It still happens, notwithstanding standing proof to the contrary, that Johann Sebastian Bach is portrayed as a composer with conservative taste who continued to adhere to traditional styles at a time when radically different trends were pervading the musical world. Certainly in his younger years, however, he should be considered an innovator of far-reaching importance, and a creator of new forms that greatly influenced the later eighteenth century. One of these is the sonata for a solo instrument with obbligato harpsichord, a marked departure from the solo sonata with basso continuo. Of the seventeen sonatas which Bach wrote for two instruments, thirteen are scored with an obbligato keyboard part. It may thus be said that with J. S. Bach the harpsichord came of age as a duo partner.

In the last part of his stay in Cöthen, circa 1720-1723, the harpsichord stood in the center of Bach's interest. It was in this period that lie wrote the six sonatas for violin and harpsichord, BWV 1014-1019, works that constitute a true compendium of the art of composing for these two instruments.

It is very unfortunate that, with the exception of parts of the sixth of these sonatas, no autograph manuscripts have been preserved. The modern so-called Urtext (“original text”) editions (Bärenreiter, Henle, etc.) are each based on one or another of the half-dozen eighteenth-century copies dating from the generation of Bach’s students. These different manuscripts show numerous discrepancies in their slurring and even in the notes. Consequently, the term Urtext is misleading, and the modern editions differ in countless details.

Bach's conception of the sonata with obbligato harpsichord was a novelty. This is reflected in the way the sonatas are announced on the different title pages of the manuscripts. Most copyists used their own designation as these sonatas presented obviously something new. According to the critical commentary of the Neue Bach Ausgabe (the most recent complete scholarly edition of Bach's works), the title page of manuscript A reads “Six Trios for Keyboard and Violin” (my translation), manuscript B gives “Six Sonatas for Harpsichord and Violin Obbligato,” and manuscript C presents “Six Sonatas for Harpsichord Concertato and Violin.” The copyist of manuscript D wrote “Six Sonatas for Harpsichord Concertato and Violin Concertato,” while in manuscript E we see “Six Sonatas for Harpsichord Concertato and Violin Solo, with an accompanying Bass for the Viola da Gamba, if desired.” Manuscript F sets the title “Trio for Obbligato Keyboard and a Violin” at the head of each sonata, and manuscript G, like source E, includes the possible use of a viola da gamba to reinforce the harpsichord bass line.

Turning our attention to the music, we see that Bach maintained the idea of the Italian sonata form in four movements (slow-fast-slow-fast) throughout the set with the exception of the final sonata, which exists in several versions with either five or six movements, including one for harpsichord solo. Musicological research has established that this sonata in its definite form was preceded by one or more earlier conceptions. As is the case with other sonata cycles by Bach (like the violin solo works or the organ sonatas), it is possible to detect some planning in the key relationships between the six compositions. The sonatas appear in the order B minor—A major—E major—C minor—F minor—G major. This shows a symmetrical construction with the interval of a second separating the works at either end of the series, a fourth separating sonatas number 2 & 3 and 4 & 5, and a third in the center of the set. It seems clear that Bach enjoyed this kind of planning. Some experts, going much further, detect certain cabalistic features in many of his works, and wish to prove that these are constructed according to a numerological system, often with religious connotations. May it suffice here to mention that the six sonatas together amount to a total of 2,400 measures.

There is a great deal of planned variety in the construction of the 24-odd movements and a compendium of compositional techniques. All the fast movements are in strict three-part texture, with the harpsichord providing two of the voices and the violin the third, and belong either to the trio-sonata genre (two upper voices and a bass accompaniment) or to that of the three-part invention, reminiscent of the older canzona. The slow movements, however, show more diversity. They may belong to the trio sonata category (as in the canon of the Sonata in A, third movement), but in many cases, including in he C minor sonata, they derive from the solo sonata with a harpsichord part that is a well-planned realization of a bass line with ostinato character. Yet another type of harpsichord writing is demonstrated in the opening movement of the F minor sonata, a piece in a freely imitative style using several voices underneath the violin part.

