Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance

Bach’s Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance Joel Lester Oxford University Press Bach’s Works for Solo Violin This page intentionally left blank Bach’s Works for Solo Violin style, structure, performance Joel Lester New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1999 To Emile and Abby who have inherited the past and are creating the future Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao ˜ Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1999 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lester, Joel. Bach’s works for solo violin : style, structure, performance / Joel Lester. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512097-3 1. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685–1750. Sonaten und Partiten, violin, BWV 1001–1006—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Performance practice (Music) —18th century. I. Title. MT145.B14L39 1999 787.2'092— dc21 98-27735 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface hen I was learning violin, I was secretly jealous of my fellow music Wstudents who studied piano. As they learned the canonic works in their repertoire—the Beethoven piano sonatas, say, or Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier—they could consult numerous performance and analytic guides to those compositions: Donald Francis Tovey’s or Hugo Riemann’s extended commentaries on the Beethoven piano sonatas and on Bach’s Well-Tempered, Heinrich Schenker’s commentaries on Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, and the extended annotations on these works in the editions of Hans von Bülow, Tovey, and others.1 No similar standard reference works existed for violinists’ canonical works—not even for Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas and partitas, Beethoven’s violin sonatas, or the major concertos. This volume begins to fill that gap by detailing many aspects of Bach’s six unaccompanied violin works, concentrating on the Sonata in G Minor. Focusing on this sonata and its companions inspires thoughts on many larger historical, analytical, critical, stylistic, and practical issues. And so this book, while keeping an eye throughout on the solo-violin works, touches on quite a few other pieces by Bach and others and treats analytical, stylistic, and performance issues that span the past three centuries. As a result, this book is in part a performance guide for violinists, in part an analytic study, in part a rumination on aspects of Bach’s style, and in part an investigation of notions of musical form and continuity. There is evidence that Bach’s solo-violin works have been a regular part of violin pedagogy since the eighteenth century. Certainly they have been mainstays of the violin concert repertoire since the mid-nineteenth century, when Ferdinand David and the young Joseph Joachim began performing them in public. Their long performance history, evidenced in recordings as well as in editions—and even through added accompaniments and arrange- ments by distinguished musicians like Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schu- mann, Johannes Brahms, and Fritz Kreisler—gives us the opportunity to study the ways in which notions of Baroque style have evolved. vi Preface The very notion of style is closely connected to the ways in which this sonata and Bach’s works in general are effectively analyzed. Many of the analytical methods that we in the late twentieth century spontaneously apply to music were developed well after the solo sonatas were composed, and many of these analytical tools were conceptualized in response to music composed more than a generation after Bach died. In particular, modern notions of musical form and phrasing emerged in response to music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—to codify the practices of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. There is a less-than-perfect fit when these tools are applied to Bach’s music. Indeed, a large part of the reason that early-eighteenth-century theoretical ideas—ideas that Bach knew—eventually dropped out of circulation and were replaced by later notions is that the earlier concepts no longer applied to later evolving musical styles, not that they were inapplicable to Baroque music. As a result, one central theme of this book concerns the types of analytical notions that are best applied to Bach’s music. Whenever possible, analytical tools are drawn from eighteenth-century notions. This decision does not presuppose that eighteenth-century theoretical ideas are neces- sarily better than later developments. Quite the contrary, it often takes time for musicians to figure out the best analytical methods for a given repertoire. My motivation here arises from the desire to employ analytical tools that were developed for the repertoire under study, not for later repertoires. Nonetheless, there is indeed an anachronism in using early-eighteenth- century theory to analyze an early-eighteenth-century masterwork: the notion of a “masterwork” is a creation of a later age—the very age in which our modern analytical tools were developed and in which the practice of music analysis began to flourish. Asking questions about why a piece of music has remained immortal would probably not have occurred to early- eighteenth-century musicians. The few published analyses that still exist from that era were done to demonstrate how some piece demonstrates this or that musical technique (as in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s two different analyses of a monologue from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s opera Armide, published in 1727 and 1754, or in Johann Mattheson’s 1739 application of rhetorical labels to an aria by Benedetto Marcello) or to demonstrate how to apply musical knowledge to an actual piece (as in Johann Heinichen’s 1728 dissection of an entire cantata by Alessandro Scarlatti to teach a key- boardist how to decide which chords to play with the unfigured thor- oughbass part).2 The more modern sort of analysis that dissects a piece to see how and why it works so well did not really develop until the early nineteenth century, when the pieces being inspected were recent music.3 To a potential charge of such anachronism I can only plead that we in the late twentieth century are interested in these sorts of issues about pieces. And rather than try to apply more modern analytical techniques that were not designed specifically for a Baroque repertoire, it seems to me more appro- priate to employ ideas contemporaneous to the pieces. Preface vii A fundamental premise of this book is that a single creative genius lies behind all of Bach’s music in all genres. Surprisingly, this premise—which should seem self-evident—is not widely apparent in the literature on Bach. Discussions of his pieces with two repeated sections (such as dance movements) apply the principles of binary forms akin to those of later eras; discussions of his ritornello movements (as in concerto movements and many arias) apply different principles; and discussions of his fugues draw upon still different principles, as do discussions of his preludes, his toccatas, his chorale preludes, and so on for each of his genres. Many of his chorales have been the pedagogical basis of tonal harmony for generations, yet others of his chorale-based works are “modal,” seeming to use entirely different principles. It is as if Bach were an eighteenth-century Arnold Schoen- berg in his American period, who decided for each piece whether it was to be tonal or 12-tone—only with Bach the options for creating musical sense seem to have been endless. I do not believe that Bach viewed his own compositional activity in that manner. To me, his work exhibits a remarkable unity of creative genius— a stylistic uniformity that transcends the differences between all the genres in which he composed. I hear similar approaches to large-scale structure, motivic work, texture and textural growth, harmony and counterpoint, and so forth in his fugues and his concertos, his binary forms and his chorale preludes, his sonatas and his suites, and his solo-violin works and his keyboard, orchestral, or vocal music. In short, Bach’s music in all these genres sounds like it is by Bach. This book attempts to pin down some of the features that contribute to this sense of Bach’s style. Even though the focus is on the solo-violin works, violinists will not find here suggestions for fingerings and bowing or even for tempos. Surely enough such suggestions already exist in the scores of violinist-edited ver- sions of the sonatas and partitas, in the endless stream of recordings, and in Richard R. Efrati’s Treatise on the Execution and Interpretation of the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin and the Suites for Solo Cello by Jo- hann Sebastian Bach.4 Here, however, they will find discussions of Bach’s notation; of phrasings, forms, motives, and genres in his music; and of the way we often simply assume that Bach’s music is akin to much later music—and the relationship between all these issues and performance. I hope these discussions will stimulate musicians to explore their own approaches to this music that is central to every violinist’s repertoire.

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