29. Fine print

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.

SOURCE:  Bärenreiter promotional photo

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:

SOURCE:  BWV 244 no. 27, bb. 1-5;  detail (p. 55) of Bach's fair copy (D-B Mus. ms. Bach P 25) from Bach-Digital. 

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:

SOURCE:  BWV 641, p. 115 of Bach's autograph of the Orgelbüchlein (D-B Mus. Ms. Bach P 283); scan from Bach-Digital

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:

SOURCE:  detail (bb. 3-4) of BWV 641 (D-B Mus. Ms. Bach P 283); scan from Bach-Digital

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 NBA critical 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).

15. A Bach family playlist

which is the fourth installment of the Settling Scores

A few weeks before the birth of my first child, I self-centeredly started compiling some playlists.  What music could I share with this new creature?  I knew all along that part of my motive was really to accustom him or her to the music I liked, or at least avoid overexposure to music I didn’t like.  We managed to avoid most of the baby toys that play music, although I remember a music box mobile on the Pack ’n[’] Play that had an infuriatingly incompetent harmonization of “Rock-a-bye baby.”  I used that in class to see if my students could transcribe and critique it.  Truly horrible, but at least it was worth something.

A few of my playlists were intended for bedtime and even to leave playing after Gentle Morpheus had sped his airy flight hither.  Although all sorts of pieces came to mind, one of the challenges of nineteenth-century repertoire was that many pieces that would have been perfect restful music otherwise had a loud outburst at some point.  (That disqualified the slow movement of Beethoven’s 9th, for example, as I feared the fanfares about three quarters of the way through would rouse a snoozing baby.  And for a similar reason I had to edit the applause off of the ending of a track of the Oscar Peterson Trio playing “In the wee small hours of the morning.”)  Still, there was plenty to choose from.  I suspect that my children’s familiarity with Dowland’s solo lute repertoire is probably excessive, and I wonder if in later life a lute recital would put them to sleep.  I hope not.

There was a good bit of Bach on the lullaby playlists, which gradually accumulated more and more items over the years.  One of the first items to be included was the aria “Schlummert ein” from Bach's cantata “Ich habe genung,” BWV 82.  This aria is to me the ideal musical manifestation of solace; listening to it I feel like Bach is gently cradling me in his arms.  (Hear a performance of it here.)  Of course the text is not about sleep at all, but points instead beyond the grave.  And he had stood at the graves of many of his loved ones, and fully half of his children.

Slumber on, you tired eyes,
Close softly and blessedly!
     World, I remain no longer here
     And take no more part in you
     That can serve my soul.
Slumber on, etc.
     Here I endure suffering,
     But there I shall see
     Sweet peace, quiet rest.
Slumber on, etc.

It was in the course of reading totally unrelated to all of this that I stumbled across a reference to a version of this aria found in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, where it is appears—twice!—in her hand.  This detail spurred me to look more at that source—a source that was very different from what I had assumed.  Indeed, brought up in piano lessons playing selections from “AMB,” I didn’t realize that there were actually two AMB notebooks—1722 and 1725—and that they are rather different from each other.  (As Robert L. Marshall put it, the first book seems to be compiled for AMB, while the second is compiled by AMB.)  Although selections from the AMB repertory have been published many times and in many forms, even in the Neue Bach Ausgabe the presentation of these collections is still a bit misleading.  Both books are included intact in the fourth volume of NBA Serie V, the series encompassing “Klavier- und Lautenwerke” [“works for keyboard and for lute”]  The title for this particular volume (edited by Georg von Dadelsen) is “Die Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach (1722 und 1725).” 

Indeed, Clavier-Büchlein [“little keyboard book”] appears on the title page of the 1722 collection (hereafter AMB1), as it had also for the 1720 collection Bach made for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann (hereafter WFB).  

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the title page of the AMB1, from Bach-Digital.  (This seems to be AMB's decorative script.)

There is no title page for the 1725 collection (hereafter AMB2).  Might that be significant?  (There is no evidence in the structure of gatherings to suggest that such a page is lost.)  AMB2 differs markedly from the others, both of which are limited to keyboard music. 

