saturday, March 28, 2015, 8pm hertz hall

Davitt Moroney, harpsichord

Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasias

PROGRAM

Johann sebastian Bach (1685–1750) Fantasia and Fugue in a minor, BWV 904

Fantasia and Fugue in a minor, BWV 944

adagio in G major, BWV 968

Fantasia and Fugue in c minor, BWV 906 (completed by Davitt Moroney )

INTERMISSION

Bach chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in d minor, BWV 903

Prelude in G major, BWV 902a

ricercar a3 in c minor, BWV 1079 ricercar a6 in c minor, BWV 1079

Cal Performances’ " !#–" !$ season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.

PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES

BACH ’S FANTASIAS word ricercare , meaning to search out. was known for his doctes recherches , HE CORE OF TODAY ’S PROGRAM is made meaning his learned counterpoint. the ways in tup of Johann sebastian Bach’s four prin - which such pieces are a kind of imaginative “re - cipal fantasias for harpsichord. the most fa - search” are numerous. the imagination needed mous of these is undoubtedly the “chromatic” to find these unusual contrapuntal combina - one in d minor, but all of these works are tions was an important feature of the style. wonderful in different ways. i have added to english composers called such works “fancies” them as the climax to the program two mon - (a usage that survives now only in the pejora - umental fugues, the three-part and six-part tive adjective “fanciful,” meaning having too ricercars published near the end of his life in much imagination), but the verb “to fancy” still (1747). For variety, i have implies the element of pleasure involved in also included two little works in G major that such activity. With Bach, this element of pleas - are often overlooked by both players and urable contrapuntal search, of musical research, music lovers. With the exception of the ener - was always important. getic and youthful second Fantasia in a minor (BWV 944), all these works are the product of Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV KBF Bach’s maturity. the title “fantasia” carried considerable lin - the first movement on the program, the guistic and stylistic baggage in Bach’s day that Fantasia in a minor ( BWV 904), is of the con - can help us understand the variety of musical trapuntal kind. Bach probably wrote it when language found in his harpsichord and organ he was in his early forties, in about 1725. fantasias. For him the word would have had although no copy survives in Bach’s hand - two distinct meanings that, to us, now seem writing, the main manuscripts were written by to be diametrically opposed to each other. on two musicians who definitely knew him, J. c. the one hand, “fantasia” could imply fantasy, Kittel and J. P. Kellner. the work has an im - freedom, liberty, imagination, and improvisa - posing structure, held in place by the opening tion. the “chromatic” Fantasia is a perfect ex - twelve-measure phrase and the three carefully ample of that kind of work—one of the very placed repetitions of the same material: twice finest in the whole keyboard repertoire, during the central part of the work in different matched only by the G minor Fantasia for keys (the dominant, and then the subdomi - organ ( BWV 542). on the other hand, and in nant), and once at the end (in the home key apparent opposition to this freedom, “fanta - of a minor). as a result, the work is usually sia” was also used as a standard title for com - described by musicologists as being in ritor - positions in the strictest of fugal styles, nello form (based on the italian concerto prin - including some of the more contrapuntally se - ciple of a section that “returns”), but these vere fugues by Bach and his predecessors. four regular twelve-measure blocks, all writ - how can we reconcile this apparent contra - ten in flexible counterpoint, are set off by diction between improvisatory freedom and three lighter contrasting intermediate pas - contrapuntal strictness? sages that are irregular, mostly in three-part to Frescobaldi and Froberger, two earlier writing, and each one of a different length (18, composers he much admired, the word “fan - 26, and 19 measures). calling the form ritor - tasia” implied a strictly polyphonic, fugal nello is easy to write about—or maybe just work, usually in four parts, with a serious con - convenient—but it avoids engaging with the trapuntal structure. (the word they used for musical reality of the passages where Bach’s the freer improvisatory style was “toccata.”) imagination is most actively at work, as if the another word for this contrapuntal kind of unvarying repetitions are the more interesting fantasia was “ricercar,” derived from the italian feature of the form. these repetitions may be

CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES the most easily audible part for a listener dis - at the heart of his compositional process. covering the work for the first time, but the eighteenth-century music students were varied intermediate passages are interesting in taught to improvise in this way, with two quite different ways. Bach and his students themes to be combined, not because it was called them the Zwischenspielen (the bits hard, but because paradoxically it actually played in between), and we know he thought made improvisation easier. they were critical to the artistic success of any this technique, known as double invertible contrapuntal piece. he is said to have taught counterpoint, was used very frequently by his students that in a fugue, for example, the Bach on a grand structural scale. More impor - repetitions of the subject are less interesting tant, it also permeates almost every measure, because they tend to be unchanging, and on a smaller scale, in terms of the fragments of therefore to some extent predictable. Modern musical material with which he builds his mu - piano teachers might like to take note of this! sical edifice. in the Fantasia, for example, the the practice of “bringing out the theme” is surprising and irregular Zwischenspielen are demonstrably antithetical to what Bach was woven freely from strands of double (and even actively trying to do when he composed con - triple) invertible counterpoint. trapuntal pieces. he said it was in “the bits in between” that composers—and, by extension, Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV KFF performers—could show the most imagina - tion, providing fire and warmth to light up Unlike the work in a minor heard at the start what he referred to as the “dry sticks” of coun - of this program, this second one in the same terpoint that can so easily seem arid and bor - key is a youthful piece. Bach’s own copy is now ing. Playing fugues by stressing the necessity lost, but its earliest source is an important of “bringing out the theme” can contribute to manuscript compiled before 1713 by his older making Bach’s counterpoint seem boring by brother, Johann christoph. however the fact drawing the audience’s attention away from that the work survives in a large number of the very passages that make them “fantastic,” other manuscripts throughout the 18th cen - in the literal sense of that word. tury confirms its popularity. the title the fugue that follows the fantasia is one of “Fantasia and Fugue” is misleading. the fan - Bach’s most expressive. since it has two sepa - tasia part is only one line of music, lasting rate themes, it is a “double fugue.” the first considerably less than a minute. it is presented half is entirely occupied by the opening simply as chords, with the instruction “arpeg - theme, a rhetorically alert and assertive gio”—an invitation to the player to develop phrase, proposing questions and answers, sonorities in a manner suitable for the instru - until the music reaches a central cadence and ment. the rest of the work, the lengthy fugal stops. the other theme, sliding down the part, has 52 lines of music, and is a high- chromatic scale in a steady fashion occupies en ergy perpetuum mobile unlike anything else the first part of the second section, until—as in Bach’s harpsichord music. the uninter - always when Bach uses more than one theme rupted flood of fast notes leaves the player in this way—we reach the last page in which breathless, and was no doubt intended to have the point of the whole edifice is made clear, as that effect on listeners. the theme itself con - the two themes meet and combine together in tains 72 notes, the most found in any Bach a harmonically rich manner. First the open - fugue! But they go by quickly and Bach uses ing theme returns with the second one on top; their energy throughout the work to explore then they switch positions. the sense of cli - all the registers of the instrument. max as the two separate musical elements are one problem with this (and several other combined would not in itself have been con - early works by Bach) is that the player is left sidered unusual by Bach. such techniques are with an uneasy question: is this in fact an

PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES organ work, or is it a harpsichord work de - the most obvious features of which are the signed to evoke the organ? i have played it on virtuoso passage work, the rapid arpeggios, both instruments, and still cannot make up the gymnastic hand-crossings, and the elabo - my mind, since it always seems right on rate chromaticism. whichever instrument i happen to be playing. the main difference between the two man - ironically, on an organ it makes its best effect uscripts is that in the other source (now in on a large instrument in a resonant building. dresden) the fantasia is followed by an unfin - ished fugue. there is a long and harmonically Adagio in G major, BWV KHJ tortured first section, followed by a quite dis - tinct second section on a different theme. a the adagio in G major is a transcription of few musicologists have argued that Bach the first movement of sonata no. 3 in c major abandoned the piece because, planning to for unaccompanied violin ( BWV 1005/1). the write a double fugue he found that the two music is clearly by Bach, but it is not alto - themes did not work together contrapuntally, gether clear whether Bach himself made the but such a view is intellectually ridiculous transcription. he made half a dozen other since the work on any double fugue would un - such transcriptions for the keyboard of violin avoidably have to begin by working out the works, but this one is unusually luxuriant. as combinations that would be the climax of the in those transcriptions, the music is trans - piece. other musicologists have argued that posed into a new key. But here the adaptation the piece is a rare case of a da capo fugue, goes much further. What was originally writ - where the first section is supposed to be re - ten for just the four strings of a high instru - peated; Bach did write a few such fugues in his ment, the violin, becomes a work that explores youth, but later abandoned the procedure; it the deepest register of the harpsichord and was antithetical to his concept of musical de - draws on its ability to develop thicker and velopment in fugal writing. Moreover, “fixing” richer chords. the result is a genuine harpsi - the c minor fugue in this way is hardly a good chord piece that brilliantly exploits all the solution since it imposes a structural imbal - sonorities of the instrument in such a satisfy - ance on the work that Bach is most unlikely ing way that thinking backwards it would be to have wanted. it also forces the fugal scheme hard to imagine that the piece originated as a to do things that he almost always avoids, es - work for unaccompanied violin. pecially in his mature works. But there is a good contrapuntal solution to Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV KBH the enigma, enabling us to create a standard (completed by Davitt Moroney ) double fugue, a solution that had escaped scholars and players. it occurred to me just in the second meaning of “fantasia,” implying time for the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth freedom and improvisatory brilliance, is in 1985, and i was able to complete (and pub - clearly present in this wonderful work in c lish) a first solution according to Bach’s own minor. it survives only in two manuscripts, practices at that time. however, 30 years later but both are fortunately in Bach’s own hand - i have become unsatisfied not with the con - writing. (one of them, in Bethlehem, cept but with my own practical working-out Pennsylvania, is the most important Bach au - of it. Last year i therefore made a new com - tograph in the United states.) it dates from the pletion derived from the same intellectual late 1730s, when he was in his early fifties. construct, and this is the version played today, the fantasia is therefore in his latest style, akin based on Bach’s own principles of double in - to that found in the “Goldberg” Variations, vertible counterpoint.

CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES

Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV KBE and when the act of breaking them served a strong musical purpose. he usually obeyed this great work, generally known to pianists the rules, but always wrote for the ear. as the “chromatic Fantasy and Fugue,” was probably written before 1730 but it was con - Prelude in G major, BWV KBDa siderably revised by Bach on more than one occasion during the 1730s. the text is partic - this charming and expansively meandering ularly problematic. no two manuscripts agree, prelude may be thought of as an unfortunate and no modern edition does it justice. (a new “reject” from The Well-Tempered Clavier . it manuscript source dating from Bach’s lifetime survives in an early source with a nice little was recently discovered in a Paris library by virtuoso fugue that did get taken into The former Berkeley graduate student Mary cyr; it Well-Tempered Clavier . the fugue was there - offers yet another version of the fantasia.) fore divorced and remarried to a different yet no amount of detail concerning the vari - (and highly virtuoso) little G major prelude. ants can ever alter the emotional impact of this the fugue is short, as is its new prelude. extraordinary work, in which we catch a clear Perhaps Bach had simply felt that the original glimpse of Bach carefully notating something couple were incompatible; or perhaps he was similar to what his improvisations must have planning on later giving this prelude a differ - been like. it ranges very widely in terms of ent, longer fugue, but never got round to keys, from the home key of d minor through doing so. at any rate, this beautiful prelude to a-flat major on the flat side, and as far as B was put aside, abandoned without any com - major on the sharp side, an unprecedented panion, and it is a great pity because this tonal range. the modulations develop with al - means it is almost never played. it is as well most overwhelming force and sweep the wrought and as expressive as anything in ei - movement forward. in the middle of the fan - ther volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier . tasia the music suddenly stops, and the right i like to think of it (along with two other such hand plays some simple melodic phrases, all “reject” movements, in F major and in alone. these are marked “recitativ,” a clear in - d minor) as sitting in Bach’s drawer, waiting dication that the instrument is trying to imi - for more preludes and fugues for a (never tate speech. the extraordinary closing section completed) third volume of The Well- is built on a series of sinking recitative-like Tempered Clavier …. phrases, supported by progressively descend - ing diminished seventh chords, all over a re - Two Ricercars, aE and aH, BWV CBIK peated pedal-note d in the bass. this passage is one of Bach’s most extraordinary inventions. these two works, along with the 14 fugues of in the fugue, the chromaticism is integrated , left unfinished at his death into the subject itself and, not surprisingly, in 1750, comprise Bach’s last statement about then becomes part of the tonal scheme for the expressive fugal writing. the story of their ori - harmonic journey on which the piece em - gin is well known. in May 1747, Bach visited barks. at the end there is a unique gesture in the court of Frederick the Great near Berlin the left hand, with a series of octaves. Bach (where his son carl Philipp emanuel was court normally avoided such octaves as if they were ) and was asked by the king to heresy; and indeed, such octaves in the bass improvise a three-part fugue on a “royal were normally considered a mortal contra - theme” played for him by the monarch him - puntal sin. But here they add weight and grav - self. he was also apparently asked to improvise itas to the closing phrase. Like rameau before a six-part fugue, which he declined to do. him, Bach knew that the rules should be bro - When he returned home to Leipzig he ken when the resulting music sounded right, wrote down (and improved) the three-part

PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES fugue in the improvisatory fantasia style elegance, even for Bach. in preparation for the (called the “Prussian Fugue”) giving it, para - twelfth and final entry of the main theme a doxically, the name of Ricercar , to stress his lively third theme enters, and the fugue ends learning and serious intent. he then had it en - with a joyful display of triple invertible coun - graved and sent it to the king as a Musical terpoint going through the six permutations Offering . the improvisatory nature of the possible (factorial three!). however, because work is evident, confirming that it belongs to the work is in six parts, there are always three the first kind of “fantasia” fugue, where free - additional voices available to add extra dom and surprise reign almost unchecked. melodic interest and to enrich the harmonic he also set to work to take up the gauntlet density of the closing page. this perfect equi - that had been thrown down concerning a six- librium between the predestined combinations part fugue on the royal theme, and this turns of the three fixed themes and the freedom of out to be of the other kind of fantasia, a very the three free voices is an essential part of what strict contrapuntal structure. it is perhaps the makes such music so deeply exhilarating. strictest fugue Bach ever wrote for keyboard, Bach’s finest counterpoint of this sort was appropriately named Ricercar . the problem is written for the two instruments that, by their that the royal theme is itself wide-ranging nature, could not “bring out the theme,” the (more than an octave), and to manage that in harpsichord and the organ, and this style of six parts with a mere ten fingers is a very tall writing was devised by him specifically for order. there is in fact only one other such six- those instruments. their particular qualities part ricercar in the whole repertoire of key - are what lead him to write in this way. i would board fugues, by the long-forgotten italian even suggest that Bach wrote his greatest 17 th-century composer Luigi Battiferri; it’s a fugues for the organ and the harpsichord pre - decent enough work, though rather short. cisely because they are incapable of “bringing Bach ended up writing a serious work, a kind out the theme.” By presenting all the themes of “fugue to end all fugues,” or a last word in and the free counterpoints as equal partners, how far such writing could possibly go. it con - they impart great harmonic strength to these tains just twelve statements of the theme. the works in which the melodies freely go on their first six, as the six voices enter one by one are melodic way yet also combine to produce— fairly regular. after a long “in between” section thanks to the unity of the hand and brain of a without the theme, and an important central single player—stark chordal realities. these cadence, the second part sets the music in mo - fistfuls of notes have a sonic effect that is nei - tion again with a second theme (implying this ther contrapuntal nor polyphonic, and they will be some sort of double fugue), but this are heard to great effect in the six-part time the music embarks on a wild harmonic ricercar. Playing such pieces on an instru - journey into keys such a B-flat minor, defi - ment capable of “bringing out the theme” is, i nitely considered outlandish for a Baroque believe, destined inevitably to undo the per - work based in c minor. this second section is fect musical balance that Bach created be - also much more irregular in the six entries of tween these fruitfully diverse elements. the theme, and the “bits in between,” the Zwischenspielen , are of unusual grace and Davitt Moroney, February MKLP

