27. “Let the rain pitter-patter”

The weather is fright’ning—

The thunder and lightning

Seem to be having their way;

But as far as I’m concerned,

It’s a lovely day.

Even with that epigram, this is the ninth installment in my now-slowed-down-but-still-appearing

This post is essentially a bit of the pre-history of this blog, and there will be more of that in time.  For now I want to tell about the time that the rainy weather changed my professional trajectory entirely.  And, as Irving Berlin put it, oh, what a break for me!

I have mentioned in passing that I am an organist, although this is very much an avocation.  I don’t really keep up my organ playing as I ought to, and for the first time in 15+ years I’m in a job where (with no organ on campus) I can’t just walk down the hall to practice.  I need to make more effort, and to make time for it.  But I do occasionally fill in for various congregations when the organist has to be away.  And so it happened one Sunday (25 October 2015, to be exact) that I was on the bench of a big downtown church in Greenville, SC for both morning and evening services.  I had a busy afternoon in between, so I had to choose music that I could pull together on minimal practice time.  Usually for me this means Bach, as you can pull the stops and go:  you don’t have to work out complicated registration changes unless you want to.   As on that day the church was celebrating Reformation Day (about a week early), Bach was a natural choice anyway.  I had learned from experience that this congregation didn’t listen to the postlude, so I chose something short and to the point for the evening service:  one of Bach’s settings of Luther’s German paraphrase of the Gloria, “Allein Gott in de höh sei Ehr.”  There are a quite a number of Bach settings extant, but I chose BWV 715, one of the easiest, flashiest, and most striking.  It is one of the six (extant) so-called “Passaggio chorales” which probably manifest something of the sort of chorale playing that got Bach in trouble with his congregation in Arnstadt in February 1706 after his Buxtehude pilgrimage:

“Reprove him for having hitherto made many curious variationes in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation has been confused by it.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 46]

In these works, the chorale is stated with a dense and aggressively dissonant in-your-face style harmony, with interspersed flamboyant runs and arpeggios.  (Hear Ton Koopman performing this work here.)  Think Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in a high Baroque vocabulary.

That morning between services as I was running through the music for the evening, it occurred to me that the dense chromatic writing would make good fodder for an exam I would be giving on the following Tuesday to my Theory II students.  Then I had an extra credit idea:  spot as many sets of parallel fifths/octaves as you can.  And would my students notice the disguised B-A-C-H in the last two bars?

SOURCE:  conclusion of BWV 715; cropped scan of NBA Ser. IV Bd. 3 (ed. Hans Klotz, 1961), p. 15. 

And so it happened that on the next morning I was sitting in my office working on the theory midterm exam, and I remembered my idea for the analysis question.  I discovered that I had left my organ score in my car.  Looking out the window to see a cold rain pouring down, I thought I’ll just go to the IMSLP and use the old complete works edition.  I had been playing out of the Bärenreiter offprint of the NBA text.  (These offprints sometimes include corrections, although the text in this instance was identical with that reproduced above.)  When I pulled up the BG edition, however, all but one of my parallel fifths/octaves were gone:

SOURCE:  the same passage; a marked-up cropped scan of the BG edition (1893), taken from the scan available on the IMSLP.  Those parallels in the NBA text that do not appear in the BG text are indicated in red (although I have not marked other variants here).  The parallel octave that remains is indicated in blue.

Although I had followed Bach research casually over the years, Bach was not at all my area of study.  I was intrigued by this, however, as it seemed like a pretty good example of different editorial ideologies:  the “1893 Bach” couldn’t have possibly intended such solecisms; the “1961 Bach” was a brash rebel.  It was a music textual equivalent of the difference between these famous representations:

SOURCES:  (left) Carl Seffner's 1908 statue of Bach in Leipzig, photo from wikimedia commons; (right) Bernd Göbel's 1985 statue of Bach in Arnstadt, photo from wikimedia commons.

