Printing the Probestücke: an eighteenth- century music publication by C.P.E. Bach The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Schulenberg, David. 2014. Printing the Probestücke: an eighteenth- century music publication by C.P.E. Bach. Harvard Library Bulletin 24 (3): 81-103. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37363376 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Printing the Probestücke: An Eighteenth-Century Music Publication by C.P.E. Bach David Schulenberg omposer of roughly a thousand works of diverse types, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), the second son of Johann Sebastian CBach, was also the author of a comprehensive treatise on keyboard instrument performance that remained infuential into the nineteenth century and is now an important source on eighteenth-century practices. Issued in two volumes in 1753 and 1762, the treatise was one of several works published at mid-century that represented the extension of Enlightenment-era encyclopedism to music; others included books on the fute by Johann Joachim Quantz and on the violin by Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang.1 Te treatise by Emanuel Bach was unique, however, in being accompanied by a musical supplement (Exempel) that contained not only numerous musical examples but six unusual sonatas for solo keyboard instrument, which the author called Probestücke or “practice pieces.” 2 Te latter remain among the best-known works 1 Bach’s treatise: Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1753–1762); critical edition by Tobias Plebuch, in CPEB:CW, VII/1–3; trans. by William J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1949). To facilitate reference to any of the various editions, citations to this work take the form of volume, chapter, and paragraph numbers. Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Voss, 1752); facsimile of the third edition (Breslau: Johann Friedrch Korn the elder, 1789) ed. Hans-Peter Schmitz (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1974); trans. by Edward R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985); and Leopold Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg: Johann Jacob Lotter, 1756); ed. Greta Moens-Haenen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995); trans. by Edith Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2 Te German word Probestücke is a plural noun; the singular form is Probestück. As used here, the term will refer only to the eighteen pieces published in 1753, not six additional ones added in 1787. Te Probestücke comprise the six sonatas (nos. 1–6) listed under entry 63 in the thematic catalog of Bach’s works by Alfred Wotquenne, Tematisches Verzeichnis der Werke von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1905, with notes and contents in German and French; reprints, 1964, 1972, and 1980, also with notes David Schulenberg 81 of a composer who was arguably the most original and infuential musician of his generation, active during what is now regarded as a transitional period between the late Baroque and Classical eras. Harvard libraries hold multiple copies of both the treatise and the supplement—fourteen items in all, in distinct versions, states, and editions (see Schulenberg appendix 1).3 Emanuel Bach’s treatise, known in English as the Essay on the True Manner of Playing Keyboard Instruments, focuses on performance in the post-Baroque (or pre- Classical) style cultivated in mid-century Berlin (see fgure 4.1). Tere the composer worked from 1740 or 1741 to 1767 as chamber musician to King Frederick II “the Great” of Prussia. Bach subsequently moved to Hamburg, where he spent the last twenty years of his life as cantor at the Johanneum and city director of church music. At Hamburg he composed—among many other works—a small addendum to the Probestücke, as well as preparing revised editions of both volumes of the treatise itself (see fgure 4.2).4 Te eighteen original Probestücke comprise a series of increasingly sophisticated keyboard pieces. Each is in a diferent key, yet Bach grouped them into six sonatas, each of which therefore begins and ends, contrary to normal eighteenth-century practice, in diferent keys—a simple example of the unconventionality that typifes Bach’s music as a whole. As in the accompanying treatise, Bach never specifes any single keyboard instrument for which the work was intended, but most readers would have played the pieces on the clavichord. Te latter was a stringed keyboard instrument whose small size and volume of sound made it suitable for private practice and study (see fgure 4.3).5 A player of the clavichord nevertheless could vary its dynamic level or loudness according to the force with which the keys were struck, as on the piano. In this the clavichord difered from the organ and harpsichord—still the predominant keyboard instruments for public performance when the work was frst published. Te clavichord was, however, in the process of being supplanted by the piano, which had been invented in about 1700 but would not entirely supersede the clavichord in northern Europe before the beginning of the nineteenth century. and contents in German and French), still the standard list for identifying works by the composer. Te six sonatinas that Bach subsequently added to the musical supplement are listed as Wq 63/7–12. 