CAL PERFORMANCES ABOUT THE ARTIST

Byrd’s complete keyboard works (127 pieces, on seven cds, using six instruments), and the complete harpsichord and organ music of Louis couperin (seven cds, using four in - struments). his recordings have been awarded the French Grand Prix du Disque (1996), the German Preis der Deutschen Schallplatenkritik (2000), and three British Gramophone awards (1986, 1991, 2000). he is currently in the middle of recording all of François couperin’s harpsichord music (ten t t i

w cds, of which six have already appeared). For e H

t his services to music he was named Chevalier t o c

S dans l’Ordre du mérite culturel by Prince AVITT MORONEY was born in england in rainier of Monaco (1987) and Officier des arts d1950. he studied organ, , and et des lettres by the French government (2000). harpsichord with susi Jeans, , in 2000 , he published Bach, An and . after studies in musi - Extraordinary Life , a monograph that has since cology with and howard M. been translated into five languages. in spring Brown at King’s college London, he entered 2009 he was visiting director of a research sem - the doctoral program at Uc Berkeley in 1975. inar in Paris at the sorbonne’s École pratique Five years later, he completed his Ph.d. with a des hautes études . his recently published re - thesis under the guidance of Joseph Kerman, search articles have been studies of the music , and donald Friedman, on the of (in the Journal of the music of and for American Musicological Society ), of François the anglican reformation. in august 2001, he couperin, of Parisian women composers returned to Uc Berkeley as a faculty member under the Ancien R égime , a more personal ar - and is a Professor of Music as well as ticle on the art of collecting old music books, University organist. he directs the University and two articles on Gustav Leonhardt. Baroque ensemble. in 2005, after tracking it down for 18 years, For 21 years he was based in Paris, working he identified one of the lost masterpieces of primarily as a freelance recitalist in many the italian renaissance, alessandro striggio’s countries. he has made over 70 cds, espe - Mass in OK and QK Parts , dating from 1565– cially of music by Bach, Byrd, and couperin. 1566, the source for which had been lost since Many of these recordings feature historic 1724. he conducted the first modern per - 17th- and 18th-century harpsichords and or - formance of this massive work at London’s gans . they include Bach’s French Suites (two royal albert hall in July 2007 (to an audience cds, for Virgin classics, shortlisted for the of 7,500 people, and a live radio audience of Gramophone award), The Well-Tempered many millions of listeners) and conducted two Clavier (four cds), the Musical Offering , the performances at the Berkeley Festival & complete sonatas for flute and harpsichord, exhibition in June 2008. two further Berkeley and for violin and harpsichord, as well as The performances took place in February 2012, for Art of Fugue (a work he has recorded twice; the cal Performances (“the Polychoral splendors first recordin g (1985) for harmonia Mundi of renaissance Florence”), and included first France, received a Gramophone award; the performances since the 16th century of other second recording (2000) accompanies the edi - newly restored “mega-works” by alessandro tion of The Art of Fugue published by aBrsM striggio’s contemporaries. the recording of Publishing, London). he has also recorded these works is about to appear.

PLAYBILL