For AMB2, Notenbuch (notebook)—the term used in the old BG edition (and in all of the practical editions I have glanced at)—is much more apt than the NBA’s imposition of Klavierbüchlein.  First, the contents are more varied, with a substantial number of vocal works in addition to both large and small keyboard works.  The 67 leaves remaining in the notebook (with evidence that 8 leaves have at some point been removed) comprise more than fifty items:

1)  four multi-movement keyboard works by JSB:  early versions of two Partitas (BWV 827 and 830) in the composer’s hand; early on Anna Magdalena copied the first two French Suites (BWV 812 and 813), although the second breaks off in the middle of the third movement.

2)  a melange of short keyboard works by various composers (almost invariably without attribution), including nine menuets (the one made [in]famous as “A Lover's Concerto” turns out to be by C. F. Petzold), six polonaises, three marches, the C major prelude from WTC bk. I, the “Aria” theme of the Goldberg Variations (in AMB’s hand, and possibly copied from the now lost autograph of the Variations),  a rondeau by F. Couperin (unattributed; and not merely a copy, but with the left-hand figuration adjusted somewhat), a sketched rigoudon apparently by Johann Christian Bach, and an ornamented setting of “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten” (BWV 691), copied by AMB from WFB, and so much taken over into the Bach organ repertory that it appears also in the NBA volumes of individually transmitted organ chorales (Serie IV Bd. 3).  Among these are four pieces now attributed to C.P.E. Bach (including a familiar Marche in D Major, BWV Anh. 122), which appear also in the new C. P. E. Bach:  The Complete Works, classified as Juvenilia (in I.8.2).  Compiling his own catalog of keyboard works in 1772, C.P.E. remarks “I have suppressed all works before the year 1733, because they were too youthful.”  He is too harsh. This is a good tune:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 115 of C.P.E. Bach:  The Complete Works, Ser. I Vol. 8.2, Miscellaneous Keyboard Works II, ed. Peter Wollny.

3)  A number of vocal works:  probably the most famous of all is the song “Bist du bei mir,” but in addition to the recitative and aria from BWV 82 with which this post began (and to which I will return), the rather frivolous “Aria di G[i]ovannini,” the contemplative smoking song “So oft ich meine Tobackspfeife,” and several spiritual songs and chorales not dissimilar to those of the Schmelli Gesangbuch (1736).  (Indeed, one of these—“Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen”(BWV 452, but cf. BWV 299)—appears in Schmelli’s collection in a negligibly different form.)

4) Finally there is a nuptial poem in AMB’s hand (“of rather dubious taste” is Marshall's assessment) and two sets of rules regarding figured bass, 

Moreover, the accumulation of material in the source itself involved at least eight hands.  The bulk of the material appears in the hand of AMB herself (whose notation is memorably described by Spitta as “without a trace of feminine ineptitude” [“ohne eine Spur weiblicher Ungeübtheit”]—the ultimate chauvinist compliment).  JSB has a much more limited role (discussed below), and the other six hands include AMB’s sons Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, as well as her stepson C.P.E.  Two of the anonymous scribes (designated by Kobayashi as Anon. L23 and Anon. L24) apparently appear only in this source.  I speculate:  could these be among JSB’s daughters?  Certainly the book seems reserved for the intimates of the family, as the other known hand is that of Bernhard Dietrich Ludewig (in just one item, the tobacco “aria”); Ludewig was a Bach pupil who acted as tutor to the younger children as well, and that familiarity might explain his appearance here.  

AMB2 seems to have taken a much longer time than AMB1 or WFB to fill up.  Only five blank pages remain, mainly scattered among the last 30 pages.  Like Bach’s other manuscript collections, it is evident that whole sections of pages were originally left blank so that additional items could be added later (although in WFB and the Orgelbüchlein the staves were drawn on the all the pages, where in AMB2 they were not).  Consequently the sequence of items presented in such a collection is not generally an indication of the order in which they were notated in that source, and AMB’s handwriting evolved enough during the years that it the NBA editor (Georg von Dadelson) was able to conclude which items were late entries in her hand.

In AMB2, J. S. Bach’s contribution is limited:  the first 41 pages present two of the partitas (BWV 827 and 830) in his hand, but thereafter his hand appears only a few times.  Here he copied out a menuet by “Mons. Böhm.”  (Is this his one-time Luneburg teacher Georg Böhm?  David Schulenburg mentioned the possibility of one Johann Michael Böhm, who was Telemann’s brother-in-law, but deleted that suggestion in his second edition.) This is often among those pieces young piano students learn.

