With this twelfth post, it is time to retire my logo for the
My plan (starting in December 2016) was to start each month for a year with a Bach post. Life got in the way of that, so it has taken me eighteen rather than twelve months to complete. In any case, this will not be the last Bach post. As I have already written, the pre-history of this blog was a Bach episode; more than that, as I have been acquiring cheap secondhand copies of the critical reports of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe in the last two years (now 56 and counting), I expect to return to Bach textual issues for years to come.
For this post, though, I want to puzzle over some of Bach’s impossible notes. I don’t mean notes that are unplayable (that is, that the technique that is required is truly prodigious, like Schoenberg’s claim that he was willing to wait for evolution to produce a violinist with a little finger long enough to play his concerto properly), but rather notes that are beneath the range of the instrument. For most instruments, it’s difficult to say there is an upper limit to the range; along comes a player who can top it.
One of these impossible notes has puzzled me for years—the low B in b. 94 the Pièce d’orgue (a.k.a. Fantasia in G Major), BWV 572. It is a note which did not exist on the pedalboard of any organ Bach is known to have played. (Linked here is a great resource about the organs of Bach’s milieu, and also access to free recordings of the whole corpus on preserved instruments of Bach’s time.)
BWV 572, bb. 89–95a; SOURCE: cropped scan of NBASer. IV Bd. 7 (ed. D. Kilian, 1984), p. 133.
Indeed, that B doesn’t exist on any pedalboard I have ever played either. Apart from some old English organs that might have pedals down to the G below, or French instruments extending down even to F (pedalboards which are, to say the least, rather different animals than those in Germany), you would need something like the Marshall & Ogletree “international touring organ” made for Cameron Carpenter to play Bach’s low B as written. Carpenter’s is an instrument that figuratively goes “up to eleven” (. . . and literally goes down to G).
The extended pedalboard of Marshall & Ogletree Op. 8 (2013); SOURCE: photo cropped from Cameron Carpenter’s website; my highlighting added.
No manuscript of BWV 572 survives in Bach's hand. Most, but not all, of the early copyists transmit the low B apparently without question. Johann Peter Kellner’s copy moves the B up an octave [at right]—an emendation to a text that seemed to him manifestly erroneous? (Kellner is known to have taken liberties with the texts he copied.) My sense when I play this piece is that some sort of rhythmic articulation is needed in the bassline on the midpoint of that bar, so that I will at least strike the B again (as Kellner’s copy indicates) if not actually to add another 16’ stop in the pedal (to suggest the effect of the lower octave).
The Kellner copy—indeed all of the eighteenth-century copies, and Bach’s default layout in his organ works—transmits the work on only two staves (rather than the three staves we expect of organ music now). Often these sources will indicate “Ped.” at certain points, although the absence of the instruction to play on the pedals need not imply that an organist wouldn’t use them. I am intrigued, though, to see the suggestion in Breitkopf & Härtel’s new edition of the organ works that—despite the title Pièce d’orgue, transmitted in many early sources—this music may have been originally intended for the harpsichord, which by Bach’s time generally had a compass extending down to the G or F below the bottom C of the organ [p. 18]. The five-part writing is playable with two hands alone (albeit awkwardly at times), but—in my hands, anyway—becomes unplayable at about b. 178.
Peter Williams (p. 170) reports the startling fact that this low B is not unique in the texts of Bach’s organ works. It appears, for example, in Kellner’s copy of the C major transposition of the E Major Toccata, BWV 566—and doubtless it is the downward transposition that explains its presence there. Indeed, Kellner writes the B almost apologetically in parenthesis, and doubled the octave above [below left, for example]. A low B is called for in the manuals in a copy (also Kellner’s?) of the C major Toccata, BWV 564, where it is the last note in the final cascading figure before the final chord [below right]. In that instance it makes good musical sense; it just can’t be played—even by Cameron Carpenter (unless he took the whole piece up a half-step--a gimmick he has been known to use).
What makes the unapologetic presence of an impossible low B in BWV 572 so perplexing is that at two other moments in the same piece Bach ostensibly writes his way around notes that were unavailable to him on the organ. For example, the climax of the movement is a prolonged march up the pedalboard, both beginning and ending with a deceptive motion from D to E. The top E was not within the compass of the majority of organs Bach knew. Is it significant that he deftly avoids it in b. 172?
