J. S. Bach: The Six Partitas
BWV 825-830

Lucy Carolan
Harpsichord

-  Two CD Set

Programme Notes

In 1723, Bach arrived in Leipzig to take up the position of Cantor at the Thomas-Schule, which carried with it the responsibility for the city's music. It was during his earliest and busiest years there that he embarked on the four volumes of harpsichord and organ music known as the Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice), an ambitious undertaking intended to show, once and for all, his mastery of several important genres. The keyboard dance suite based on allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue (the equivalent to a baroque composer of the three-movement piano sonata to a classical one) seemed a logical beginning. To this end, Bach published-at his own expense-six 'partitas' or suites, first singly from 1726 onwards, and then all together in 1731 as: 'Keyboard Practice / consisting of / Preludes, Allemandes, Courantes, Sarabandes, Gigues, / Minuets and other Galanteries / Composed for Music-Lovers for the refreshment of their Spirits ... Opus 1'. Six is Bach's preferred number for sets of instrumental music, but it seems that he first intended to publish seven-as late as June 1730, an advertisement for the newly published fifth partita mentions 'two last suites still remaining'. A group of seven pieces had an obvious precedent here: the previous Thomascantor, Johann Kuhnau, had also published volumes entitled Clavier-Übung (1689 and 1692), which each contain seven suites; perhaps Bach intended his Opus 1 partly as a tribute to his predecessor. Also obvious is the key of the hypothetical seventh partita. Bach's overall key-scheme for the set radiates outwards in a widening zigzag, B flat, c, a, D, G, e, which requires F to complete it (completion is duly achieved with the F major Italian Concerto, which opens Klavier-Übung II). Why Bach eventually decided on his usual grouping of six is not known; publishing costs may have played a part.

It is difficult to think of a more unlikely 'Opus 1' than the six partitas: not only are they Bach's last word on the keyboard suite, surpassing his own 'English' and 'French' sets in variety, intellectual depth and technical difficulty; they also signal the end of a long and distinguished tradition of elevating a sequence of dances to high art; the suite continued to exist, but in name only.

Bach and his contemporaries would unhesitatingly have identified this tradition as French, and indeed some of Bach's earlier suite movements are straightforward imitations of French models. By the time of the partitas, however, French influence had combined with many other strands to form his mature style. Italian versions of the dances had arrived: the fast exciting corrente threatened the subtler courante, while French gigues were an early casualty even in their native land. (The presence of a French or Italian dance title is-inevitably-only the roughest guide to Bach's sophisticated versions of these national styles.) And in every movement, from the strictest fugue to the simplest melody and accompaniment, his German heritage ensured that he rarely stopped writing 'proper' counterpoint or abandoned an opening theme.

Bach uses these strands, singly or woven together, above all to achieve contrast. By reinterpreting the tradition of a free prelude to mean a free choice of first movement, he can oppose the French overture that begins no. 4 with no. 5's Praeambulum, an Italian-style 'concerto'. And since pitting one national style against another goes only some way towards guaranteeing that no two allemandes, no two courantes sound alike, he can then select a different rhythmic subdivision for each movement (one allemande will have triplet semiquavers throughout, another a dotted figure, and so on) beneath which the larger-scale rhythms typical of the original dance only sometimes emerge.

Partita no. 1, the first to appear in print, but probably the third or fourth in order of composition, was dedicated to Crown Prince Emanuel Ludwig of Anhalt-Cöthen, the infant son of Bach's former employer, Prince Leopold. Bach could hardly have presented him with a more suitable piece: here is a pastoral idyll largely undisturbed by angular melody, strict fugue or chromatic harmony. The Praeludium begins with a simple theme based on an ascending scale (though subsequent appearances show that there is invertible counterpoint even in Arcadia). Arpeggio figures characterise the Allemande and the Corrente, while the serenely beautiful Sarabande has a melodic filigree under which the traditional dance rhythm, with its second-beat emphasis, is clearly marked. The witty Giga explores hand-crossing (but not very far-one direction only!): the fun lies in the way the leaping left hand provides both melody and bass while the right hand merely fills in the harmony.

The opening of Partita no. 2 immediately plunges us into the world of the Passions and church cantatas: its dramatic slow introduction is conceived in particularly orchestral terms, with massive (and often dissonant) chords, silences and right-hand 'solos'. The rest of the movement consists entirely of two-part writing, but of such variety and richness that it never sounds sparse. Bach continues to explore this texture in the flowing Allemande and Sarabande, leaving dance rhythms largely behind. A very French Courante, on the other hand, with short upbeats and strong accents, has not come very far from its roots, and the Rondeaux is another staple of the French harpsichord suite-although no French composer could have written the spiky falling octaves and sevenths of Bach's rondo theme. The other five partitas end with the customary gigue; in no. 2 we have a Capriccio which combines the large leaps of the Rondeaux (here expanded to tenths) with three fully imitative parts; nimble fingers only should attempt it.

Partitas nos. 3 and 6 were probably written before the others, since they are the only ones to appear in the 1725 Klavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach. The composer thought highly enough of them to alter them only slightly for publication. The title of no. 3's first movement suggests a quasi-improvisation, but for Bach it could also mean the opposite. This Fantasia is a strict, even austere two-part invention whose first four notes pervade every bar. The rest of the piece contrasts the smooth with the rough: an elegant Allemande with an aggressively energetic Corrente; a gently melancholic Sarabande with two galanteries that are anything but galant. The Burlesca was originally entitled Menuet, but the new name reflects its robust humour much better; the stabbing left-hand note-clusters of the Scherzo-a movement added by Bach for the published version-make it a fitting companion. After this the Gigue seems more civilised than is usual for this lively dance, though its subject has a fine chromatic twist in its tail.

