The Musical Offering

MUSICAL OFFERING
The work includes three basic types of composition: the two ricercars (ricercar has a variety of historical meanings, but in this case it refers to an early kind of fugue), a trio sonata, and ten canons. We don’t have time today, or in our lifetime for that matter, to cover all the subtleties and striking features of these movements in detail. Let me add just a few remarks about the ten canons.


A canon is essentially a leading voice followed by an answering voice which enters with the same melody after a certain time interval. The examples in Musical Offering are called “riddle canons” because Bach has left it up to the players to figure out when the following voice should begin. Furthermore, almost every imaginable permutation of the canon material is presented: playing the royal theme backward against itself, playing it upside down, upside down and backward, in slower and faster rhythms, in different keys like a fugue—it’s all there. If a canon is the musical equivalent of “follow the leader,” these canons are something akin to playing Twister blindfolded.


At the heart of the Musical Offering is the intriguing theme: [play]


The opening half of the theme (triad plus a falling leap) is not uncommon as a fugue subject, but the tail end, with its chain of chromatic half steps sliding in and out of the home key, offers a greater challenge. Indeed, the subject uses eleven of the twelve tones in the Western musical octave—a level of complexity and tonal richness that would eventually cause the transformation of tonal music as Bach would have understood it.

Tradition ascribes this tune to Frederick himself; there is some doubt about that (“could a talented amateur invent such a probing chromatic theme”?), but it is certainly not out of the question. One scholar has pointed out that a movement from Quantz’s Trio Sonata dated 1741 begins with the same rising C-minor triad and falling diminished 7th. A provocative connection, certainly, and Quantz, Frederick’s flute teacher, likely helped the king craft this subject. But it is the ensuing series of falling halfsteps that makes the theme interesting from a contrapuntal point of view. Some have seen the chromaticism as evidence that Fredrick or one of his entourage meant to have a joke at Bach’s expense. Even the venerable master could not work such tonally ambiguous material into a meaningful fugal structure, could he? Well, Bach had already used chromatic subjects in many fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier, including a twelve-tone idea in the B-minor Fugue of Book 2 from WTC:


By all accounts, Old Bach rose to the occasion at Sans-souci by improvising on the spot a 3-voice ricercar based on the King’s theme. Whether he performed his 6-voice ricercar immediately thereafter or the next day is unclear, but he did ask for time to work out the piece to perfection. He returned to Leipzig to work out the details and sent Frederick a specially dedicated copy some two months later, by which point he had added the trio sonata and diverse riddle canons.

The ordering of the movements as conveyed by Bach is uncertain, particularly the placement of the canons among the larger movements. Modern scholars have debated the question across the spectrum. One of the most distinguished Bach scholars, Christoph Wolff, argues on the basis of the printed sources that no single ordering was intended by Bach. At the other extreme is a controversial theory that the Musical Offering intentionally and exactly parallels the successive parts of a classical oration as defined by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian [exordium, narration of facts, proof, refutation, conclusion].
Possibly a more fruitful analogy is to view the Musical Offering as a gourmet presentation: successive courses of a musical feast, all unified by the presence of the royal theme but with three larger movements (the ricercars and trio sonata) interspersed with lighter fare (the canons). It may seem far-fetched to call the riddle canons “light” for they epitomize Bach’s almost scientific investigation into the possibilities of strict counterpoint. Yet they are whimsical and mischievous games and as such offer a brief diversion from the longer, more expressive weighty movements. Whatever the specific ordering, it seems that something of this give-and-take or palate cleansing is aesthetically most pleasant.

Apart from ordering, Bach also did not specify the instruments which were to play the parts in most of the movements. We do know that he utilized the flute, King Frederick’s instrument of choice, as the treble part in the trio sonata. But the lack of specifications for the ricercars and the canons has fostered a cottage industry of subsequent performance editions. Tonight we are fortunate to hear the premiere of Carsten Schmidt’s own version, which (unlike more extravagant but un-historical renditions) uses the smallest, essential coterie of instruments that likely would have been on hand at Sans-souci each evening: flute, violin, cello, and harpsichord.

(c) Jason Stell