Only in the beginning of the fast trio sonata movements, before the entrance of the second upper voice, does the harpsichord have a few bars of continuo bass, which poses the problem of its realization. Even today, with all the results of scholarly research at our disposal, realization of Bach's continuo bass parts tends to be widely different at the hands of various performers, who may, however, be roughly classified into two schools. On the one hand, we hear proponents of a full and rich realization (of which Bach himself has left us a few handwritten examples) favoring a four- or even five-part texture throughout. On the other are those who favor a more austere approach, with a thinner texture but strong rhythmic impulses and expressive arpeggios. It is tempting to define these two performance styles as respectively “Lutheran” and “Calvinist.” Both trends have their strong defenders nowadays, proving that artistic convictions are not necessarily based on historical evidence.

The problems in performing these sonatas, and the decisions to be made regarding the choice of instruments and the playing technique, are numerous. If the artists’ concern is to present a performance which the composer would at least have recognized and accepted, there is no doubt that the use of period instrument is a basic decision. Apart from a German-style harpsichord (very different in sound from a French one), a Stainer-type baroque violin would be the natural choice (Bach himself possessed a Stainer). The decision, made long ago, to use such an instrument with its original neck and bass-bar, with gut strings and, most importantly, with a baroque bow, has enabled this writer to rediscover a technique and a style of playing that solves many problems of interpretation. The intense but unpressured tone production obtained with a baroque bow on gut strings results in a well-articulated sound that is bright and open, thus matching the harpsichord sound as no modern violinist with his twentieth-century technique is able to do. Resonance and transparency, key words in the baroque era, are a natural component of pre-romantic string playing. Once these basics are absorbed again by a modem musician, a number of other problems resolve themselves satisfactorily. The well-articulated shorter impulses of the old bow match the quickly decaying tone of the harpsichord, leading to more fluency in the slow movements and to more bouncing strength in the fast ones. And the tackling of intonation problems, rediscovering the warmth and purity of the old tuning systems, is a cleansing process to be recommended to every modern player!

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Jean-Philippe Rameau is one of the greatest figures in French musical history. He first gained widespread notoriety as a keyboard composer and theorist at the age of 40, but in the second half of his life he became a highly successful, if not uncontroversial, composer of operas and ballets. He also wrote dramatic cantatas and a number of impressive sacred pieces. Although until recent decades his stage works were rarely performed, revivals have made it abundantly clear that Rameau must be considered the most important French composer of the 18th century.