By 'Ouverture' an eighteenth-century musician would have understood the French overture made famous by Lully's operas: a slow introduction in dotted rhythm followed by a triple-time fugue. As the first movement of Partita no. 4 shows, harpsichord overtures need not lack the grandeur and excitement of their orchestral counterparts. The Allemande and Sarabande, by contrast, show Bach at his most intimate: the simplest of accompaniments supports a melody fashioned from hundreds of tiny ornamental figures. Writers have called this idiom 'violinistic'; certainly that instrument's tradition of improvising embellishments must have contributed to it. A French Courante also features a more than usually decorated right-hand part. The jovial Aria's syncopated melody may well represent a parody of the latest fashions in Italian vocal music, while the triplets of the Menuet show Bach bowing to the recently modish galant style. The rollicking Gigue presents two themes in succession, the second of which sounds deliciously silly until it is combined with the first.

Bach's discovery of Vivaldi's concertos in about 1713 was a great turning-point in his life, but many years were to elapse before he found a really inventive way of adapting this new style to the keyboard. The Praeambulum that begins Partita no. 5 probably remains his most elegant and daring solution: a miniature concerto, which replaces orchestral effects with a catalogue of virtuoso harpsichord techniques. Its brio infects the rest of the piece, especially the sparkling Corrente and the Tempo di Minuetto, whose true rhythmic colours reveal themselves only at cadences; the Allemande and Sarabande also share in the generally sunny mood. The Gigue's quirky subject is complemented in the second half by the arrival of a new theme, at which point a manageable three-part fugue suddenly becomes a player's Waterloo as trills erupt in all sorts of nasty places-one can imagine Bach laughing up his sleeve.

The Toccata of Partita no. 6 begins with one of Bach's most arresting ideas: four chords decorated with sighing appoggiaturas and paired to suggest question and answer; a variant of this rhetorical device becomes the subject of the central fugue section. A 'walking' bass gives the next two movements an Italian flavour; its regular steps in the Corrente are countered by a relentlessly syncopated right hand. As a sheer outpouring of emotion, the Sarabande surpasses nearly all Bach's other keyboard music. The opening bar from the Toccata, with its anguished, dissonant 'question', is transformed here into an inexorable tread above which Bach spins decorations of extravagant wildness. Dissonance and chromaticism show a more academic face in the fugal Gigue, which provides an impressive if stern ending.

Forkel's claim that whoever learned a few pieces from the partitas could make his fortune in the world is well known, but probably (like many other things in his 1802 biography of Bach) to be taken with a pinch of salt. More significant by far are two early-indeed, almost immediate-reactions to the partitas, one from a professional, the other from one of the Liebhaber mentioned on the title page. According to the composer and theorist Johann Mattheson, the pieces must have acquired an almost overnight reputation for difficulty, for as early as 1731 he wrote: 'Let a student of art compare [a simple aria] with a suite...from Kapellmeister Bach's partitas, and he will easily find out the difference...anyone who ventured to read them at sight would be undertaking something very foolhardy...even if he were the arch-harpsichordist himself.' The following year, a young woman named Luise Culmus wrote from Danzig to her husband-to-be in Leipzig: 'The pieces that have arrived-for harpsichord by Bach, and for lute by Weyrauch-are as difficult as they are beautiful. If I play them ten times, I still feel myself to be a beginner with them. Everything by these great masters pleases me better than their caprices [no doubt a reference to the Capriccio of no. 2], which are unfathomably difficult.' The fiancé was the poet and literary theorist Johann Christoph Gottsched, whose ode on the death of the Electress of Saxony Bach had set to music five years before; what more natural than that Leipzig's leading literary figure should send his future wife a recently published Opus 1 by its leading musical figure?

Several problems of performance practice arise in connection with the partitas, for even though they were closely supervised by the composer himself, the prints contain ambiguities of notation. First, there are actual handwritten additions of ornamentation, some of it copious, on a few surviving printed copies. While it is true that Bach is known to have continued to tinker with his compositions even after their publication, the existence of more than one ornamented copy of the partitas suggests that Bach may have asked his students to add suitable embellishments, as an exercise in composition. Some of these ornaments, along with others newly improvised, can be heard in repeat sections in the present recording. Secondly, there is the question of the order of the movements in nos. 4 and 6. The Arias are printed before the Sarabandes, but the normal place for such galanteries is after them. It is clear that their position in the print allows the longer movements to be laid out in such a way that page turns are minimised or at least facilitated; from this several writers have inferred that their placing is one of convenience only and that performers should assume the conventional Sarabande-Aria order. There has even been the suggestion that the Arias were included as afterthoughts, to fill up staves that would otherwise have been left blank-this raises the intriguing possibility of dispensing with them altogether! Last, there is the hotly debated issue of the duple-time Gigue of no. 6. Because there was a tradition-which Bach may have known-of playing duple-time gigues as if they were in triple time, some writers have suggested ironing out Bach's anapaests and dactyls into even triplets throughout. Furthermore, some argue, Bach used the time signature of a circle bisected by a vertical line here (and uniquely for him) because this had once implied tempus perfectum, i.e. triple time. But it can also be argued that by 1700 this time signature on its own had come to mean simply 'very fast' (it is described thus in his cousin J.G.Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon): in other words, Bach is saying 'this gigue is written in relatively long notes, but it is faster than it appears'. Only when combined with the signature 3/2 or 3/1 did the cut circle's tempus perfectum attributes return to it-and Bach certainly encountered this 'combination' signature in a motet collection used by his Leipzig choirs, Bodenschatz's Florilegium Portense (1618, 1621). On musicological grounds, perhaps more evidence exists for duple-time performance; it must be admitted, however, that the triplet version lies far more comfortably under the hands! 

Lucy Carolan, 1999