Not all my Substack readers are aware of my YouTube efforts, so I’ll catch you up with this post. Twice a month, I post videos with the score and educational subtitles to elucidate the music. Think of it as a nutritious supplement to the podcast. …Some of you might actually prefer this medium.
I started, “counting down from BWV 1000,” as BWV 1000 is the last catalogued keyboard work, not counting The Art of Fugue. (Schmieder, the man responsible for the BWV catalogue, did not understand The Art of Fugue to be written for keyboard, hence he gave it a number removed from the rest of the keyboard works.)
Schmieder’s last ten BWVs are his attempt to cram anything that was a keyboard piece into his catalogue, hence I doubt there is a group of ten pieces as diverse as BWVs 991-1000. I’ll briefly discuss each of them and hope that all of my readers here become subscribers there:
This is BWV 1000, an arrangement of the first fugue in the solo violin works. This fugue was arranged three times by Bach: the earliest is probably this version, for lute-harpsichord. In 1720, he rewrote it for solo violin, and still later, for organ in a magnificent version in d minor. If you’re a keyboardist and this arrangement is not in your repertoire, consider learning it.
This is a famous piece. If you had a beginner Bach book when you took piano lessons, this piece was probably in there. Likewise, if you studied classical guitar, this piece possibly appeared in a minor. It appears late in the BWV catalogue, rather than with other ‘loose’ preludes and fugues, because of its distinction as being for lute-harpsichord.
Noteworthy are the many discrepancies in this very short piece between the principal source, P. 804, and the printing in the Neue Bach Ausgabe. (I cannot explain these discrepancies, but they must be written about in the critical commentaries. I welcome anyone with access to this scholarship to enlighten us all!)
The questionable notes are always in the left hand. (In the hand-written copy, the right hand is written in soprano clef.)
Bar 16: E-flat(?)-A in NBA. P. 804 reads C-A
Bar 18: D(?)-A in NBA. P. 804 reads C-A.
The most dramatic change, Bar 22: The Bass is D(?) in NBA, preserving the pedal-point, but P. 804 clearly shows an E-flat, breaking the monotony.T
BWV 998, a favorite piece, is reflective of Bach’s late style, possibly even making attempts at the soon-to-be classical style simplicity. The prelude may be musical perfection. The fugue is one of his exceptional ‘da capo fugues.’ This form, prelude and fugue followed by yet another single movement, will never be repeated.
These two videos are the suite, BWV 997. Composed at a similar time and in the relative minor to the previous BWV, BWVs 998 and 997 represent Bach’s late efforts for the lute-harpsichord. BWV 997 also has a remarkable ‘da capo fugue’ and the sarabande (first movement of the second video) is so incredibly similar to the final movement of the Saint Matthew Passion that one can hardly imagine a coincidence. The prelude, too, once known, makes anyone its captive.
BWV 996 is, like BWV 1000, an earlier composition for lute-harpsichord. We can actually track the origins of this composition to a particular sale of one of these instruments within Bach’s region. Compositionally, it is similar to the English Suites. See here the gigue of the e minor English Suite:
And the gigue of the e minor lute suite:
Fine, you say, it’s a scale. But there are only two fugal gigues whose themes are scales, both descend, both are in quick triple meter, and both in e minor. I could point to many other similarities, but these arpeggios through the circle of fifths at roughly the same percentage through the second half, are striking (I made an instagram post about this years ago):
That’s the lute suite, and now the English Suite:
Schmieder rightly catalogued BWV 995, the transcription of the c minor cello suite, BWV 1011, first among the lute-harpsichord works. The autograph survives in Bach’s hand, making this an extremely important document when trying to reconstruct the missing autograph of the cello suites. Bach here also shows his great skill in transcription adding such rich chords as:
which in the cello version is:
and of course, my favorite, the unadorned last notes of this line:
becomes the unbelievable (major seventh chord!):
Cellists like to mention that the sarabande is special because of its complete lack of chords. Bach knows no such sentimentality, turning this:
into:
N.B. The slurs in Bach’s autograph are closer to Anna Magdalena’s copy at least in this instance.
I give a verbal introduction to this video, the ‘Applicatio,’ and hopefully say everything that needs to be said about this short little piece, which, questionably given its own BWV, amusingly is sandwiched between two major compositions in the catalogue.
This piece, the capriccio in E major, is the star of these ten BWVs. Called “not so interesting” by Schweitzer, and put after the B-flat capriccio BWV 992 by Schmieder, this piece encapsulates the spirit, scope and ambition of the young Bach perhaps better than any other piece from his young years. A sprawling fugue, Bach ventures into little known harmonic territory with unparalleled virtuosity. A shining example of how Bach scholarship is constantly improving, I predict this piece will become more or less standard among keyboardists.
This work is the better known capriccio and famous early example of Bach’s programmatic genre. The lament, (the last movement of the first video) remains important as an example of Bach’s solo works using figured bass. The final movement, a fugue, is very exciting, yet put next to the E major capriccio, it seems to suffer the comparison.
This work, BWV 991, is somehow stuffed in with the BWVs that cover variations for keyboard. A few pages in Anna Magdalena’s 1722 notebook were dedicated to this beautiful work, yet only the first half of the first strophe was completed. The rest contains mere melodies, and even those, too, break off incomplete. I reconstruct some of it in this video.
See this gesture, completed at a similar time:
Compared to the work in question, it is almost identical:
I hope you enjoyed this. Leave any questions or comments below, and let me know if you’d like more written content. At the moment my two outlets are the podcast and these videos, but I can, if you want more in this medium, scrawl my thoughts now and then. Thanks!
-e.s.
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Very informative, thanks.
Wrt bar 22 of bwv 999, the NBA editors have not only ignored the inspired E-flat downbeat (and the rest of the left hand) but have also completely recomposed the right hand part, so that not a single note of JS’ original remains in this measure!