3 See CPEB:CW, I/3 and VII/3, for the most current listing of extant printed copies and other sources of the supplement and the treatise, respectively. 4 Bach’s revisions were incorporated into the third edition of volume 1, published by Schwickert of Leipzig in 1787, which was accompanied by an expanded version of the musical supplement that included the six sonatinas Wq 63/7–12; the revised second edition of volume 2 appeared posthumously in 1797. Further details in CPEB:CW, I/3, xix–xx. 5 See Bernard Brauchli, Te Clavichord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and the article “Clavichord” by Edward M. Ripin et al. in Grove Music Online, ed. Deane Root <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo> (accessed December 5, 2013). 82 Printing the Probestücke Figure 4.1. Te musical supplement to Bach’s treatise: Exempel nebst achtzehn Probe-Stücken in Sechs Sonaten zu Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs Versuche über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen auf XXVI. Kupfer-Tafeln (second version of title page, presumably 1753 or later). 41 cm. Loeb Music Library, Merritt Room, Mus 627.2.411 PHI. All illustrations from the musical supplement, except fgure 4.7, come from this copy. David Schulenberg 83 Figure 4.2. Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, volume 1 (title page, from the revised edition of 1787). 23 cm. Loeb Music Library, Merritt Room, Mus 347.12.4 PHI. 84 Printing the Probestücke Figure 4.3. Arnold Dolmetsch, clavichord (no. 34), made in 1908 afer Christian Gotthelf Hofmann (1784) for Chickering & Sons, Boston. Harvard University, Department of Music. Among Bach’s admirers were his younger contemporaries the poets Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Matthias Claudius, Johann Heinrich Voss, and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, who knew the composer personally during his Hamburg years and whose texts he set to music as songs for voice and keyboard. Gerstenberg was so inspired by Bach’s solo keyboard compositions that he added words to some of them, including the fnal movement of the Probestücke. Gerstenberg in fact wrote two texts for this piece, one of them paraphrasing Hamlet’s soliloquy from the Shakespeare play, then newly translated into German (see fgure 4.4).6 Bach’s “Hamlet” Fantasia, as it is 6 On Gerstenberg’s “experiment” (his own term), see Tobias Plebuch, “Dark Fantasies and the Dawn of the Self: Gerstenberg’s Monologues for C.P.E. Bach’s C-minor Fantasia,” in C.P.E. Bach Studies, ed. Annette Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25–66. Gerstenberg’s second text for the fantasia was a monolog of the dying Socrates. Te author’s performance of this work (on clavichord) can be heard online at <http://faculty.wagner.edu/david-schulenberg/works_perfs-html/> (accessed December 5, 2013). David Schulenberg 85 Figure 4.4. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, texted adaptations of Bach’s Fantasia in C minor, Wq 63/6, movement 3, from Carl Friedrich Cramer, Flora, Kiel and Hamburg, 1787. 22 x 27 cm. Copenhagen, Der Kongelige Bibliotek Slotsholmen, Weyses Samling U24 mu 6309.1131. now known, is an example of a free fantasia, a type of piece that was meant to sound like an inspired improvisation. Bach was famous for such improvisations, and in volume 2 of his Essay he devoted the last chapter to an account of how to improvise a free fantasia. He illustrated the practice not only in the fnal Probestück but also in a second, much shorter, composition (Wq 117/14) whose bass line was printed as a musical example within volume 2; the complete score appeared on a separate printed sheet.7 Tis brief second fantasia, incidentally, was probably the last engraved publication by a member of the Bach family, bringing to a close a tradition whose fnal major product was Emanuel’s Probestücke, but which went back at least to a vocal work of J. S. Bach published in 1708.8 Between the times that the two volumes of Emanuel Bach’s 7 Edited by Peter Wollny in CPEB:CW, I/8.1.