BWV 572, bb. 157–175; SOURCE: cropped scan of NBA (as above), p. 135; my highlighting added.
Maybe, but not necessarily. Satisfying as it is to play that long scale up, I find something even more satisfying about the leap down in b. 171: it suggests that a cadence is imminent (in a way that just another whole note would not), yet once more the resolution is avoided—and the downward leap enables Bach to reach the lowest(?) note of the pedal (b. 175) pretty quickly by means of another scale down. The overuse of the word awesome has made it trite, but I think this is a passage that deserves the adjective in its truest sense. Whether or not the high E was available to Bach, he has made a virtue of not calling for it here, and brings the manual tessitura down at precisely the same moment, so that it can expand outward again.
This expansion happens over a long dominant pedalpoint, and again the register change in the pedal appears as if Bach might be avoiding an impossible note:
BWV 572, bb. 176–185; SOURCE: cropped scan of NBA (as above), p. 135; my highlighting added.
Because of the economic use of the so-called “short octave,” many German instruments in Bach’s time lacked the rarely-needed bottom C-sharp—and sometimes the D-sharp as well. (The huge pedal pipes were, after all, the most expensive to build.) This might explain Bach’s leap up an octave in b. 184 . . . or then again it might not, as the octave motion again intensifies the advance of a cadence which is then rudely interrupted. In any case, the low C-sharp is not there—as, for example, it is not on this 1722 Silbermann pedalboard [at right]. Curiously, though, the earliest known copy of BWV 572—a copy made by Bach’s cousin Johann Gottfried Walther—has a low D whole-note throughout b. 184, even though the ensuing C-sharp is thus a dramatic leap up.
Browsing through the sets of performing material for the much-revived early cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis,” BWV 21, I note that the various sets of performing material are inconsistent about this sort of problem: in an early version, a cello and organ are both given a non-existent low B-flat [top row, left and right respectively, the last note in the images]; in a later transposed version, the copyist of the cello part (transposed up) has an erroneous D when C would have been reachable [bottom row, left—the wrong note is circled]; and a copyist of a basso continuo part (transposed down for Chorton pitch) replaced corresponding non-existent low A-flat up an octave [bottom row, right].
SOURCE: Composite of original parts for BWV 21/viii b. 14 (and context) all in D-B Mus.ms. Bach St 354 (sigla from the NBASer. I Bd. 16 critical report linked to corresponding Bach-Digital image): top left A12; top right A13 (autograph); bottom left A19; bottom right A26
For a bona fide example in which Bach was compelled to devise a creative solution to accommodate a melody that would otherwise go below the range of the instrument consider these two versions of the conclusion of the opening ritornello of the “Deposuit” from his Magnificat. In its original version (BWV 243a—the Magnificat in E-flat), the unison violins end powerfully on their lowest note, the open G; when the work was revised in a downward transposition to D major (BWV 243), the needed low F-sharp wasn’t available, so Bach conceived a dramatic swoop up two octaves in compensation:
SOURCE: composite of cropped scans from NBASer. II Bd. 3 (ed. Alfred Dürr, 1955); top, BWV 243a (p. 46); bottom, BWV 243 (p. 108)
The cantata “Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?,” BWV 155, yields a puzzle that would truly flummox us if we lacked contextual evidence. In the bassoon obbligato for the second movement duet (a movement that always has me thinking that Horace Rumpole is about to enter), at one point Bach reaches down for a low G, fully a minor third below the B-flat that is conventionally the bottom note of the instrument. Notice here—the very last note of the top staff—that in the autograph score Bach has taken pains to clarify what note he has written, marking it “G” directly above the note with the three ledger lines:
You can find references here and there positing a “semi-contrabassoon,” but that instrument as such is unknown for Bach. (There is an extant Thuringian contrabassoon dating to 1714, but much of this solo is too high for it.) Nonetheless, as Bruce Haynes has emphasized, “Bach consistently distinguished the ‘Fagotto’ from the ‘Bassono’ by key/pitch . . . [with] the latter a m3 lower” (p. 139). The “Bassono” is thus, if not a semi-contrabassoon, in effect a “sub-bassoon.” Although the NBA volume for BWV 55 makes no comment at all regarding any of this, the curious low G in the passage above must be a consequence of that most vexing subject, the difference between Kammerton und Chorton pitch. It would help, of course, if the original performing parts for this cantata survived to confirm this; in this case they don’t, but in another pre-Leipzig cantata, BWV 31, we have woodwinds parts notated a minor third higher than the rest of the ensemble. (BWV 150 is preserved with a similar transposing bassoon line in a score apparently copied from parts.) BWV 55 must thus have been conceived for a low-pitch bassoon so that the sounding G (in terms of the rest of the ensemble) would be just its bottom B-flat. The highest note of the solo, the sounding D (two and half octaves higher), would be then just the high F—high but well within the normal playing range of the instrument. Problem solved.