He was born in 1683, the seventh of eleven children, into a musical family in Dijon, where his father was an organist at the church of St. Étienne. The elder Rameau, according to the 1766 Éloge historique de M. Rameau, “taught his children to read music even before they could read.” Not many other details about Rameau’s early life in the provinces have come down to us: according to an obituary by M. P. G. de Chabanon, “he never imparted any detail of it to his friends or even to his wife.” We do know that he received a Jesuitical education, then made, in his 18th or 19th year, a brief trip to Milan to learn the Italian musical style. He next held a succession of organist’s posts in Avignon and Clermont, Paris (1706-1709), Dijon (succeeding his father), Lyon, and again Clermont before finally setting in Paris in 1722. Two years later, he married a nineteen-year-old girl, Marie-Louise Mangot. His initial reason for moving to the capital was to supervise printing of his 450-page harmony treatise, the Traité de l’harmonie, a work in which Rameau both encapsulated earlier harmonic theories and proved the importance of what he called the basse fondamentale, showing how any harmonic progression could be interpreted as following one of “a limited number of paradigmatic cadence-like models.” Over the next forty years, Rameau published nearly as many shorter essays and letters on various aspects of keyboard playing and harmony.  Although he initially had strong ties to Diderot and Alembert, he eventually parted ways with them and with their fellow Encyclopédiste Jean-Jacques Rousseau over the primacy Rameau accorded to harmony. According to the musicologist Graham Sadler, “For Rousseau, the fierce partisan of Italian opera, Rameau’s elevation of the ‘rational’ component of harmony over the ‘passionate’ component of melody inverted music’s origins in natural language.” Nor was this the only public dispute in Rameau’s life. Even his first opera, the great tragédie lyrique of 1734, Hippolyte et Aricie, aroused a mixture of admiration and disgust, giving rise to a long-running dispute (engendering many of the combative Lettres of which the Parisian musical public seemed so fond) between the composer’s supporters, known either as the ramistes—or, more provocatively, the ramoneurs (chimney sweeps)—and the lullists, defenders of the by that time hallowed “classical” style of the late 17th-century, defined by the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Rameau’s own collections of harpsichord music may be said to straddle this stylistic divide. His first such publication, which appeared in 1706 (with a reprint in 1741), consists of a single suite of dance movements, much in the mold of similar books by composers such as Nicolas Lebègue, Louis Marchand, and Gaspard le Roux. Rameau’s next two keyboard books (1724/ rev. 1731 and ca. 1729-30/ rev. after 1760) each contain two suites, the first primarily dances, the second almost exclusively character or genre pieces with descriptive titles like those found in the orders in François Couperin’s four books of harpsichord music. The 1729/30 publication included the famous Les Sauvages, inspired by a 1725 performance Rameau attended at the Théâtre Italien in which two Louisiana Indians gave a memorable terpsichorean demonstration. This harpsichord piece—and at least nineteen others—later found its way into one of Rameau’s operas, brilliantly orchestrated. Conversely, Rameau published 24 movements from Les Indes galantes in arrangements for harpsichord solo within a year of that opéra-ballet’s August 1735 premiere.

With the 1741 Pièces de clavecin en concerts, Rameau published his only set of chamber works. The five concerts each contain between three and five movements, primarily of character pieces, side-by-side with a few “pure” dance forms. In his preface, Rameau acknowledged his debt to some recent compositions: “The success of recently published sonatas which have come out as harpsichord pieces with a violin part, has given me the idea of following much the same plan in the new harpsichord pieces which I am venturing to bring out today. I have given them the form of little suites for harpsichord, violin or flute, and viol or second violin.” Though they are not named, Rameau probably was referencing the works of Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville and Gaspard Le Roux, both of whom published harpsichord pieces with harpsichord accompaniment. Rameau published his concerts in score and suggested that the accompanying musicians play from it to achieve a heightened awareness of each other's parts as well as the proper blend and balance. Violin and viola da gamba are designated as the instruments of choice, but a flute may replace the violin, and, if a viola da gamba is not available, another violin, for which Rameau provided a separate part, may serve as substitute. According to Rameau, “These pieces lose nothing by being played on the harpsichord alone; indeed, one would never suspect them capable of any other adornment; such, at least, is the opinion of several persons of taste and skill whom I have consulted on the subject, most of whom have done me the honor of giving names to some of them.”

Thus, the first Concert may be thought of as a tombeau, or musical funerary monument, to Louis Sanguin Comte de Livri, a “person of taste” and great patron of musicians, playwrights, and artists, who died shortly before Rameau’s collection was published. La Coulicam references a clever satire on Parisian morals by a Jesuit priest named Jean-Antoine Ducerceau. Thomas Souli Khan, nouveau Roi de Perse ou l’histoire de la dernière Révolution en Perse arrivée en 1732 was an immediate success in Paris upon its publication in 1728, and was reissued in 1741, just as Rameau’s volume appeared. Le Vézinet is a suburb of Paris, which, at Rameau’s time, boasted some celebrated pleasure gardens. The fourth concert seems to portray the bustle of practice in the Rameau household. Perhaps La Pantomime and L’Indiscrète are “inside jokes” of a sort. While this background is interesting, we do not actually need to know it to enjoy these deftly chiseled portraits. As the late harpsichordist Albert Fuller was fond of saying: “The titles are starting points for our listening fantasies; letting Rameau’s imagery direct and then unleash our interior worlds may well be the closest way to join his genius today.” The then of now, the now of then . . .

—Kenneth Slowik