In the last days of July he Finnish pianist Tuija Hakkila left behind the endless summer twilights of her own country for a few days of lower latitudes and earlier nightfalls in Upstate New York. At Cornell University last Saturday she played a recital of Romantic piano music on a sultry, sweat-soaked evening. Her program moved from sentimental miniatures, none more poignant and affecting than Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), and towards Franz Schubert’s epic Sonata in C Minor in which tender moments must brace themselves against the coming tempests of physical and emotion challenge.
Made in Vienna a few years after Schubert’s untimely death at the age of thirty-one in the same city, the piano whispered tenderly between the gusts. Gorgeous to look at and listen to when played with Hakkila’s finesse and expressivity, the instrument’s mahogany veneer has darkened lustrously over these two centuries. The strings inside the rich brownish-auburn case endlessly entrance when struck with such finesse and fire, expressivity and elegance.
Though she plays the repertoire from either side of 1800 with admirable expertise and intuition, Hakkila does not confine herself to any musical period. She performs contemporary music on big, black pianos, and earlier this year released a recording with her colleague Sirkka-Liisa Kaakinen-Pilch of J. S. Bach’s Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (BWV 1014-1019) for which she used a reconstruction of a German piano of the first half of the eighteenth century when the new invention (“the harpsichord that could play both loud [forte and soft[piano]’, i.e., fortepiano) was just a few decades old.
After the concert, Hakkila’s presented me with a copy of the CD for which I had written the program notes. I have now listened to the recording, one of pathos and panache, of precision and exuberance—and one that casts these familiar works in a new sonic light, expanding our access to the proliferating musical sounds available to J. S. Bach, a musician keenly receptive to, and critically engaged with, the technological developments of his day.
Here are my notes to that CD. They should count as a full-voiced recommendation for this captivating and illuminating account of music that sounds as pathbreaking now as it must have three hundred years ago.
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All but the last of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six sonatas for violin and harpsichord (BWV 1014-19) commence with slow movements of intense feeling. This is music of implication and inference, the emotions no less real for their apparent lack of specificity. There is pleasure in the paradox: even without a text, the music sings.
The first sonata begins with the keyboard alone extending across four bars: at the start of the collection the violin is silent, listening to the keyboard’s paired sighing figures. In pieces of this genre the harpsichordist was expected to improvise supporting chords with the right hand above the written-out bass line taken by the left. But as an accompanist Bach was famous for devising countermelodies on the spot. Codifying this skill on the composed page in the violin and harpsichord sonatas, Bach provides an obbligato part—an independent, fully worked-out right-hand line—that elevates the keyboardist from accompanist to equal. Why shouldn’t the violinist be made to admire in silence as a new genre is forged?
After dutifully waiting its turn, the violin insinuates itself into this pathos-saturated atmosphere on a high f-sharp held out for a bar-and-a-half until finally unleashing a torrent of intensely expressive notes—a challenge? a confession? a cry for help?—that spills downward to the tonic pitch of b-natural then leaps up the octave and holds again. Plaintive stasis alternates with terse outpourings in the violin above the relentless pleadings of the keyboard: profound melancholy as a form of delectation.
Bach will repeat something of this approach in the fifth sonata in F Minor, a contrapuntal colloquy for keyboard alone, the course of its argument tending downward. Rather than intruding from above as in the first sonata, the violin here enters on its G string (the lowest on the instrument) with a ghostly reminder emanating from the midst of the counterpoint that this is a piece for two to play.
The second and third sonatas are both in bright major keys (A and E). The A Major sonata is marked dolce (sweet), and is a confection that begins as a three-part canon over its initial entries, the violin first delivering the theme, which is taken up next by the keyboardist’s right hand then the left. Good taste needn’t shun complexity, the suave erudition does not cloy. Unlike the haughty fast fugues of the set, this counterpoint sounds forthright, even fragile.
The assured violin ascent at the outset of the third sonata is lofted by the keyboard’s booming bass pedal point and the gusts from the churning right hand figure heard four times in a variety of configurations separated by rests. The partners share in a poised eloquence so confident that it could almost be mistaken for arrogance.
The first movement of the fifth sonata is a more generic affair, a lilting siciliano in which the melody sings above a steadily arpeggiated accompaniment. Bach’s recourse to convention does not sap the heartfelt immediacy of this singing Largo, the keyboard dabbing shifting harmonic colors beneath the tableau’s central figure—the sensitive, serene violin.