Of course I wanted to know more, and promptly set aside the midterm.  The college library had many of the NBA scores but none of the NBA critical reports.  I e-mailed Patricia Sasser, the music librarian at Furman University just up the road, asking whether she could send me a scan of the page or two covering BWV 715 from the relevant critical report.  Within about an hour she graciously responded, but it only whetted my appetite.  When I asked for a few more pages and explained what I was looking into, she replied “That sounds like a paper for AMS-SE [the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society].”  At first I thought it was nothing more than a diversion from the work I ought to be doing, but having spent an hour pulling out all of the editions of Bach’s organ works that I could lay my hands on, I realized I was obsessed.  It did become a paper for AMS-SE, with the most complicated hand-out I’ve ever put together.  Here’s the first page of it:

There are six extant passaggio chorales attributed to Bach:

• Allein Gott in der höh sei Ehr, BWV 715
• Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722
• Herr Jesu Christ dich uns zu wend, BWV 726
• In dulci jubilo, BWV 729
• Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich BWV 732
• Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her, BWV 738

These six works offer a great perspective on the editing of Bach’s works because 1) none of them survives in his hand (although they do survive in manuscript copies from quite close to him) and 2) the texts conveyed by surviving sources are problematic at best.  None of these works was published until the 1840s.  Indeed, BWV 715 (together with BWV 726) actually did not make it into print until the 1893 BG volume.  These two chorales survive together in a manuscript copy by Johann Peter Kellner—neither a student nor a close colleague of Bach, but his sometimes flawed copies are nonetheless important sources for much of the Bach repertoire (as Russell Stinson has shown).  However audacious Bach’s chorale playing might have been, Kellner’s copy of BWV 715 is manifestly deficient—not only frequently omitting voices haphazardly, but giving harmonies that are implausible in their own terms or as the result of the counterpoint.  The start of Kellner’s manuscript is this:

SOURCE:  (left) detail of Kellner's score, from Bach-Digital; (right) my Finale transcription

Here the irregularity of the part-writing (at times three, or even just two voices) is surely suspect:  voices don’t merge, but they just disappear for a few beats, mid-phrase.  When the same melody is reharmonized a few bars later,

SOURCE:  as above, this time arranged vertically

that initial quartal harmony is, to the say the least, eccentric.  There are, indeed, enough problems here to make me wonder if Kellner was working from a fully-realized score at all, particularly as the four extant chorales apart from the two Kellner copied exist in two separate lines of transmission—one with full realized harmonies, and the other employing figured bass.    If Kellner was trying to realize the figured bass, though, he did it exceedingly poorly in this case.

All of this warrants further discussion, and this summer I was at work on an article about the editing of these works over nearly two centuries, but I had to put it aside when a new source for BWV 715 emerged.  It appears in a practical notebook of 154 pieces (mostly chorale settings) described on its label as being from the repertoire of Bach’s student Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809—an exact contemporary of Haydn).  This notebook is dated 1800, and is the work of one Johann Christoph Bach (1782-1846), an organist in Bindersleben.  Speaking of eccentricities, this Bach copies some of the pieces across the full spread of an opening (verso and recto), so that there are only four systems in image below, with the gutter of the binding crossing through each of them:

SOURCE:  BWV 715, in my composite of verso and recto digital scans from the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden 

What I note about this source:

1.  It lacks the harmonic eccentricities of Kellner’s copy, 
2.  While the number of voices is inconsistent (including the disappearance of the bass line entirely in the fifth phrase—was this ever played from this score?!?), there are never fewer than three in the harmonized sections, and there very often more than four (five, six, and at one point eight), and
3. While such a thick texture means that parallels are inevitably present, the parallel fifth in the final cadence which had been eliminated in BG is here eliminated by means of precisely the same strategy—arriving at the tenor C early, echoing the cadence which had concluded the fourth chorale phrase.

Curiously, BWV 715 is the only one of the 154 pieces in this collection to be attributed to J. S. Bach.  There are several other passaggio chorale settings—not surprising, as it was a common practice for chorale playing during the eighteenth century.  If Kittel was the conduit through which BWV 715 entered this collection, it suggests that JSB didn’t regard this showy style of harmonizing and peacock preening as a youthful indiscretion set to annoy his Arnstadt elders:  he was still conveying it to his students in Leipzig in his very last years.

Nevertheless, these pieces have been tainted in some of the Bach literature as unworthy of the master.  On that rainy October morning, one of the first commentaries I pulled off my shelf was candid:

I have much more to say about these pieces, and eventually I need to get around to writing that article, if it doesn’t get scooped.  In the meantime, I reflect upon the strange intersection between weather and career:  if it hadn’t been raining on that Monday morning, all of the subject matter of the blog would have remained for me just items of idle curiosity, and you wouldn't be reading this now.

Long as I can be with you, it’s a lovely day.

