Angela Hewitt: Program Notes

ANGELA HEWITT October 21, 2018 Notes on the Program

By Harry Haskell JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Born in Eisenach, March 31, 1685 Died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750 THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER, BOOK II, BWV 870-893 Composed between 1739 and 1742; 120 minutes Johann Sebastian Bach was the greatest of a large family of German musicians spanning several generations. He spent most of his life as a hard-working church musician, diligently turning out a prodigious quantity of organ music, cantatas, passions, motets, and other sacred works to meet the demands of the Lutheran liturgy. But he was also a celebrated virtuoso on the organ and harpsichord, as well as a better-than-average violinist and violist. His secular instrumental music ranges from unaccompanied works for keyboard and other instruments to large-scale orchestral suites and concertos.

Much of this repertoire was featured on the public concerts he organized at a popular coffeehouse in Leipzig in his capacity as director of the local collegium musicum in the 1730s and 1740s.

Angela Hewitt’s “Bach Odyssey” offers concertgoers an opportunity to survey the vast and diverse corpus of the composer’s solo keyboard works, a genre to which he devoted much of his creative energy throughout his long career. The three programs that constitute the third installment of Hewitt’s four-year cycle—which continues on May 11 and 14, 2019—range from early works, composed when Bach was an ambitious journeyman organist at churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, to the first fruits of his maturity as a court musician in Weimar and Cöthen, to the magisterial preludes and fugues that comprise Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, which Bach probably introduced on his weekly concerts at Zimmermann’s coffeehouse.

Bach’s keyboard playing, like his compositions, reflected a synthesis of the “learned” and heavily contrapuntal German idiom, the melodious, extraverted Italian style, and the French penchant for florid, speech-like arioso. He studied and admired the works of François Couperin and his fellow claveciniste composers, whose harpsichord music demanded exceptional lightness and evenness of touch to achieve its characteristic blend of delicacy and brilliance. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, vividly described the economy of his keyboard technique: “Bach is said to have played with so easy and small a motion of the fingers that it was hardly perceptible. Only the first joints of the fingers were in motion; the hand retained even in the most difficult passages its rounded form; the fingers rose very little from the keys, hardly more than in a trill, and when one was employed, the other remained quietly in its position.”

One of Bach’s secrets was an innovative system of fingering that placed the hitherto subordinate thumbs on a par with the other digits as “principal fingers.” This enabled him not only to range with ease across the full spectrum of keys, some of which had traditionally been held to lie awkwardly under the fingers, but also to invest the inner lines of his music with greater complexity and textural interest. In sum, Forkel tells us, Bach “at length acquired such a high degree of facility and, we may almost say, unlimited power over his instrument in all the keys that difficulties almost ceased to exist for him.” In emphasizing Bach’s

extraordinary ability to navigate all 24 keys corresponding to the notes of the chromatic scale, Forkel was undoubtedly thinking of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier dates from 1722, when Bach was serving as director of music to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The young composer felt fortunate to be in the employ of “a gracious prince who both loved and knew music.” It was during his six happy years in Cöthen that Bach wrote much of his most beloved instrumental music, including the six Brandenburg Concertos, the solo suites and sonatas for unaccompanied violin and cello, and the six sonatas for violin and keyboard. Some two decades later, as the venerable cantor of St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, he revised the first part of the Well-Tempered Clavier and composed another two dozen preludes and fugues as a sequel. Collectively known as “the 48,” the two volumes have long been regarded both as the acme of the contrapuntist’s art and as a supreme test of a keyboard player’s ability.

In pairing improvisatory, free-form preludes or fantasias with strictly contrapuntal fugues in the same keys, Bach was drawing on a tradition that had already put down roots in Germany and elsewhere. At the same time, he was plowing new ground, as the title of the Well-Tempered Clavier would have signaled to his contemporaries. When musicians speak of “temperament,” they are referring not to a person’s cast of mind, but to a system of instrumental tuning. It takes a fine ear to distinguish between an interval that is acoustically pure and one that has been adjusted, or “tempered,” in order to make a more pleasing sound in a particular key or keys. Bach possessed an exceptionally acute ear, and in a way, he was showing it off when he wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier.

In Bach’s time, there was no standard system of tuning instruments, as there is today. Composers and performers used a variety of temperaments, depending on the nature of the instruments and the degree of “out-of-tuneness” they were prepared to accept. In certain temperaments, for example, fifths sound pure and sweet, while thirds sound excruciatingly harsh. In so-called equal temperament, every interval of the scale, except the octave, is either slightly sharp or slightly flat. This system came into general use in the 19th century because it gave composers the flexibility to write in any key without fearing that one would sound significantly more out of tune or dissonant than another. Everything we know about Bach suggests that he was no purist in these matters. As a practical musician, he used the term well-tempered to embrace any system of tuning that produced reasonably consonant sounds in all 24 keys.

Playfulness and Discipline The word fugue derives from the Latin word for “chase,” and that’s precisely what the independent voices in a typical Bach fugue do to one another. One starts the ball rolling by stating the fugal “subject,” or theme, whereupon the other voices take it up in turn and run with it. Part of the fun, for the attentive listener, lies in spotting the theme—and its various permutations—as it bobs up and down in the fastflowing contrapuntal current. According to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, his father took an almost childish delight in a well-made fugue: “When he listened to a rich and many-voiced fugue, he could soon say, after the first entries of the subjects, what contrapuntal devices it would be possible to apply, and which of them the composer by rights ought to apply, and on such occasions, when I was standing next to him, and he had voiced his surmises to me, he would joyfully nudge me when his expectations were fulfilled.”

That spirit of playfulness is never far from the surface in Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier. It’s channeled, though, by the discipline of Bach’s formidable contrapuntal technique as he methodically

works his way up through the keys, half-step by half-step, from C major to B minor. No two of the 24 preludes are alike; each posits a fresh compositional “problem” and offers a unique solution. The same is true of the three- and four-voice fugues. Although the companion pieces are for the most part thematically unrelated, Bach ties them together in less conspicuous ways. In the F-sharp-minor pair, for instance, the lyrical, warmly meditative Prelude revolves around a number of small melodic and rhythmic motives, such as the distinctive downward leap of a fourth that introduces each appearance of the principal theme. The same interval figures prominently in the Fugue—this time as a rising fourth—in the first of three themes that Bach seamlessly weaves together in a consummate demonstration of contrapuntal skill.

In similar fashion, the characteristic broken figurations of the vivacious G-Major Prelude are echoed in the tautly sprung arpeggios and cascading passagework of the Fugue. In such a compact piece Bach has room to explore only a single subject, but he milks it for all it’s worth and brings the Fugue to a close with a majestic flourish. In the somber, two-voice Prelude in A Minor, on the other hand, Bach explores the contrast between a smoothly flowing chromatic line (heard at the outset in the bass) and chains of sixteenth notes comprised of widely separated half-steps. Pervasive chromaticism and syncopation give the music an aura of mystery that carries over into the three-voice Fugue. Here Bach combines another angular theme with a countersubject whose nimble scalar runs recall a similar motif in the Prelude. One more example will suffice to illustrate the infinite variety of Bach’s invention: the brisk up-and-down scales that open the B-Major Prelude return throughout the piece as a leitmotif, embedded in a brightly colored tapestry of figurations. The Fugue’s ponderous theme—which, like that of the Prelude, spans an octave—surges from the bass through each of the other three voices in turn.

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