Angela Hewitt BACH The Six Partitas (6 & 7 / 15)

When Johann Sebastian Bach left his post as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in 1723 to go to the more prestigious city of Leipzig as Kantor of the Thomaskirche he had no idea of the troubles that awaited him there. In Cöthen he had spent six very happy years composing mainly instrumental music, including the Brandenburg Concertos, the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the French Suites. He had, however, hesitated before accepting the new position, as the switch from Kapellmeister (orchestra leader) to Kantor (director of church music) was a step downwards in status, but he knew that Leipzig would be a better place to educate his children. His first wife had died suddenly in 1720 leaving him with three sons and a daughter (three others, including twins, had died in infancy), but a year later he married Anna Magdalena Wülcken, a professional singer sixteen years his junior and the mother-to-be of thirteen more Bachs. Although his income increased with the move to Leipzig, the high cost of living in that city made things difficult for such a large family. As part of his duties as Kantor, Bach was responsible for music in the choir school, at the university, and on civic occasions. None of the authorities involved appreciated Bach’s genius (one of them even dared to say that Bach showed ‘little inclination to work’!), and their penny-pinching and narrow-mindedness were a constant source of annoyance. More than anything, Bach wished to upgrade the instruments, instrumentalists and singers at his disposal, but was repeatedly refused the necessary funds to do so. Many of his wonderful cantatas – a new one incredibly dished up every Sunday – were perhaps given less than perfect first performances.

It was during his early Leipzig years that Bach took it upon himself to publish a work for the first time. It now seems incredible to us that out of one thousand or so compositions only a dozen were published in his lifetime. Even more astounding is the fact that the six Brandenburg Concertos (nowadays almost ‘pop’ music) had to wait one hundred years after the composer’s death for publication. Bach’s contemporaries who wrote more accessible music, such as Telemann and Handel, had no trouble getting their music published, and even received royalties. Bach’s ‘Opus 1’ (as he called it, even though he had already been composing for twenty years) was a set of six Partitas for keyboard, ‘offered to music lovers in order to refresh their spirits’. The first Partita in B?flat major appeared alone in 1726, and one followed each year until the six were published together and put on sale at the 1731 Leipzig Fair. These works were to form Part I of the Clavierübung (‘Keyboard Exercise’). Although they were never reprinted during Bach’s lifetime, they were, according to the composer’s first biographer Forkel, a success: ‘This work made in its time a great noise in the musical world. Such excellent compositions for the clavier had not been seen and heard before. Anyone who had learnt to perform well some pieces out of them could make his fortune in the world, and even in our time [1802], a young artist might gain acknowledgement by doing so, they are so brilliant, well-sounding, expressive and always new.’

‘Partita’ is simply another name for a suite of dance movements in the same key formed to make a satisfactory whole. The titles ‘Partita’ and ‘Clavierübung’ had already been used by Bach’s predecessor at the Thomaskirche, Johann Kuhnau, for two collections of keyboard works in 1689 and 1692. As Bach never strayed far from home (in his whole life he never went beyond a radius of 200 miles), he only became acquainted with the music of France, the leader in the field of dance music, and Italy by copying scores he found in various libraries. Albinoni, Vivaldi, Corelli, Couperin – all were absorbed by him, but then turned into something greater. Bach’s earlier French Suites, works of great beauty and imagination, are on a much smaller scale than the six Partitas and begin with the traditional Allemande. The English Suites, the first set of six suites he composed, occupy a middle ground between the two, opening with a concerto-like Prelude. When we become familiar with the Partitas we tend to identify them immediately with their diverse opening movements – each making an important initial statement about the character of the work as a whole. Two Partitas, the third and sixth, appear in earlier versions as part of the 1725 Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach. Although Bach probably never expected anyone to perform these pieces complete in public, they are nowadays among his most popular concert vehicles for both harpsichordists and pianists.