23. Tidbits at the first milepost

The subject of this eighth installment of the Settling Scores

comes about by chance.  Quite independently of this project, I had set myself the task of studying all of Bach’s extant cantatas in more-or-less the sequence in which they were performed during his first few years in Leipzig.  (I will go back later to pick up the earlier cantatas—those, anyway, that he isn’t known to have reprised.)  This project occurred to me a few years ago when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, a stimulating Bach book by John Eliot Gardiner, who himself undertook a different sort of Bach cantata pilgrimage in the Bach anniversary year, 2000.  Gardiner’s book was for me a healthy resituating of the context, especially as he gives much more attention given to the vocal works than to the instrumental works.  (Moreover, Thuringian potato farming had never before crossed my mind.)

Gardiner inspired me to go through the cantatas methodically, giving myself basically a week with each—looking, of course, for specific ways in which Bach himself developed over the years.  I splurged on a copy of the NBA study scores of the complete set of cantatas (and when Bärenreiter tweeted asking for pictures of “towers” of their publications, I obliged with this [at right]—even just my NBA holdings now loom over my middle child).  And so I started in the first week of June with his first cantata for Leipzig, BWV 75 Die Elenden sollen essen, written for the first Sunday after Trinity, 1723.  (At the moment I’m a little ahead of the liturgical calendar, as Easter was later this year than it was in 1723, but this allows me to get Advent in the right place.)

On Sunday, 4 June, I listened to the cantata and read what Alfred Dürr had to say in his magisterial survey.  On Monday, I went through the score and listened again, and then that evening idly opened the relevant Kritischer Bericht of the NBA.  I wasn’t expecting my listening project to be a topic for this blog, but already I find interest stirred by textual minutiae—the “trees,” so to speak, that may well prevent me from giving Bach's “forests” my full attention.  I think I have written already that I can’t look at a critical report without finding something that is curious enough to make me want to say “Hey, listen to this....”  (In this respect I am particularly blessed to be married to a musician; she is used to hearing me go on about such trivia, and while she may not particularly care about it, she at least understands why I do.)

SOURCE:  marked-up Bach-Digital screen-shot

Curiosity no. 1

C. P. E. Bach inherited the now-extant autograph score after his father’s death, but the work is mislabeled in the subsequent catalogue of C. P. E.’s estate.  It is listed there not as “Die Elenden sollen essen” (the first words to be sung) but as “Was hilft des Purpurs Majestät” (the beginning of the recitative that follows the opening chorus) because his economical father had used the empty staves under the chorus to write in the recitative.  “Was hilft” are thus the first words to appear in the score, and the hasty cataloguer of the estate skipped the title page and copied merely the words on the first page of the score, not recognizing that the beginnings of two consecutive movements appeared together.  The first page of the autograph score is shown at right; I have added a red-dotted line to divide the opening chorus at the top of the page from the first recitative at the bottom, and I have circled the quoted text.

Curiosity no. 2

The BG edition omits fourteen bars in the middle of the first aria.  This was discovered by Robert L. Marshall more than 50 years ago, but IMSLP users (or those who use Kalmus reprints of it) may well be unaware of the omission.  It is an egregious textual error:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of extract from first aria (no. 3): (left) BG volume XVIII, detail of p. 166, downloaded from IMSLP; (right) digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 106 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6, p. *132).

This parablepsis is easily explained, as it relates directly to curiosity no. 1:  the opening chorus is so long that not only the first recitative but also this first aria is notated one-system-at-a-time at the bottom of the page.  The first movement ends on the same page (a verso) that concludes with b. 111 of the aria.  On the facing recto, Bach continues with b. 112 at the top of the page—for the first and only time in that aria.  Wilhelm Rust, the BG editor, overlooked this and the following system as he was preparing the third movement, as for the previous eighteen pages he could safely tune out everything at the top of the page (material that he would have already dealt with for the first movement).  He didn’t realize that he had omitted fourteen bars, but he must have noticed something was wrong, as he altered the text in order to make syntactic sense.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite scan of pages from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 18-19).

Curiosity no. 3

Hypermeter (that is, groupings of bars in strong-weak patterns).  Much of this is obvious without turning to the critical report—for example in no. 10, an alto aria notated in 3/8 time, but in which the only bar that is a simple 3/8 bar is the very first one.  All the rest are grouped together by means of short barlines into groups of two (effectively 6/8) or, occasionally, three (= 9/8).  I am reminded of Beethoven’s instruction ritmo di tre battutte in the Scherzo of Symphony no. 9—although, with no timpani thundering away here, it may be less obvious to the listener.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of the first two systems of no. 10, cropped from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 29 and 30);
I have marked some of the short barlines and circled the first of the quasi-9/8 groups.