The opening of the sixth and last sonata, which exists in two versions, dispenses with such ruminations and instead bursts out of the gate in an unbridled Allegro gallop in G major, leaps and runs and arpeggios echoing between keyboard and violin and then racing together in whirring sixteenth-notes.
The start of the concluding sonata is the exception that proves the rule: aside from this last opening movement of the set, we enter each of these sonatas slowly, even cautiously, with senses sharpened, attuned to the subtlest gestures, the most careful shadings of sentiment.
Yes, Bach will serve up an abundance of virtuosity and witty counterpoint in the brisk fugal frolics that close each sonata, as in the careening rhythmic games and other concerto-like thrills of the last movement of the third sonata, and the barely evaded chromatic collisions at the end of the fifth, and the rollicking, rusticated gigue that closes out the entire collection.
But it is the slow movements that delight and devastate, none more than that very first Adagio.
Bach’s legacy was literally bound up and into this collection and its slow movements. The copying and performance of these sonatas were crucial to the mission of memorializing him, but not merely as a matter of historical interest or archival fastidiousness. The most important of the first generation of legacy-makers was the composer’s second son, C. P. E. Bach, an assiduous curator of the scores he inherited. C. P. E. supplied J. S. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, with details of his father’s life as well as copies of his music. In a 1774 package sent to Forkel that contained the violin and harpsichord sonatas, C. P. E. included a letter that referred to them as the ”6 Clavier Trios,” and claimed them as among the best works of his “dear departed father” (des seeligen lieben Vaters). It was their enduring stylistic currency that so captivated C. P. E.: “They still sound very good and give me much joy, although they date back more than fifty years. They contain some Adagios that could not be written in a more singable manner today.” (Sie klingen noch jetzt sehr gut, u. machen mir viel Vergnügen, ohngeacht sie über 50 Jahre alte sind. Es sind einige Adagii darin, die man heut zu Tage nicht sangbarer setzen kann.” Bach-Dokumente III, p. 279). The son’s affection was not merely aesthetic. The manuscript that he dispatched by bumpy postal coach from Hamburg where he then lived to Forkel’s Göttingen, 150 miles to the south, had been cherished not just in thought, but also frequently performed from. C. P. E. Bach cautioned the recipient to handle the precious pages with great care.
In an age when the smallest details of musical style spawned heated debates, C. P. E. Bach’s assertion that music half-a-century old still held up against the latest tastes may seem like special pleading of his father’s case. Expressed in plain, direct German, the praise appears to me full of fondness and sincerity, but informed by a keen understanding of the eddying flow of history. That C. P. E. singles out the slow movements of the set should not be taken as an admission that the more bracing contrapuntal trio textures were outmoded—baroque curios as compared to the still-relevant Adagios. Even so, for the musicians of C. P. E. Bach’s generation the Adagio provided a window onto the soul, illuminating the essential artistry of the composer and performer. That his father’s sonatas could continue to move the most refined players long after his death proved his visionary genius not, as was usually asserted, on account of his undisputed mastery of polyphony, but because of his command of musical expression and emotion.
That the copy of the sonatas sent to Forkel in 1774 was well worn shows that it had been played and heard in C. P. E. Bach’s home in Hamburg and before that during his three decades in Berlin where he was keyboard accompanist to Frederick the Great, the flute-playing monarch who also favored Adagios above all other modes of musical performance. This particular manuscript is lost, but C. P. E. Bach had at least one other made by his Berlin copyist, Johann Friedrich Hering. Now in the Berlin State Library, Hering’s is a lovely and immaculate copy, though it includes only the harpsichord part (the companion violin part is lost). Its title page lists the obbligato harpsichord (Cembalo Concertato) first, above the violin (Violono solo).
This ordering accords with that on the title page of the surviving copy linked most closely to the composer: Sei Sounate [sic] | â | Cembalo certato [sic] è | Violino Solo. Bach himself inscribed only the last sonata (in its first version of six movements); the rest of the manuscript was prepared by Johann Sebastian’s nephew and student, Johann Heinrich Bach in the mid-1720s‚ that is, around the time of the genesis of the collection, that is, the “50 years ago” mentioned by C. P. E. Bach in his letter of 1774. C. P. E. Bach called these pieces Clavier Trios not simply because of the manuscript titles: the obbligato right hand of the keyboardist had replaced one of the instruments (violin, flute, or oboe) of the customary baroque trio sonata. It was fitting that the keyboard should set the tone at the outset.