Or not. None of this answers the most important question for the player hired for the gig: How do I play this? The advice in the NBA regarding BWV 31 seems almost absurdly obvious: “die zu tief liegenden Töne . . . des Fagotts müssen durch Stimmknickung umgangen werden”(p. vi). Roughly “you have to get around the bassoon notes that are too low by tampering with [more literally bending] the part.” So we bend the truth just a bit. My guess is that only the conductor needs to be told that.
I think I can remember the exact moment that I first heard the Prelude to Bach’s E Major solo violin Partita (BWV 1006), and with the help of the Internet Movie Database, I can determine the precise date: 6 March 1986. I see that it was a Thursday—which it must have been, as it was at 9 p.m. on Thursdays that WGBH’s series Mystery (then hosted by Vincent Price) aired on South Carolina Public Television—and it was must-see viewing in the Kuykendall house. On that evening in March, the segment being broadcast was “The Red-Headed League” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes production (Granada Television) starring the late, lamented Jeremy Brett. And in the middle of that episode there is a reenactment of Dr. Watson's account (in the 1891 short story) of a Sarasate recital at St. James’s Hall, to which Holmes goes because "I want to introspect":
But I remember being puzzled. I knew that piece already from a recording featuring organist E. Power Biggs, on which he was playing the Sinfonia from Cantata no. 29, “Wir danken dir, Gott”:
For this post, the penultimate installment of my slowly-progressing
I want to consider a few instances where Bach’s reworking of a text took it so far from its original version (to the extent that we can actually know the original) that with just one version before us we would never be able to guess another. This is surely such an example. The solo violin prelude (Bach’s autograph is dated 1720) seems complete, idiomatic, and perfect in itself; and yet Bach returned to it around 1729 and transfigured it—allocating the moto perpetuo to solo organ, and then conceiving a four-part string texture around it as part of a wedding cantata (BWV 120a). Not stopping there, he then expanded it yet again to add oboes, trumpets and timpani for BWV 29 (1731). The new orchestral texture has a motivic integrity of its own, with new ideas that seem like they were all there from the start, but are nowhere implicit in the original violin solo. Thus I knew the third version first, but the first version—once I heard it—seemed entirely natural. I am even tempted to go a step further: because of its novelty to me as I heard it then, the earlier version seemed superior.
We’re accustomed to all manner of cover versions, where one artist takes the work of another in order to recreate it in a new style, putting their personal stamp on it. (I borrow the title of the post from Franz Hasenöhrl’s ingenious quintet arrangement of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche; “yet again, in a different way.”) But here Bach was covering himself. His stylistic mastery was so wide that he could put his personal stamp on both. What kind of mind was this that would transform its own product so completely that it becomes something new, utterly coherent in itself, without any hint that it wasn't alway thus?
Another example that I first came to know entirely in its later (it would seem) version is the Triple Concerto (BWV 1044) in A minor for flute, violin, and harpsichord—the same combination of instruments featured in the fifth “Brandenburg” concerto (BWV 1050). I remember hearing it for the first time sometime when I was in high school, when I bought a mid-price disc on which the concerto served as filler material, supplementing a reissue of two of the orchestral suites in a recording by Trevor Pinnock. As the opening ritornello played, I recall thinking “Why haven’t I heard this piece before?” When we got to the slow movement, I thought “... but I have heard this piece before—this is one of the organ trios”:
SOURCE: (l.) Organ trio in D minor, BWV 527/ii from NBA Ser. IV Bd. 7, p. 35; (r.) Concerto for flute, violin and harpsichord in A minor, BWV 1044/ii from NBA Ser. VII Bd. 3, p. 142.