Although Bach does not always notate these short barlines in all three staves, the pattern is clear.  He is thus more consistent in his usage here than, for example, in his autograph of the Corrente of the B-minor solo violin partita, BWV 1002  There the hypermetrical paired bars of the musical material is clear enough, but it is hard to know from his notation whether he intended short barlines to indicate the hypermetrical groupings (as above in BWV 75), or if these were merely a matter of notational convenience—that is, a short barline (not always the same length) in the immediate (i.e., vertical) proximity to each note on either side of that barline.  Without pushing any argument here beyond this, I have circled below in red those short barlines that are placed close to the notes before and after; in green the strongest evidence that these barlines are indeed intended to be short (together with the fact that his full barlines tend to extend either above or below the staff, or both); and in blue the two instances where the full barline before the putative “weak” bar is again proximate to the notes on either side (in both cases the d and c in the staff).

SOURCE:  marked-up cropped screenshot of autograph fair copy of BWV 1002/iii, bb. 1-32 (P967 f. 5r  from Bach-Digital)

A further hypermetrical curiosity in BWV 75 is a change Bach made as he prepared the manuscript.

SOURCE: cropped scan of the beginning of no. 5, from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

Although it manuscript is very clean (and Stephen Crist has unraveled fascinating evidence by comparing this clean manuscript with the unusually messy manuscript of BWV 76, the cantata that followed it for Bach’s second week in Leipzig), as he began no. 5, a soprano aria with obbligato oboe d’amore, he first notated the solo part with the time signature C, immediately cancelling it by superimposing 3/8.  (As shown at right, the other two staves have 3/8 from the start.)  I have puzzled over this.  This aria proceeds in a regular pattern of 4-bar groups (with few deviations); was he thinking of [re-notating?] it as a compound meter, essentially 12/8?  (If so, why not just write 12/8?)  Was it merely a slip of the pen?  Very curious indeed.

Are we having fun yet?

Curiosity no. 4

Neither the BG nor the NBA text accurately reflects the autograph’s rhythmic notation for the Oboe d'amore in movement five (the beginning of which is pictured above), but this is because the editors sought to present what they surmise Bach intended rather than what he ultimately left on the page.

SOURCE: cropped scan of no. 5 (bb. 16-18), from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

The opening figure of the oboe d’amore ritornello recurs as a primary motive in the solo vocal part, but by the time he wrote the vocal entry he recognized that the placement of the dotted rhythm made for very awkward text declamation.  Consequently he moved the 32nd-note earlier in the figure [at left].  The discrepancy between the oboe figure and the vocal figure continues in the autograph until b. 59 (an incipit indicating the repetition of the opening ritornello), at which point he wrote the revised (that is, vocal) rhythm into the instrumental part.  In no instance, however, does the autograph show any signs of an alteration to the rhythm.  Both the BG and NBA presume (reasonably, but not inevitably) that the rhythm should be made uniform throughout.

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 108 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6 p. *134)

These were not the only curiosities in this work (for example, how the 32-bar choral setting concluding each part of this cantata was later transformed into the 39-bar setting that concludes BWV 100)—and of course one wouldn’t have to resort to the critical report to find all of these.  Still, I think it is a pity that musicians generally seem to regard the critical reports—even without looking at them—as dry if not actually intimidating.  Admittedly they are not generally page-turners, to say the least.  For Americans, it doesn’t help that they’re often in a language other than English, and even when they are not the technical language can seem impenetrable.  But it doesn’t take long to get used to them with their specialized vocabulary and the ubiquitous abbreviations.  After I got this blog off the ground, a colleague remarked to me that “it’s sort of like you read the critical reports so we don’t have to.”  I hope that’s not the case.   And I greatly respect those editors like Jonathan Del Mar who make a genuine effort to make their commentaries as lucid and even winsome as possible—editors, that is, who seem to take real joy in communicating with others about their work, rather than regarding the critical report as a contractual obligation of unutterable drudgery.  There is buried treasure in many critical reports, a subject I will return to time and again, I’m sure.

17. Just kidding?

The fifth installment of the Settling Scores

Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 biography of Bach has many over-the-top claims which bash the reader over the head with Bach’s supreme genius.  Today I consider just one of these, drawn from information related by C. P. E. Bach.  I’m prompted to write about it now because of some evidence that I have stumbled across in recent months supporting my doubts about it.

