French Overture

Many composers can be described as extraordinarily broad in their outlook. But J. S. Bach seemed particularly motivated to develop every musical style, idiom, technique, instrument, and genre he encountered to a new degree of sophistication and variety. If you know much of Bach's music, then his quest for encyclopedic completeness will come as no surprise. But if you get a chance to know only a handful of his works, the pieces on today's program wonderfully encapsulate a great deal of what Bach was “about,” at least in his instrumental endeavors.
First, a little context. This recital concludes Carsten Schmidt's complete survey of the non-organ music contained in Bach's four-volume Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Exercises). In the past few seasons we have the heard the Six Partitas (Vol. 1) and the Goldberg Variations (Vol. 4). Now we fill in the middle volumes with the contents of Volume 2 and a small selection from Volume 3; the majority of the latter is for organ. It seems the height of irony to call these compelling and technically demanding compositions Übungen (“practice” or “exercises”), but that label does catch the sense of intellectual muscle flexing. Indeed, one might go so far as to claim that Bach was both exercising and exorcising his creative spirits, spirits that reveled in diversity and cosmopolitan flair and which he felt compelled to express in periodic bursts of activity.

Volume II of the Clavier-Übung draws together two leading genres of competing national musical traditions, one French and the other Italian. For generations before Bach, Italian and French musicians had fought—sometimes quite literally—for the upper hand in opera and concert music. Italian masters would occasionally be unceremoniously dismissed from Parisian courts, and vice versa. Working within his narrow central German orbit, Bach could stand aloof from all this political foolery, though he remained finely attuned to the inflections of musical style that resulted from Franco-Italian relations. He had already made close study of Italian concerto technique, and had also worked extensively in the French dance suite tradition. As the new director of Leipzig's Collegium Musicum ensemble after 1729, Bach had both occasion and motivation to write larger, more public style instrumental works (concertos and suites) rather than the intimate didactic keyboard music of decades prior. Around 1735 Bach conceived the idea of pairing French and Italian works within a single collection; as we will see, the material for both was already in his portfolio. The title page indicates Bach's desire to present the works as a pair, a grand synthesis:

“Second part of the Keyboard Practice, consisting of a Concerto after the Italian Taste [Gusto] and an Overture in the French Manner [Art], for a harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach...”

The Overture—Bach's designation for both the entire French suite and the first movement—makes striking, intentional contrast with the accompanying Italian Concerto. For example, the Overture lasts more than twice as long as the Concerto. The opening movement alone, which includes a lengthy fugue inside the framing French Overture style sections, is as long as the entire Concerto! Its numerous small two-part dances offer a Baroque sampler, as it were, whereas the Concerto's three movements are fewer but more dramatically laid out. For the dances portions of the French suite, Bach augments the expected Courante-Sarabande-Gigue core structure to include several divertimenti: two Gavottes, two Passepieds, two Bourées, and an Echo. This format recalls Bach's four contemporaneous Orchestral Suites, which include many of the same alternative dances in ABA pairings (e.g., Bourée I-Bourée II-Bourée I). Thus where the Concerto is fairly brief and non-repetitive, the Overture-Suite is quite massive and highly repetitive. Even in the choice of keys, Bach manifests his strategy of complementarity. The Concerto's outer movements move in a sunny F major; the Overture already existed as a work in C minor, but for publication Bach moved it into B minor, the exact opposite tonal region to F. In a sense, the entire tonal world unfolds between these Herculean pillars.

(c) Jason Stell