Partita No. 3, Violin, E major, BWV 1006 (1720)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born 21 March 1685, Eisenach, Germany.
Died 28 July 1750, Leipzig, Germany.
Johann Sebastian Bach was known in his own time, and still is in ours, as a virtuoso keyboardist, on both the organ and the harpsichord. Often forgotten is that he was also a skilled player of stringed instruments–violin (his father’s principal instrument), viola, and possibly violoncello. In fact, one of his first positions (Weimar, 1703) was that of a violinist and in 1714 Bach, already Weimar court organist, was appointed concertmaster of the court ensemble, which entailed leading the rehearsals and performances as first violinist. According to Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, he played the violin “cleanly and penetratingly ... until the approach of old age.”
Therefore, it should not surprise us that, during his Cöthen period (1717-23), when he focused on composing cycles of secular works that explored exhaustively the possibilities of various genres and media–resulting in the 2- and 3-part Inventions, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the French Suites for keyboard, as well as the finishing of the Brandenburg Concertos–Bach undertook a monumental synthesis of Italian, French and German traditions using the spare medium of unaccompanied violin and violoncello, respectively. These are the six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied solo violin (BWV 1001-6) and the six suites for unaccompanied cello (BWV 1007-12), which Bach conceived of as paired sets of works.
The autograph manuscript of the violin works, dated 1720, is of incalculable value in determining Bach’s intentions, although the generally clearly marked slurs–often indicating less-than-obvious groupings of notes–are usually ignored by modern violinists; this is because their training and use of modern bows (more important for expression than the violin itself) tend to produce performances of long, relatively homogeneous melodic lines that do not render well the natural unevenness of up- and down-bow and subtle articulations indicated or implied (for example, by the character of individual dances) in Bach’s 18th-century musical language. The present performance offers a compromise approach eminently suited to our times: a baroque violin of 1692 (by the Milanese maker Carlo Giuseppe Testore ) in modern set-up–as virtually all the great violins of the baroque age are– is made to “speak” with a baroque bow. Such a bow, lighter, shorter, and less evenly balanced than the modern “Tourte” bow, lends itself effortlessly to the more highly differentiated expression that was characteristic of baroque string playing. Another characteristic was the performer’s right to ornament the composer’s musical text, here heard when sections are repeated.
The three solo violin Sonatas draw on the Italian tradition of the Italian church sonata (with its slow-fast-slow-fast sequence of movements), while the Partitas (or Partias, as Bach called them), are, despite the Italian title, more indebted to the French dance suite. However, these genres were never absolutely mutually exclusive, nor are they in Bach’s sonatas and partitas. Thus, the E Major Partita, BWV 1006 begins with a Preludio (note the Italian term) that is a brilliant moto perpetuo exuding Italian exuberance rather than French elegance. Bach seems to have been especially fond of this movement, for he not only arranged it for lute (BWV 1006a) but reworked it for full orchestra with solo organ obbligato to open the festive Cantatas 29 (1731) and BWV120a (1729?).
Posterity likewise has cottoned to the Preludio. In the later nineteenth century, for example, we hear of Brahms’ violinist-friend Joseph Joachim conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in a version for violin and orchestra, and even of a performance of 40 student violinists of the Berlin Conservatory playing together the solo violin version to the piano accompaniment for the piece written by Robert Schumann (1853). Moreover, the Preludio was one of the very first of the solo violin pieces by Bach to be recorded–by Sarasate around 1903.
Six of the seven dance movements show Bach’s familiarity with the characteristics of French social dance that dominated the courts and polite society of most of Europe, and especially Germany. (Bach himself likely studied dancing while finishing his schooling in Lüneburg (1700-03), and as a violinist likely played at court balls and the like in his pre-Leipzig days before 1723.) The French influence may even be noted in the absence of the allemande-courante-sarabande-gigue sequence found in many of Bach’s other dance suites, for the French were generally freer in their choice and ordering of dances than the Germans.
Nonetheless, the first dance here is a loure, often described by contemporary writers as a “slow gigue,” its 6/4 meter and majestic affect (aided by a characteristic dotted rhythm within measures of two big beats) contrasting with the energy of the gigue. Of interest is that in this piece, the main rhythmic stress falls rather consistently on the fourth beat of the measure (rather than the downbeat), as implied by multiple stops, ornaments, and other means of emphasis.
The title Gavotte en Rondeau tells us something about dance and something about abstract form. The Gavotte is a lively dance in cut-time that begins on the half-bar (often resulting in confusion in the hearer’s ear about where the downbeat precisely falls, although Bach does provide help with his use of multiple stops and longer note values, both of which add emphasis.) The Gavotte, like most French dances, is normally in binary form, i.e., in two sections, each of which is repeated, thus, aabb. Here, however, only the first section a, which functions as the rondeau, is repeated at the beginning, but it then returns four more times, each time following a couplet of contrasting music (that nonetheless remains in the tempo and spirit of the gavotte). The result is an overall form of aabacadaea.
The menuet was the most popular and long-lived of the French dances, surviving even into the 19th century. Here Bach provides a pair of them, each in the standard triple meter and binary form, although the b section of the first menuet incorporates a varied recapitulation of the a section. Since menuet dancing steps were in two-measure units (hence, six, not three beats of music), both menuets have an even number of measures; performers therefore stress the downbeat of the first of a pair of measures more than that of the second.
The bourée, like the gavotte, is a buoyant dance in two beats to the measure, but with the accent on the downbeat (after a short upbeat) rather than the half measure. At the conclusion of the b section of this bourée, there is, as in Menuet I, an allusion to the opening of the a section to round the form.
Whereas step-patterns for the categories of dance discussed thus far were published in France in the early eighteenth century, the “Gigue” of this Partita is not a French gigue, but rather an Italian giga, concerning which no choreographic information has been unearthed. Nonetheless, the flowing patterns of mainly sixteenth-notes in the context of a binary form in a lively 6/8 meter are typical for Bach’s gigas.
From the titles and character of the movements, then, the E major Partita brings together Italian and French elements in a single work. However, there is another, indigenous, tradition demanding notice: the German cultivation of unaccompanied violin music of a polyphonic character, aided by the use of multiple-stopping, i.e., of creating chord-like sonorities of up to four notes on a melody instrument. This is, of course, the technical aspect of the sonatas and partitas for solo violin that, to the detriment of proper musical characterization of the dances, has dominated attention ever since the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, Bach was by no means the first to introduce this violinistic idiom, although he took it, as he did everything, to a higher plateau than had been previously achieved, both musically and technically. His direct inspiration may have been the Dresden-based violinist Johann Paul Westhoff (1656-1705), who published a cycle of six suites for unaccompanied violin in 1696 and who was active at the Weimar court in 1703, when Bach was also there.
Bach’s real achievement in his unaccompanied violin music lies less in his use of showy multiple stops than in his ability to create out of monophony–a single, unaccompanied melodic line–the illusion of polyphony. In listening to this music, one can hear melody and accompaniment, call and response, implied bass lines and harmonic accompaniment–all achieved usually with only a single note sounding at a given moment. To be sure, the use of double-, triple- and quadruple stops add tension, excitement, and new sonorities to the basically monophonic texture, yet it must be remembered that this occurs sparingly to achieve maximum effect.
The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries looked at Bach’s unaccompanied string music mainly as pedagogical materials for developing technique. Even today, every violinist has to scale the mountain represented by the sonatas and partitas. Yet the true value of these works lies in their inimitable synthesis of national traditions and technical innovations (equalled only by Bach in other comparable efforts) to produce musical art works of profound musical expression and striking character.Raymond Erickson (2006)
