenage son Carl Philip Emanuel, who was then learning that exacting craft. Bach published an additional partita every year or so until 1731 when he gathered together the six works and issued them collectively in a volume titled Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice), a term he borrowed from the name of Kuhnau’s keyboard suites published in 1689 and 1692. The partitas of what became part 1 of the ClavierÜbung were well received. Bach continued his series of Clavier-Übung with three further volumes of vastly different nature: part 2 (1735) contains the Italian Concerto, the ultimate keyboard realization of that quintessential baroque orchestral form, and the Overture in the French Manner; part 3 (1739), for organ, the Catechism Chorale Preludes, several short canonic pieces, and the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue; and part 4 (1742), the incomparable Goldberg Variations.
above: Johann Sebastian Bach, holding a copy of the six-part canon, BWV 1076. Portrait in oil by Elias Gottlob Haussmann (1695–1774), 1748. Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, Germany
stage that year (he did not play in public again until 1848), he remained active as a teacher and composer, and that summer, he created four major works: Impromptu in G-flat major (op. 51), Ballade in F minor (op. 52), Polonaise in A-flat major (op. 53), and Scherzo no. 4 in E major (op. 54).
Though Beethoven perfected the scherzo as a constituent element of multimovement instrumental compositions, it was Chopin who elevated the form to an independent concert genre. The Scherzo no. 4 derives its overall three-part form (A–B–A) and its rapid triple meter from the Beethovenian
model but invests the medium with a sensitivity and range of expression that are unique to Chopin. The Scherzo in E major, the most extended but also the most halcyon of Chopin’s four examples of the form, is, according to Herbert Weinstock, “happiness made manifest. There is a sense in which the sunny motion of the E major scherzo is aimless—by which I do not mean that it is formless, but that it seems spontaneous and lacks portentousness. . . . It is rich in invention, pleasant to play, and generous with intensely interesting structural and harmonic ideas.”
this page: George Sand and friends at Nohant, a fan painted by Auguste Charpentier depicting (from left) painter Luigi Calamatta as a snake; writer Maurice Sand as Zephyrus; scientist and mathematician François Arago as a merman; actor Pierre-François Bocage as a faun; Franz Liszt on his knees before Sand; Eugène Delacroix as a shepherd; and Chopin, as a bird, perched on Sand’s hand (others unidentified). Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France. Photo by De Agostini/Getty Images | opposite page: Dmitri Shostakovich, portrait, 1942
from performing much music other than his own. The composer’s student Samari Savshinsky described him as “an outstanding artist and performer. The crystalline clarity and precision of thought, the almost ascetic absence of embellishment, the precise rhythm, technical perfection, and very personal timbre he produced at the piano made all Shostakovich’s piano playing individual in the highest degree.”
In 1950 Shostakovich was in Leipzig to attend the events marking the bicentenary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach and to serve as a judge for a piano competition for which The WellTempered Clavier was the required work. The WTC impressed Shostakovich deeply, not just with its peerless technical and expressive qualities but also as a way out of the creative impasse he had entered following his censure by the Soviet bureaucracy in 1948, when he determined that he would go along with the Party prerogative for pap and withhold all of his substantial works until the time they would be given a fair hearing— when Joseph Stalin was dead. A large systematic cycle of abstract preludes and fugues modeled on Bach’s WTC, he decided, would allow him to create a work of significance without testing the deep and uncertain expressive waters of symphony, quartet, sonata, or song. The twenty-four preludes and fugues were composed between October 1950 and March 1951; they are the only important works that he made public between 1948 and 1953. Tatiana Nikolayeva, winner of the Leipzig competition Shostakovich helped judge, gave the premiere on
December 23, 1952, in the Small Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic.
The Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major is a boisterous waltz with a delicate, musicbox central episode. The fugue, fiery and relentless, is aggressively unstable in meter and spikily chromatic in tonality.
One of the most potent forces in Shostakovich’s music is its expressive ambiguity, and it is in such a manner that he closed his two-hour cycle of prelude and fugues. The Prelude no. 24 in D minor begins somberly but soon turns defiant with chains of pealing bell tones. The music quiets and pauses on deep octaves before intoning a simple, hymnlike theme that previews the subject of the fugue. The opening phrases are heard again, and then the hymn tune recurs in the bass before the prelude comes to a pensive, unsettled close. The fugue, based on the prelude’s hymn tune initiated in the bass, is at first meditative in its diatonic purity but comes to suggest remembered pain as chromatic notes insinuate themselves into the flow. The music finds invigoration in a new theme and quicker rhythms and gathers sufficient strength to again confront the hymn tune, but the hard-won victory that the fugue tries to attain with its ringing final measures is tempered by the recall of the earlier, pain-bearing chromaticisms. The cycle ends suspended between triumph and tragedy.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