And, once I read the liner notes, I discovered that the outer movements were also reworkings of other material—the curious Prelude and Fugue in A minor (BWV 894). Although it is impossible to establish the chronology with absolute certainty, it seems that the concerto is the transfiguration of earlier material rather than vice versa. That said, the solo keyboard prelude is a remarkable work—more like a concerto, in my opinion, than his “Italian Concerto” (BWV 971), having not only a ritornello construction, but also the virtuoso outbursts so characteristic of some of his other keyboard concertos.
SOURCE: excerpt of BWV 894/i, from NBA Ser. V Bd. 9.2, pp. 56-57.
(Actually, I had originally expected this post to be about just this first movement of BWV 894, but I will have to return to it some other time. Its textual complications would take too much time to write up at the moment, and time is at a premium at the end of the academic term.)
Among the remarkable examples of Bach's redeployment of his ideas are the missa settings compiled in the late 1730s and 1740a, drawing largely upon cantata movements of the 1720s, now retexted. A chart in the critical report of the relevant NBA volume is a handy visualization of Bach's sources for the four missae, BWV 233-236:
SOURCE: Emil Platen and Marianne Helms, eds., Kritischer Bericht for NBA Ser. II Bd. 2 (1982), p. 16.
Of all of these reworkings, two are particularly striking to me—and yet again I had become familiar with the second versions (Latin missa) before I knew the first (German cantata). Both examples are re-texted with the Latin Gloria in excelsis Deo / et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis: “Glory to God in the highest / and on earth peace to people of good will.” In both cases there is a marked change in the musical setting reflecting a distinction between the heavenly realms (in excelsis) and those below (in terra)—but this change was already part of the cantata source material that Bach was reusing.
Example 1: Gloria from the A-major Missa (BWV 234) and the sixth movement of cantata “Halt im gedächtnis Jesum Christ” (BWV 67)
In the cantata, placid, triple-meter sections accompany a single bass singing “Friede sei mit euch” (“Peace be with y’all,” as this Southerner feels compelled to translate it), while the bustling 4/4 sections set the other three soloists pleading for Jesus to deliver them from all manner of anxiety.
SOURCE: beginning of BWV 67/vi, from NBA Ser. I Bd. 11.1, pp. 43-45.
In the mass, the opening ritornello—which in the cantata had received no text—now accompanies the the in excelsis text, while the 3/4 section (which had been about “peace” from the first) is now et in terra pax. It is very effective—and all the more astonishing for not having been originally conceived that way.
SOURCE: beginning of BWV 234/ii, from NBA Ser. II Bd. 2, pp. 17-19.
Example 2: the G-major Missa (BWV 236) and the opening chorus of cantata “Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild” (BWV 79)
This is a very similar example—and rather than taking up space with scans, I will just embed two recordings. In the cantata, the initial vocal entrance on fairly long note-values (where we first hear the text “Gott der Herr”) contrasts markedly with all the activity of the unusually long ritornello that has preceded it. In the mass, that ritornello is merged with the in excelsis clause, so that the long note-values become (as above) an apt setting of et in terra pax. It is hard to for me to grasp that it hadn’t always been thus.
