“…a book full of piano pieces, from back-then most famous masters…which his brother possessed, was, without taking notice of all requests, who knows for what reasons, denied. Diligence, to get forward, lead to the following innocent cheating. The booklet lay in a cabinet locked only by a closed grill door. So he took it because he was able to get through the grill with his little hands as he managed to roll the booklet, which was only stapled in paper. In this way, he took it out at night, when everybody was in bed and copied it at moonshine, as he was not having any of a light. After six months, this musical booty was happily in his hands. He tried, secretly and with increasing ambition, to get use out of it, when, accompanied by his most significant heart suffering, his brother realized the cheating and took the copy which he was written with so much effort, away from him with no mercy. A grasping person, whose ship went under on its way to Peru with one hundred thousand talers on board, may provide an agile idea of little Johann Sebastian's sadness about this loss…”
Toccata - Johann Adam Reincken
Chaconne in C minor (BuxWV 159) - Dietrich Buxtehude
Ouverture (Suite No 2 in D) - Georg Böhm
Biblical Sonata No 2: The melancholy of Saul assuaged - Johann Kuhnau
Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor (BWV 582) - Johann Sebastian Bach
Today’s programme explores the Andreas Bach book, a collection of music which - according to Bach’s obituary - Johann Sebastian copied out by moonlight, having been forbidden from doing so by his brother.
Reincken’s grand Toccata sits in the North German praeludium tradition, with its structure springing from rhetoric. After an unfurling of the tonality a more intimate exploration (based around the tonic triad) ensues in the form of a fugue. The opening gesture is recapitulated before we hear a different exploration of the home key tonality - here played on the 4’ Brustwerk Rohrflute. A second more robust fugue follows before a final summation, harking back to the opening.
Bach and Buxtehude’s relationship is well-known, and the Danish master’s chaconne contains a number of different aspects that Bach adopts in his Passacaglia. Textures and overlapping phrases abound here, all bound together by a pedal theme with a strong sixth at the heart of its character.
From Denmark we turn to something infused with a rich French language: the extravagant opening of Böhm’s second suite. The drama of this combined with the filigree counterpoint find obvious echoes in Bach’s own musical language.
The biblical sonatas of Kuhnau are some of the most beautiful programmatic music. The second sonata, with its varying phrase lengths and wide-ranging keyboard idioms, tells of Saul, his soul weary and sad, gradually being consoled by music. The harp is often invoked across the various movements from the ‘opening sadness and of the King’, into the angry fugue, before a canzona which gives way to a fulsome presentation of the spirit of Saul ‘tranquil and contented’.
The Passacaglia of J S Bach has resonances with all of these pieces (and others throughout the Andreas Bach book), whether it be in phrase structure, keyboard idioms, or in an ebullient exploration of emotion. We should be thankful that the seventeenth century moonlight was (apparently) strong enough for Bach to copy the music book illicitly!