Italian Concerto

Bach made numerous transcriptions of Italian concertos, mostly of works by Vivaldi and Albinoni, during his years in Weimar (circa 1710). Bach's generation still learned by virtue of imitation and apprenticeship. If he wanted to master the newest trends from Italy, he could either go there like Handel (1707) and Mozart (1770), or—and this was eminently more practical—he could copy them out by hand. For instance, even before Vivaldi's famed L'estro Harmonico concerto collection was published in Amsterdam in 1711, Bach had acquired a copy in manuscript from which he made six transcriptions. Of course, Bach would not have been Bach if he had simply transcribed the model without alteration, note-for-note. No, at almost every turn in the music Bach could find some different detail—a slightly different harmonic pattern, a fuller bass, perhaps putting the melody in the bass and the chords up above. The possibilities were nearly endless, and he exploited the raw material for all it could offer. By the end he had internalized the drama, brilliance, and rhetoric of the Italian concerto. Thus when Bach composed his own Italian Concerto (the full title is Concerto nach italiänischem Gusto) around 1735, it was with a fair amount of experience. A draft of the first movement has been preserved in the composer's own hand and seems to date from much earlier in his life, perhaps going back as far as Weimar.
BWV 971 stands apart as Bach's only example of an original concerto for solo instrument without orchestra. All the give-and-take, all the dialogue that defines concerto form must here be suggested by the keyboard alone. Bach explicitly calls for a two-manual harpsichord so that the different volume and timbre of the two keyboards can mimic an opposition between soloist and orchestra. Significantly, this Concerto marks one of the very few occasions when Bach notates forte (“loud”) and piano (“soft”) directly in the score. (Another is in the Echo movement of the above-mentioned French Overture.) Moreover, these dynamic markings were not included in Bach's earlier version of the Concerto's first movement. The outer fast movements are spirited and robust; the finale in particular never lets off the gas from the moment it begins. Still Bach manages to introduce a fair amount of counterpoint—more counterpoint, in fact, than would have been typical of fast movements by Vivaldi or other Italians. In the middle Bach positions a plaintive Andante. This Andante typifies the beauty of Baroque song, with a rock-steady accompanying pulse in the left hand supporting the spontaneously lyric and highly ornamented melody. There is a hardly a treble note that is not set alight with a flurry of decoration.
Bach's strategy and attention to detail were rewarded, for the collection succeeded with the public from the start. Since very little of Bach's music was published during his lifetime, it is particularly noteworthy that this second volume of the Clavier-Übung went into a second printing soon after its appearance. Given the extent of their contrast with one another, it is tempting to see the French Overture and Italian Concerto as an Alpha and Omega of Bach's keyboard style—at least, circa 1735....

(c) Jason Stell