SOURCE:  scan of AMB2 p. 70 (f. 35v) from Bach-Digital.

This is one of the few items in AMB2 to bear an attribution, so it has long been known not to be by Bach himself.  In many editions (up to the present day) the rest of the contents are tacitly or explicitly attributed to Bach even when this is now known not to be the case.  The famous “aria” Bist du bei mir (which appears in Anna Magdalena’s late hand) is not by Bach, but since 1915 has been known to be the work of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel--a musician clearly held in high regard by JSB, who apparently used an entire cycle of his cantatas in Leipzig in 1735-36, and possibly more.  I would be eager to hear more of his work, although it seems that a large portion has been lost.

SOURCE:  scan of AMB2 pp. 75 (f. 38r) and 78 (39v) from Bach-Digital.

 A curious aspect of AMB2—and again differentiating it from both AMB1 and WFB—is the number of works that appear more than once in different versions, generally one right after the other.  Sometimes these are transpositions with other slight differences.  The chorale “Gib dich zufrieden,” BWV 511 appears again immediately below as BWV 512, transposed down a minor third—and both in JSB's hand.  The smoking song (BWV 515) appears first—or at least on the verso side, although that need not be first—in Ludewig's hand and without lyrics; it appears on the facing recto as a collaboration of AMB (melody, transposed up a fourth, and with the first stanza of lyrics) and JSB (slightly different bass line). Without the lyrics one might have assumed this piece was just a menuet; indeed, maybe it was originally, and the lyrics were only inserted after the fact—that the anonymous text existed independently of AMB2 is clear from Telemann’s (earlier?) setting of the same text (TWV 36:142).  

Most curious of all, however, is “Schlummert ein.”  It appears twice—not in immediate succession, but with intervening pages.  Both appearances are the work of AMB, in her younger hand and the transposition for both is consistent with “second version” of the cantata (catalogued in the Bach Compendium as A169b, dating from the early 1730s)  The first appearance includes the recitative, which is complete although unfigured.  (The first few notes of the bass line bear traces of corrections: evidence of transposition errors?)  Following this is the aria, although the ritornelli have been omitted so that only the vocal portions remain; and although AMB provided a staff for a bassline, she left it blank.  At some point, however, someone sketched in a bassline in the first three bars:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of AMB2 p. 105 (f. 53v) from Bach-Digital.

This bassline seems to have been newly composed, as it was not copied or transposed from the cantata itself—or if it was, it was done incompetently.  In any case, it does not continue.

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.

So why is this aria entered twice, neither time complete?  Why write it out a second time rather than finish the first?  And how useful would they be without the bass?  (It doesn’t really matter that it isn’t figured, as the harmonies are intuitive.  I had no problem playing a passable version at sight—at least until the bass ran out.)  Was the bass not needed here because it could be read off of a separate part?  (It might be needed in the recitative to help keep the singer and continuo together, but less essential in the aria with its metrical predictablity.)  Was the bassline added to the first three bars of the first copy a pedagogical exercise for one of the children?  And does the presence of the aria here indicate a favorite of AMB’s (who never got to sing it in church), or of one of the trebles of the family?  It raises many more questions than it answers, even if it is a fascinating glimpse into domestic music-making chez Bach.  For nineteenth-century commentators, this glimpse seems to have been voyeuristic, and their writings tend to emphasize the pious contents and downplay the vulgar.

But taking it altogether, this family album is a sort of playlist—not exactly the sort I was compiling for my own family, but in its patchwork assembly still more akin to a playlist than any other of JSB’s collections.  Indeed, AMB2 really isn’t one of Bach’s collections:  his was the primary hand in the compiling of WFB and AMB1, but not this one.  The overlap between these collections suggests some particular favorites.  Although no one work appears in all three, a number of pieces appear in two of the books—in each case in different hands:

WFB and AMB1:  BWV 841 (a menuet—possibly an early work of Wilhelm Friedemann?)
WFB and AMB2:  BWV 691 (an ornamented chorale); and BWV 846 (the first prelude of WTC1)
AMB1 and AMB2:  BWV 812 and 813 (“French” Suites nos. 1 and 2, albeit incomplete)

Did other Bach family collections exist that have since been lost?  I wonder what further oddities and intimacies they might have contained.  Not that it is any of our business....