The transfiguring capacity of Bach’s genius boggles the mind. With such examples, it is reasonable to try to look behind any oddity for what might have been a source version. Surely the most notorious example in this regard is the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), which may be the most universally recognizable work of all organ repertoire. Rather like that of Beethoven's fifth symphony, the opening gambit of BWV 565 is known to wide swaths of people who would otherwise claim no familiarity with “classical music.” Of course, they may well not associate it with J. S. Bach. In popular culture it seems associated with the movie cliche of the mad organist... which inevitably brings me back to Vincent Price, even if he was a late-comer to this particular parade:
It seems fitting, though, with Vincent Price now before us, that I confront a musicological mystery: what lies behind the text as we now know it of BWV 565? There is no autograph in Bach’s hand, but a manuscript from about 1740 in the hand of Johannes Ringk (1717-78)—a tangential connection to Bach—puts the work in the larger Bach circle, and it is attributed explicitly to “J. S. Bach” on Ringk’s title-page. So it may actually be by Bach, but it is a curiosity in many respects and certainly an outlier among his organ works. Peter Williams (pp. 155-159) has enumerated the oddities (form, style, a curious simplicity, texture, idiomatic plurality, and harmonic idiosyncracies), as well as some possible explanations. So is the work a transcription for organ of a string original? Certainly many violinists have been happy to stake claim to it as a show-piece. (Google it.) Most of these [re-?]transcriptions are transposed up a fifth to A minor, to suit better the range of the violin. On viola or cello D minor works well—allowing, of course, for the other modifications to an unaccompanied string instrument. Alternately, might the work just imitate string writing? (A legitimate complaint from singers is that Bach writes for the voice as if it were a violin. Actually, he tends to write for everything as if it were a violin. The solo parts of “Brandenburg” Concerto no. 2 are a locus classicus in this respect.) When Ringk attributed the work to Bach, did he think Bach was the arranger or the composer? And to what degree has the arranger—assuming there was one—“improved” upon the source text?
None of these questions about BWV 565 bother me very much. I enjoy multiple texts, different translations, various takes on things. The piece can be great on the organ—whether in the rather staid style of E. Power Biggs or the flamboyant approach of Virgil Fox, or in any number of interpretations in between or beyond. It can be compelling on electric guitars or the accordion; the harp or the glass harmonica. In that way it reminds me of some of the issues Ryan Bañagale brings up in his study of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue—the almost gravitational pull the work exerts to bring all manner of interpretive artists into its orbit. Consider that Stokowski’s orchestration of it was given pride of place in Disney's 1940 Fantasia. (I prefer Henry Wood’s.)
Even if I don’t listen to it very much—and almost never play it—BWV 565 is a larger-than-life work. It has a cultural presence far out of proportion to its significance among more than a thousand BWV numbers. But when it comes down to it, a host of creative interpretations of BWV 565 are not as interesting to me as Bach’s own covers I discuss above, the product of a single mind. Bach doesn’t even seem to have called attention to the transfigurations he enacted. All in a day’s work, I guess.
This tenth installment in my slowed-but-still-proceeding
further explores an idea that crossed my mind as I was writing the fourth installment, which examined the two “AMB” notebooks. Toward the end of that post, writing about one of the two incomplete copies of the aria “Schlummert ein” (from BWV 82) in one of these notebooks, I wrote:
Several pages later the aria appears a second time, although this time AMB did not finish the copy. The vocal line breaks off midway through bar 60 (at the end of a page); the unfigured bassline breaks off after 28 bars. It seems likely to me that it was added in later, as it too breaks off at a page-turn: waiting for the ink to dry before turning the page, she was needed elsewhere and never completed the project. (Similarly, I wondered, are the five missing appoggiaturas in her first copy merely a sign of a practical notational issue? That is, might she have used a different pen-nib for the appoggiaturas, so that there was a reason to leave space and move on, coming back to fill them in later? I don’t know the Bach literature well enough to know if this has been explored, nor have I seen it discussed in other eighteenth-century sources.) [On the image on the left, the vertical blemish in the middle of my red circle where the appoggiatura ought to be does not seem to be an erasure—and there is no such blemish in the other four instances.]
SOURCE: cropped scans of "Schlummert ein" b. 40 in AMB2 p. 108 (f. 55r) [with absent appoggiatura highlighted] and 113 (f. 59v) from Bach-Digital.
The example above is in the hand of Anna Magdelena Bach. In the past several months of exploring Bach sources (particularly in his own hand), this issue about the absence of small-note ornaments has recurred with such regularity that I find myself with a short catalogue of data points. I should stress that I’m thinking exclusively of the “small-note” ornaments (i.e., those in which a note is written smaller to indicate that it is ornamental) rather than what one might call the “squiggle” ornaments (i.e., those indicated by an arbitrary symbol—trill, mordent, turn, Schleifer, etc.) These latter show up regularly in composing scores, and thus (I am speculating) did not require a change of nib to notate. (And nota bene: Pen-nib was not quite accurate in my earlier post, as really it is quill-nibs that are at issue.)