In the chapter concerning “Bach the clavier player,” Forkel records that

“He even went so far, when he was in a cheerful humor and in the full consciousness of his powers, as to add extempore to three single parts a fourth part, and thus to make a quartet out of a trio.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 435; cf. C.P.E.'s letter in ibid, p. 397]

And he repeats it in the chapter concerning “Bach’s character”:

“If he was in a cheerful mood and knew that the composer of the piece, if he happened to be present, would not take it amiss, he used, as we have said above, to make extempore, either out of the figured bass a new trio, or of three single parts a quartet.  These, however, are really the only cases in which he proved to others how strong he was.”  [Ibid., p. 460]

Maybe there is some basis in fact to this story—even if it was only a single occasion—but it seems to me literally incredible otherwise.  Forkel even acknowledged elsewhere that the sort of polyphony that allows the adding or reducing of parts has to be very specially constructed:

“In his compositions in four parts, you may sometimes even leave out the upper and lower part and still hear in the two middle parts an intelligible and pleasing music.  [Only the two middle parts, Herr Forkel?  An example would be nice....]  But to produce such harmony, in which the single parts must be in the highest degree flexible and yielding towards each other if they are all to have a free and fluent melody, Bach made use of peculiar means, which had not been taught in the treatises of musical instruction in those times, but with which his great genius inspired him.  These means consisted in the great liberty which he gave to the progress of the parts.  He thereby transgressed in appearance, but not in reality, all the long-standing rules which, in his time, were held sacred.”  [Ibid., p. 443]

As an organist I am occasionally in a situation where a descant is added for the final verse of a hymn.  Sometimes the descant line is printed in the hymnal on an extra stave above the four-part harmony.  What I notice invariably—because it is indeed inevitable (that word that dogged my previous post)—is that in order to give the descant line a musically-satisfying melody, it will at times borrow note-progressions from the alto or tenor (or even the soprano), creating intrusive parallel unisons or octaves.  Really, the right way—if I may be so bold—to add a descant is to compose it as a counterpoint to the melody, and then write a harmonic background for those two lines together.  There are many examples of this done well, but too often I’m playing the other type.  And it beggars belief that a hypothetical trio by Forkel’s “composer of the piece, if he happened to be present” would accommodate an added fourth line with its own integrity while not making substantial alterations to the original parts.  I have naively accepted this as literal truth for too long.  No longer:  two examples I recently noticed suggest to me that four voices was too many for Bach to shuffle around in his head.  Heresy?  Maybe so.  But look at these:

1)  strict canon:  “Christe eleison” from the Missa in A, BWV 234

I love this movement.  For years I have used it on the very first day of Theory I, when students generally have no theoretical background, may only read one clef (if that), and may never have seen a full score.  I throw it at them and ask them to observe:  What do you see?  And there’s much to be seen.  It is a strict canon beginning with the bass soloist, and with ensuing entries in the tenor, alto, soprano, and finally two flutes in unison—each of these entries a perfect fourth higher than the last, and with the sustained harmonies in the strings never really relaxing into anything that feels like a resolution.  Even the apparently simple question “What key is this in?” defies a simple answer.  Also interesting is that the canonic line echoes its opening arpeggio (and more) twice even as the voices accumulate, so that the arpeggio occurs not just five but nine times, as if in stretto.  (This is partially illustrated below, but if you’re curious you’ll save time just looking up the movement yourself.  Good stuff.)

One day, sitting in the Subaru service department with the NBA Kritischer Bericht at hand—as you do—I was killing time looking at the variant readings for this movement.  The report documented a series of systematic corrections in the autograph, commenting merely (and I paraphrase) “the corrections in bb. 80, 82, and 85 are related:  Bach altered his conception after the fact, as the fourth canonic phrase initially began with a leap of a fourth.”  [p.27]  Each note circled below (the autograph score on the left, the NBA text on the right) was originally a fourth lower in the autograph.

Composite of BWV 234/i; SOURCES: (left) cropped scan of autograph score f. 3v (bb. 75-85) from ULB Darmstadt scan;
(right) scan of Barenreiter TP 266 (off-print of NBA Ser. II Bd. 2), p. 11 (bb. 80-85); for both, I have added the red circles.

Here is the bottom system of the same page of the NBA (bb. 83-85), which presents the complete “Stimmtausch block” of the canon, marked-up to show the canonic phrases.  [I appropriate the term from Robert L. Marshall’s landmark study of Bach’s compositional process (v. 1, p. 134f.]  “1” is how the line begins (originally in the basses, now in the flutes), continuing to “2” and so on to accumulate five canonic elements (although each voice is a fourth higher than the previous one).