J. S. Bach continued to revise the sixth sonata. As if to draw attention in retrospect to the collection’s elevation of the keyboard to full autonomy, he composed a brash new movement for harpsichord alone to replace the Corrente pillaged from his keyboard partita in E Minor (BWV 830) for insertion into the first version of the sonata. Bach’s composition of a new last slow movement was also instructive. The first version had given the harpsichord simply a bass line instead of an obbligato part for this movement, therefore contradicting the very title of the collection. In his revision Bach brought the keyboard and violin into intricately wrought dialogue around shared thematic material. It should come as no surprise that the movement is marked Adagio, and that the keyboard introduces the theme alone. The later version of the sonata survives in a copy made by Bach’s son-in-law, the organist Johann Christoph Altnickol. As C. P. E. Bach’s pride also makes clear, this was family music.
It is unclear exactly when the sixth sonata achieved its ultimate form, but Bach may have been fussing with it still in the early 1740s. This might in turn suggest that he continued to accord the collection great value, not least for its appeal to musicians of the younger generation.
Students, like Altnickol, who came to Leipzig to work with Bach took home with them copies of these sonatas. Johann George Ludwig Heinrich Schwanberg was already in his thirties and an established violinist at the Court of Braunschweig when he studied with the master sometime between 1727 and 1730. Anna Magdalena Bach made Schwanberg beautiful copies of the solo violin and cellos works (BWV 10001-1006; 1007-1012). Schwanberg’s artful copy of the violin part of the “Clavier Trios” (only the first three sonatas survive in his hand) is now housed in the State Library in Berlin under the same shelfmark (D-B Mus.ms. Bach St 162) as that of the keyboard part made by Johann Heinrich and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Later the beleaguered Director of Music for Frederick the Great in Berlin, Johann Agricola studied with Bach between 1738 and 1741 and also made a copy of the set (though his is missing the last sonata). Like his teacher, Agricola was keenly interested in technological innovation. In his annotations to the important book on musical instruments, Musica mechanica organoedi of 1768 by his colleague (and fellow Bach devotee) Jakob Adlung, Agricola tells us that J. S. Bach examined the first attempts at making fortepianos by the organ and harpsichord builder Gottfried Silbermann. According to Agricola, Bach admired the tone of these earliest German fortepianos but criticized their action as too heavy.
Initially aggrieved, Silbermann nonetheless dedicated himself to correcting these faults so that by the time J. S. Bach played another one of his fortepianos in 1747 in Potsdam for Frederick the Great and his court musicians (among them C. P. E. Bach and other leading figures of his generation—all of them, including the sovereign, masters of the Adagio), he is said to have expressed his satisfaction with the result. In his last years Bach even seems to have served as a dealer for Silbermann’s fortepianos in Leipzig.
Silbermann’s initial engagement with the fortepiano came in the early 1730s, just a few years after the genesis of Bach’s “Clavier Trios.” The sources of these sonatas uniformly name the keyboard part as being for Cembalo—harpsichord. Yet in his 1774 letter to Forkel, C. P. E. Bach uses the more encompassing term Clavier—keyboard. During this period while he was the Director of Music in Hamburg and a revered cultural figure in the city and across Europe, C. P. E. Bach entertained musically at his home, especially at the clavichord and fortepiano. His assistants continued to make copies of J. S. Bach’s music, including his chamber works, presumably for performance by C. P. E. Bach and his colleagues. Given the heavy use his personal manuscript of the Clavier Trios had gotten by the time he sent it off to Forkel, we can assume that these sonatas too were heard by the musicians, poets, amateurs, and friends of C. P. E. Bach’s circle. More than likely the Clavier used by C. P. E. for these pieces was the fortepiano, a keyboard endowed, like its quieter cousin the clavichord, with capabilities of dynamic expression that could bring out the singing qualities he so admired in these sonatas.
Whether the violin was joined by harpsichord or fortepiano, this was intimate music of the chamber, perhaps of the princely hall, and certainly of the bourgeois home—music of candlelight and conversation. Indeed, C. P. E. Bach’s house was a place famous for music and conviviality. By 1774 a man of sixty years (old by 18th-century standards), C. P. E. Bach was burnishing his father’s posthumous reputation not only with written words and through the sharing of scores, but also through musical performances at his Hamburg house. This was not just a duty, but, as he touchingly put it, a “pleasure.” And so it is for us, not fifty years on, but nearly three hundred since Bach assembled these six Clavier Trios that still sing from the shadows and from the light.
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