Indeed, much of this post is really just speculation, as I do not have much to go on. I remember a moment in a graduate school seminar when I voiced some idea for which I had assembled a similar paucity of evidence, and the professor (rightly) shot it down with the line “That’s not a theory; that’s speculation.” The contempt with which he enunciated the word still sticks with me. For some reason, I enjoy reliving that moment in my memory—maybe because it was an important lesson I needed to learn.
I have also written in this blog about the dangers of amateurism in music scholarship—yet I will wallow in amateurism in this post. As I’ve said before, I am no Bach scholar; his music is an inevitable topic in a blog such as mine, as the amount of textual research to which his Nachlass has been subjected is truly staggering. There is just so much for me to write about. Like Everest, he’s there. But in this post I find myself writing speculatively, without any underpinnings in the literature.
A few weeks ago I was studying the new Bärenreiter facsimile of BWV 20 (which reproduces the autograph composing score of the cantata together with the original manuscript parts and the two wrappers). Although it wasn’t what I was looking for, I was startled by a consistent discrepancy: the small-note ornaments in the parts were not in the composing score. These ornaments were authentic—there for all to see in the parts (the collective work of the composer and four copyists). But of course the parts were where these marks needed to be in order to be heard because they would not be played directly from the score. This brought to mind my earlier idea about the smaller nib: would it have been more trouble than it was worth to put the small-note ornaments in the hastily-written score? (Indeed, the number of instances of small-note ornaments in the composing score is exceedingly small: mvt. 1 / b. 92 / Vln. I; and a handful in mvts. 5 and 10.)
I have made no general survey of the Bach works for which both a composing score and an authentic set of parts survive; that task is certainly beyond what can be done with a blog that is very much on the side of my obligations. But that the parts supply this sort of information when the scores may not is noted by Moritz Hauptmann, the original chairman of the Bach Gesellschaft edition, and the editor of this cantata in the second volume of the BG (1852):
SOURCE: detail of "Vorwort" (p. xiii) to BG vol. 2, from scan available via the IMSLP.
[Third and fourth sentences; roughly:] “...Where in addition to the score the original parts were also available, these were conscientiously consulted. The parts are of importance not only for the appoggiatura markings and the figuring of the basso continuo, of which the score seldom has any; they also serve to verify unclearly-written notes and lyrics [in the score]....”
A particularly striking example of this in BWV 20 is the sixth movement, the alto aria “O Mensch, errette deine Seele,” which is replete with small-note ornaments in both the BG and the NBA, both of which give proper editorial deference to the parts over the score in this respect. As a sample, observe (if you can make it out below) just the opening bars of the BG, the autograph, and the original Vln. I part:
SOURCES: (top L) cropped screen-shot of BG Bd. 2, p. 314 from IMSLP; (top R) cropped scan of Bärenreiter 2017 facsimile of D-LEb Rara I,14; (bottom) cropped screenshot of original Vln. I part f. 2r. from Bach-Digital. [Note also that the trill in the score b. 3 is dutifully copied into the part; the trill in b. 2 is Bach’s added ornament (the identical mark as in the score) to the copied part, and thus not in the score.]
All of this brought to mind a startling difference between the early version of the St. Matthew Passion and the version universally familiar from Bach’s c. 1736 fair copy score. The sole extant source for the early version is a copy by J. C. Farlau made some ten or so years after Bach's fair copy “revised” version was prepared. Originally the NBA issued the early version only as a grey-scale facsimile of Farlau’s score (which at the time—1972—was attributed to Johann Christoph Altnickol), although it has subsequently been issued as a newly-edited volume in its own right. It has been recently recorded by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr, who (on the promotional video for this release) notes the absence of some of these appoggiaturas:
“I find a lot of things sharper in focus and more dramatic in color, whereas in the later version things have been softened up with appoggiaturas and more rococo ornaments. So generally I find some things are a little bit more shocking, and a bit clearer.” (at 04:21)
On that video we hear what must be the most “shocking” example of this textual difference, which is the duet “So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen” (no. 27a, near the end of Part I). Here is the beginning as it appears in Bach’s c. 1736 manuscript, replete with "small notes" in the imitative woodwind lines:
And the same passage as it appears in Farlau’s copy; nary an appoggiatura in sight:
SOURCE: BWV 244b no. 27a, bb. 1-5; detail of copy by J. C. Farlau (D-B Am. B. 6) from Bach-Digital.