SOURCE: cropped scan of Barenreiter TP 266 (off-print of NBA Ser. II Bd. 2), p. 11 (bb. 83-85)

The NBA does not go on to explain why Bach would have made the changes.  Bar 85 makes the reason clear:  the A in the alto (the pick-up to canonic phrase “4”) was originally an E, but the leap up from E to A would cause parallel fifths with the tenor leap from A to D.  This became an issue only when he wrote the fifth canonic phrase, but apparently he didn’t notice it in b. 82, so had to go back to fix it there; the retrospective change in b. 80 was only necessary to preserve the strict canon, and was thus presumably the last to be made.  The lesson here?  Bach could juggle a number of voices in his head as he constructed the canon, but clearly had to get it down on paper to get it right once too many voices had accumulated.  In other words, he had not conceived phrase 5 when he first notated phrase 3.

2)  permutation fugue:  chorus Himmelskönig, sei willkommen, BWV 182/ii

This is a similar example—this time more complicated because the lines had to work as invertible counterpoint rather than just a canon.  Arthur Mendel discussed this example in a 1960 Musical Quarterly article; his point was really just that an autograph that Spitta had taken to be a fair copy was really a composing score, as the types of corrections were not copying errors but rather directly related to the substance of the counterpoint:

Composite of BWV 182/ii bb. 1-5; SOURCES: (top) cropped scan of f. 1v of autograph score of BWV 182 from Bach Digital; (bottom) cropped scan of Mendel’s reconstruction of the first reading of these bars (Musical Quarterly (1960), his Ex. 1, p. 292); for both I have added the accolades on the left.

 Mendel notes a pattern of corrections:

“...we see that while there are no corrections in the first two measures, in measure 3 the last note in the soprano has been changed from an original a1 to d2, and there is a corresponding change in the alto in measure 4 and the tenor in measure 5.  In the bass in measure 6 [not shown above], however, at the beginning of the second brace, there is no corresponding correction; here the corrected reading found in the other three voices was written in to begin with.  If we look a little further, we can see that at the end of measure 4 not only the alto but also the soprano, and at the end of measure 5 not only the tenor but also the alto, have been corrected.  But again in measure 6, the tenor bears no correction corresponding to those in the alto in measure 5 and in the soprano in measure 4.”  [p. 292]

and then reconstructs Bach’s compositional process:

“Bach starts out as follows, writing in the first brace the whole four measures of the soprano, then the rests plus three measures of the alto, then the rests plus two measures of the tenor, and finally the rests plus the subject in the bass.  [This produces Mendel’s Ex. 1, given in the above composite.]  But already on the fourth beat of the bass's subject-entrance (the first beat of measure 5) there occur consecutive octaves between bass and soprano.  Apparently he next changed the soprano, inverting its motion to read d2-f#2 instead of f#2-d2.”  [pp. 292f.]

He then charts further changes to get from his putative original to the eventual (I hesitate to say final with Bach) reading.  He concludes

“It is surprising to find that in writing such a permutation fugue (he had already written several that we know, and the scheme remained a favorite one with him) he had not worked out the invertibility of his four melodic elements until he set pen to paper to write a score that is neat enough to have been taken by Spitta for a fair copy.” [p. 293]

Granted, Bach was clearly very good at this.  The anecdote transmitted by Forkel suggests a contrapuntal understanding of such profundity (being able to spontaneously convert a trio into a quartet by the addition of an extra line) that writing out such examples into fair copy would not be surprising at all.  For too long I’ve taken the Forkel story at face value, but when I stop to think of it it really can’t be true.  “Just kidding,” as my students sometimes say when corrected; maybe Forkel would say the same.

ADDENDUM  20 August 2017

In the course of my Bach cantata pilgrimage, I have run across an interesting example going the other way—something originally in five real parts (SATB with a descant) in which Bach later deleted the fifth part, and had to make only very minor adjustments in two spots for the four-part version:  compare the closing chorale of BWV 12 with its later use in BWV 69.

ADDENDUM  28 November 2017

Then again, the seven-part scoring of the final chorale of BWV 70 more than amply demonstrates Bach’s ability to write integrated-yet-disposable lines.  Even so, there were some small alterations to the inner parts when this harmonization was included as a four-part chorale as no. 347 of the Breitkopf edition of Bach's chorales (1784-1787).  See NBA Ser. III, Bd. 2, Teil 2, where this chorale appears on p. 200.

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....