Orchestral Suite No. 1

The genre of BWV 1066 is one with a long pedigree: it is a dance suite headed by a three-part overture which, apart from the scale and polyphonic complexity of the opening movement, would have been familiar to listeners in generations previous to Bach’s. The concerto dates from around 1730, while the Suite was written in 1717 in Cöthen during the first months of Bach’s tenure in that Pietist center. Church music was less important now than at other times in Bach’s career, and with the added impetus of the resident Collegium Musicum, he delved deeply into all manner of instrumental music.
The most characteristic aspects of the opening movement are gestural dotted rhythms and sweeping violin runs inherited from the French overture. Bach also explores oppositions between small and large ensembles (borrowed from the concerto) and, as noted above, by includes a lengthy fugue as the middle section of the overture. The fugue is so long, in fact, that Bach’s indication to repeat the entire middle section must be given serious consideration by even the most historically minded performer. To play the entire fugue twice threatens to overwhelm the work’s dance nature and undercut the “galant” manner with too much of the learned style.
Bach maintains a fairly rigid harmonic structure among the dances. The dances are all in two-part (binary) form, where the A section covers a move from the tonic to the dominant key—in this case, from C to G major—and the B section touches on related minor keys on its way back to tonic. The pacing and manner in which these tonal moves are undertaken remains reassuringly consistent from one dance to the next. Repetition, written into all the dances, works better here than in the opening movement’s fugue since it allows the listener to discover subtleties of voice leading and allows the performer to vary volume, timbre, articulation, and ornamentation. Apart from the Courante and Forlane, the dances are written as da capo pairs, such that the first dance is heard both before and after the second dance (e.g., Minuet 1, then Minuet 2, followed by Minuet 1 again without its repeats taken).

(c) Jason Stell