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| Bach Flute Sonatas
Can a universe spring from a single point? In the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at least, yes it can. That point could be a text, a handful of notes or an instrument: for each of the organ, harpsichord, violin, cello and flute, Bach fashioned a compre |
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| Bach Flute Sonatas
Can a universe spring from a single point? In the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at least, yes it can. That point could be a text, a handful of notes or an instrument: for each of the organ, harpsichord, violin, cello and flute, Bach fashioned a comprehensive body of work that became the core of the literature for successive generations of performers and composers.
After encountering the single-keyed transverse flute that had flourished in France from around 1670 onwards, he gave it a substantial presence far transcending the aspirations of flautist-composers such as De la Barre and Hotteterre. Within Bach’s flute world are to be found a solo partita, a trio sonata for two flutes, featured solos in the cantatas and larger sacred works, a central role in the Second Orchestral Suite in B minor, and membership of the brilliant trio – with violin and harpsichord – that leads the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, the Triple Concerto and the Musical Offering. And at the centre of it are the sonatas with harpsichord, sometimes in tandem with a cello.
However, in another faint echo of a conundrum from physics, pinning down their provenance throws up something of an uncertainty principle: in the two cases where Bach’s autograph fair copy exists, it implies an origin in another instrument or line-up; for the other sonatas, the flute is the only instrument suggested, but their manuscripts are by hands other than Bach’s. The musical material of the time often lacked a single, definitive form: it gravitated from one instrument or combination to another as circumstances demanded. Such flexibility occurred even with certain movements from the sets of six works that Bach liked to bring together as if to map out an instrument’s resources. But the flute sonatas form no such systematic group, and we do not know who first played them.
The finest and longest is the Sonata in B minor, BWV 1030, for flute and harpsichord obbligato, the keyboard “obligatory” in the sense that its elaborate music is fully written out rather than realised from a figured bass. There exists a copy of the harpsichord part alone in G minor, pointing to an early version of the work from around 1729, when Bach started directing the Collegium Musicum’s coffee-house and open-air concerts in Leipzig, though it is not known what the melody instrument was: from time to time it is taken up by oboists. Bach’s autograph of the B minor version, with copying errors confirming a G minor original, dates from around 1736, the year he was given the title of court composer to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden, the state’s capital, where the distinguished musical establishment included the celebrated French flautist Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin.
The work’s opening is a particular universe-from-nothing moment: the harpsichord’s flow of semiquavers steals in one note ahead of the flute’s upbeat quaver, as if somehow the music has been silently in progress beforehand. However, once the two complementary lines are under way, there is no stopping the flow of invention. The first idea functions like the ritornello, the returning orchestral section, in a concerto movement by Antonio Vivaldi. Indeed, the B minor is an example of the “sonata in the concerted style” particularly favoured at Dresden, where the violinist-composer Georg Pisendel had returned from studying with the Italian composer in Venice in 1716-17. But Bach was familiar with the vehicle for Vivaldi’s pop-music directness of appeal from at least 1713, when Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, two years before his death at the age of 18, had prevailed on his teacher to make keyboard transcriptions of various concertos brought back from Amsterdam.
As so often, the vital musical spark was generated by the effect of a Latin element, often Italian, sometimes French, on a non-Latin cast of mind. In taking up the concerto model, Bach makes it less four-square, blurring the distinction between occurrences of the ritornello and the intervening episodes for the soloist; the moderate pulse of the B minor sonata’s opening Andante provides space for him to embark on an exploration of the formula that at times sounds almost improvisatory in character.
The succeeding Largo e dolce is one of the transverse flute’s first great songs – an antecedent in spirit of a lyrical utterance like the flute entracte from Bizet’s Carmen in the following century. In the Presto finale, a severe duple-time fugue arrives at a half-close, after which the material reinvents itself in a quite different genre – a heavily syncopated gigue with two repeated halves. Throughout the work, familiar structures are handled with extraordinary boldness and energy.
The Sonata in E major BWV 1035 for flute and continuo looks both forward and back: its movements, unusually for Bach’s chamber works, follow the slow-fast-slow-fast pattern of the sonata da chiesa, the old church sonata, but the expressive idiom of the opening Adagio ma non tanto tends towards the lighter, North German galant style of which his composer sons were leading exponents. In the Siciliano third movement, Bach the contrapuntist makes himself felt in the bass line’s imitation of the flute at a bar’s distance, but otherwise the interplay between melody instrument and the cello-reinforced bass is less rigorous and the texture is lighter, with the harpsichord also filling in the harmonies.
A note on a 19th-century copy, the work’s principal source, indicates that it was written for King Frederick II of Prussia’s chamberlain, confidant and fellow flautist, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf. Bach could have produced it for a visit to Berlin in 1741, the year after his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel joined Frederick the Great’s growing musical establishment. The king was away fighting a war at the time, and Johann Sebastian’s famous visit that resulted in the Musical Offering came six years later.
For the Sonata in A major BWV 1032 for flute and harpsichord obbligato, there is an autograph – as with the B minor sonata, from around 1736 – but copying errors in the outer movements again point to an earlier version, in this case in C major. The central Largo e dolce movement’s constant key of A minor would have been consistent with the relative minor/major key relationship to be found in the other sonatas, and maybe the earlier line-up involved the recorder, the instrument displaced by the transverse flute. The autograph uses the vacant staves below the Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C minor BWV 1062 (Bach’s transcription of the celebrated double violin concerto), and about 46 bars are missing from the end of the opening Vivace: Philippa Davies and Maggie Cole use the completion devised by the eminent traverso-player Barthold Kuijken. Both this movement and the concluding Allegro display an exuberance appropriate to the “concerto-style” sonata.
The earliest of the sonatas appears to be that in E minor for flute and continuo, BWV 1034. Its first known source is a dependable copy from 1726-27, and flute solos from cantatas composed in Leipzig in 1724 suggest that the availability of a gifted player may have stimulated Bach’s interest. The work combines the sonata da chiesa and continuo features of the E major with the concerto style: if the first movement Adagio ma non tanto has something of the character of a cantata aria – once again momentarily sounding as if it could be the continuation of previous, unheard music – the influence of Italian string writing shows in the figuration of the second movement, and in the even-quaver bass of the succeeding Andante. In the playful finale, a second virtuosic Allegro, the flute momentarily finds itself chasing its own tail.
The outer movements of the Sonata in E flat BWV 1031 for flute and harpsichord obbligato are so close in character and construction to a trio sonata in the same key for violin, flute and continuo by Johann Joachim Quantz as to suggest that Bach may have been paying him some sort of compliment; no autograph survives, but the work may date from the early 1730s. Quantz, often referred to as the greatest flautist of his age, was a pupil of Buffardin at Dresden, from where he was lured to the court at Berlin at the end of 1741.
Another concerto-style sonata, the E flat major begins, like the A major, with the harpsichord giving out the ritornello. The central Siciliano is not only a striking piece in its own right, but opened the way – particularly through Carl Philipp Emmanuel, another significant flute composer – to intensively expressive music in a later idiom such as the slow movement of Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D K285.
It is very likely that there were other flute works among Bach’s lost chamber music, particularly since few manuscripts survive from his pre-Leipzig period (1717-23) at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. But however haphazard the circumstances in which Bach wrote his flute sonatas and their subsequent history, they have since emerged as brightly shining stars in the chamber music firmament.
Robert White |
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