To Egarr, this is an intentional stylistic difference: Bach has added (new) ornaments as he revised the work in 1736; they weren’t there in 1727. If we take Farlau’s effort to have resulted in a faithful copy of Bach’s 1727 score (and there is nothing at all to suggest he was scoring up from parts), we can grant that these were not in that source. But maybe (I speculate) these appoggiaturas were in Bach’s conception of the work in 1727, but included in the no-longer-extant parts rather than the score. As in BWV 20, the parts were where it would really matter, as this would be what the players read. The later fair copy autograph is justly celebrated as a beautiful calligraphic copy, and it is reasonable that Bach would make more effort to present a more accurate text in it than in run-of-the-mill scores. But if the original 1727 score was anything like that of the hastily-prepared BWV 20—and if indeed adding such notes meant using a different nib—I would not really expect them to be there. That is not something Farlau would have known to take into account as he prepared his copy. One thing that is consistent about Farlau’s copy is the incredibly scarcity of small-note ornaments. In my examination of this source, apart from the more profusely ornamented no. 39 (the alto aria “Erbarme dich”), I located only nine examples in the whole work. (If you want to see a list, click here. My list also includes some instances where the 1736 fair copy score lacks some of the small-note ornaments transmitted in the corresponding(?) set of parts.)
My speculative nib idea also suggests a new way at looking at (for example) the profusely ornamented chorale “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein,” BWV 641 (in the Orgelbüchlein). This is the chorale which was later revised as the so-called “deathbed chorale” (“Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich,” BWV 668), stripped of the ornamentation, and with imitative interludes interpolated between the chorale phrases. (Christoph Wolff has dealt with this situation very lucidly.) But what strikes me as I look at the page is that the ornamented melody seems to have been written with two different sized quill-points—and am I imagining things to perceive a different tint to the ink? Here is the full page:
And here is a detail of the third measure leading into the fourth. The downbeat of b. 3 seems to be a normal-sized note-head; all of the notes of beat two, and the first note of beat 3 and beat 4 similarly seem to be the default size, as well as all of the notes in the other voices. But the rest of the figuration seems significantly smaller:
Turning to Peter Williams's excellent survey The Organ Music of J. S. Bach, I’m delighted to see that he has noticed the same thing:
“The coloraturas, unlike most of those in BWV 614 and 622, centre around turning phrases that lead to the next note of the cantus, which is placed where it would be even if there were no decoration. This is a particular technique that can be understood in two ways: these embellishments could be taken out in order to produce BWV 668, or they could be added in order to produce BWV 641, where they are written as smaller notes in P 283.” (p. 311; emphasis mine)
We might imagine (uh... speculate), then, that Bach initially wrote something like this:
only later to squeeze in the more florid version. His use of the smaller nib would then be merely a practical matter—not indicating “small-note ornamentation,” but simply cramming a lot of notes into an insufficient space. It is certainly hard to believe that he would have intended such a florid second beat of b. 4 when originally laying out the work in this manuscript, as he ends up not just in the margin but in the gutter of the binding of his “little book.”
Another imponderable question: do the squiggle ornaments which would then have been written mainly over quarter notes apply also to my putatively new florid line (i.e., resulting in the face-value reading of the page, as it is invariably played now)? Or does the filigree supersede the squiggles (or some of them), themselves mere remnants of a previous version?
One thought leads to another, and the suggestions here about BWV 641 strike me as support for those organists who would add ornamentation to another Orgelbüchlein chorale, BWV 639 “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” in which the first half of the chorale is decorated with a few passing tones but the second half is left in bare quarter notes. I have always taken this to mean “you get the idea... go thou and do likewise.” The Orgelbüchlein was explicitly a teaching volume—and, like Bach's other pedagogical works, transmitted not in print but by students (and subsequently their students) copying it out. From the NBAcritical report for this work and from perusing some of the scans available via Bach-Digital, I see that some of these extant copies (NBA sigla B2, L2 and M1 particularly) do indeed have a few added squiggle ornaments and passing tones in the second half—although, of course, the presence of such decoration on the page is not the prerequisite to the performance of a more decorated version.
