BRANDENBURG: BACH FOR HARPSICHORD & STRINGS

It wasn’t until the Bach revival movement in the early 19th century—of Johann Forkel’s Bach biography of 1802, and Felix Mendelssohn’s performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829—that the name Bach began to mean J.S., rather than C.P.E. This Bach, his second surviving son, was a prolific composer, who, in 1740, gained employment at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin as a harpsichordist. 

C.P.E. Bach is one of those composers who falls between the cracks of periodised musical history. Yet, his influence is constantly understated, perhaps because his most influential work was not a composition, but an aesthetic treatise: On The True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, which was essential in shaping performance practices in the early Classical period. In particular, Philipp Emanuel was important in suggesting performers should align themselves emotionally with the music they are performing. (“A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved,” he wrote, such as in sad passages, where “the performer must languish and grow sad.”) He also helped codify some performance trends that we still come across today. “Ugly grimaces are, of course, inappropriate and harmful, but fitting expressions help the listener to understand our meaning,” he wrote. If you’ve ever remarked on why performers regularly perform with unsightly or unusual facial expressions, blame Philipp Emanuel! 

Bach was a prodigious composer both in the concerto form, and for the flute, a particularly popular instrument at the time—especially in the court of Frederick the Great—which Bach often rearranged existing concerti for. This concerto in D minor, written as early as 1747, is no different. Versions exist for harpsichord and flute, with contrasting scholarly arguments as to which came first. Spanning three movements—fast, slow, fast—the first is declamatory and technical, the second lilting (with liberal uses of ornamentation) and the third comes with a fluttering, nervous vitality. With its darting runs, juddering repetitions, crunching discords and loud ensemble exclamations, the concerto’s conclusion seems to prefigure some of the Sturm und Drang tempestuousness that Mozart and Haydn would deploy so effectively later that century. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

Telemann and his godson C.P.E. Bach had a lot in common: both studied law before pursuing music, both became key links between late-Baroque and early-Classical styles, and both composed prolifically—Telemann’s output is measured in the thousands. Alongside the reams of sacred music, instrumental suites, operas, and concerti, Telemann also wrote sets of unaccompanied instrumental fantasias, for violin, viola da gamba, harpsichord and flute. 

The second Fantasia of this set of twelve has four sections (Grave, Vivace, Adagio, and Allegro), with tempo changes aligning with changes of mood or character. This Fantasia in particular is a fantastic example of Telemann’s mastery of counterpoint, managing to keep multiple lines of melody spinning concurrently through regular changes of register. 

Hugh Morris 2024

Of all J.S. Bach’s famous children, Wilhelm Friedrich, the eldest son and half-brother of C.P.E Bach, has the most colourful reputation, as the black sheep of the Bach family. But is this reputation deserved? As scholars like David Schulenberg have pointed out, Friedrich has suffered historically thanks to the unfortunate combination of scant biographical detail, and uncharitable actors filling in the blanks. Albert Emil Brachvogel’s novel on Wilhelm Friedrich, turned into a 1941 film, framed Friedrich as the talented son trying to move out of his father’s shadow, and focused heavily on his capacity for immodesty, belligerence and drunkenness. Matters were not helped by a rakish, widely circulated portrait by Wilhelm Weitsch that is almost certainly not of Wilhelm, but instead of a relative. 

The style is an interesting compound. The opening movement retains a melancholic character, despite a stand-out harpsichord part, which emerges as a truly solo voice, rather than a member of concertino. Still, inbetween the sections of dazzling solo passagework, there’s still room for long stretches of rigorous counterpoint. The middle movement is a Cantabile, in stately triple time, ripe for ornamentation in the increasingly ornate solo part. The finale, Allegro, ma non molto, returns to the melancholy air of the opening, with repeated “sighing” gestures and downward figures passed around the ensemble. It’s disrupted, once again, by more harpsichord fireworks, before a resolute conclusion. 

Hugh Morris 2024

The fifth of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos represented a historic landmark. These “Concertos for Several Instruments”—collectively called the Brandenburgs after the works’ recipient, Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg—were formally radical in their expansion of the concerto grosso form as far as it could go, with wildly different results in terms of length, instrumentation, style, and compositional techniques used. 

The fifth, probably the last of the set to be composed, elevates the harpsichord, transplanting it from a continuo role to the concertino group of solo instruments. Bach elevates the instrument further still, with an elaborate, cadenza-like passage for solo harpsichord at the end of the first movement of the piece. Many see this piece as the first keyboard concerto accordingly.  

The second movement, Adagio affettuoso, is a soloists-only moment. The combination of flute, violin and harpsichord was a common one in the form of the trio sonata, but here, the harpsichord plays more of a soloistic role, contributing its own lines of woven counterpoint. In the lively finale, the harpsichord once again dominates, this time the solo episodes between the tremendously elaborate fugal writing. 

Hugh Morris 2024