And so I sit and speculate. And piece after piece comes before my eyes in which the similar small-note ornament discrepancies recur, although the conditions are never quite the same. It should be noted, for example, that solo music need not have the ornamental details worked out that ensemble music (particularly ripieno parts) would need. It is also worth keeping in mind that unlike our current rehearsal situation, where a pencil or other writing implement should always be handy, Bach's players may have had no writing implement at hand (surely not any requiring an inkwell!), and so it paid for ensemble parts to be as carefully prepared as time allowed.
I have been wondering about what evidence might refute this whole idea. Certainly an example intermingling squiggle and small-note ornaments in close proximity could be inconvenient for my proposal, although it might be hard to show that the two different sorts of notation were written in the source in the same sitting. (At this point in a draft of this post, I digressed with an example from BWV 873/1, the C# minor prelude from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I took it out because it was too dense for the flow of this already-too-dense post, but if you want to see it, here it is.)
I will close with an example I stumbled across while flipping through Walter Emery’s classic study, Bach’s Ornaments. As with most treatises on ornamentation, Emery’s subject is how an ornament should be interpreted in performance. That is not my subject, but I turned to Emery nonetheless because of his keen eye for the notation. I have quoted Emery on this blog before—and will surely do so again. In this book, he is scrupulously cautious about the sources he quotes, remarking sagely “one cannot deduce Bach's habits from ornaments that he did not write. As things stand, this means that unless a writer on ornamentation has made himself competent to edit every work he wishes to quote, he must take examples only from reproductions of autograph manuscripts, and from a few texts whose reliability can easily be tested. The Bach examples in this book have been chosen in this way; with a few exceptions, included for special reasons and expressly described as questionable, they are authentic beyond all reasonable doubt.” (p. 7)
Thus his Ex.157 caught my eye, in which small-note appoggiaturas surround a single hook (b. 11):
SOURCE: cropped scan of Walter Emery, Bach's Ornaments (Novello, 1953), p. 77.
But Emery was cautious as ever:
“As the hooks have been translated into small notes by all but the most conscientious of editors, it is impossible to say, without access to large numbers of autograph manuscripts, whether Bach made any distinction between hooks and small notes. If the BG is to be trusted, he used them indifferently in the tenor aria of Cantata 67 [his Ex. 157].” (p. 76)
If the BG is to be trusted, he writes, and even before looking up the BG I went straight to Bach-Digital—a resource which gives precisely the “access to large numbers of autograph manuscripts” that Emery craved. There I found a scan of the original Violin I part, copied by J. A. Kuhnau, and what did I see?
Source: BWV 67/ii, Violin I part, end of b. 1; cropped scan from Bach-Digital
Emery was right to be wary. In fact, BG is unreliable here: the small-note E appoggiatura is actually there—but I can’t help wondering if Kuhnau's “hooked” flags for the sixteenths might have caught the editor (Wilhelm Rust) out on this one instance—the hook from the f# flag somehow being turned into an appoggiatura hook on the d#. Otherwise it is hard to explain whence the hook in BG came. It does no damage in performance: the appoggiatura is authentic; it's just Rust's notation of it that is not. Even more curious, actually, is (for example) bar 5 of the same aria, where Rust converts the original small-notes all into hooks—rather than, as Emery would have expected, the other way around:
SOURCE: BWV 67/ii b. 5-6; (top) BG vol. XVI, p. 228 (at IMSLP); (bottom) original Vl. I part (as above).
Rust actually does this switch inconsistently throughout the aria in both Violin and Oboe lines, and I can see no logic to it. The lesson I take from it, though, is that I don't have the time or the energy to plumb the depths of the small-nib question further. At least for now.
ADDENDUM 03 February 2019
Another example to keep in mind: BWV 125/ii: the original parts are preserved replete with small notes; but other sources transmit the presumed reading of the (now lost) score, lacking the graces. See NBA Ser. I Bd. 28.1, pp. 66-74 (cf. 46-54).
