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Bach Perspectives

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Chapter One

New Light on Bach's Ouverture BWV 1067

Joshua Rifkin

Johann Sebastian Bach's Ouverture for Flute, Strings, and Continuo (BWV 1067)-in common parlance, "the B-Minor Flute Suite"-has long enjoyed a favored position both within his own instrumental output and in our musical practice at large. Indeed, for generations of performers and listeners, the work has become virtually emblematic of the flute itself. As its continued preeminence reminds us, moreover, the ouverture has evaded the scholarly scythe that has so painfully diminished the body of Bach's instrumental music with flute-identifying this piece as a transcription from a different medium, disqualifying that one as a product of his authorship altogether. If anything, recent scholarship seems only to have heightened the ouverture's significance: with most authorities now agreed on placing its creation in the late 1730s, it ranks as the very latest of Bach's original compositions for larger instrumental ensemble, the capstone to a rich succession of works stretching back at least as far as the Brandenburg Concertos.

The present study will upset-or at least seriously qualify-this gratifying picture. Let me immediately forestall anyworry that I shall seek to remove BWV 1067 from the canon of Bach's works: both the transmission and, surely, the music itself leave no room for doubt that he composed it. But on every other count, we shall see that the evidence tells a very different story from the one familiar to us.

I

The ouverture BWV 1067 survives in only one source from Bach's lifetime, a set of six parts preserved-together with several more added later by Carl Friedrich Zelter-in ST 154. Table 1 lists the original parts in detail. As it makes clear, Bach himself wrote the flute and viola parts; each of the rest shows the hand of a different, anonymous copyist. Yoshitake Kobayashi's investigation of the paper and script assigns the set as a whole to "ca. 1738-39"; but Bach's viola part, although written on the same paper as the others, appears to postdate them by some years-presumably it replaces an earlier copy that had suffered damage or got lost. No. 5, the unfigured continuo, also occupies a secondary position, but of a somewhat different sort: as a direct copy of no. 6, it offers no independent testimony on the origins or readings of the music. For obvious reasons, therefore, the discussion that follows will concern itself essentially with parts nos. 1, 2, 3, and 6.

Of these, we must first consider the three nonautograph parts. In each instance, Bach himself appears to have got the copyist started: not only did he write the heading at the top of the page, but he also entered the movement title, clef, key signature, and time signature. We may perhaps take this as more than a simple courtesy. On several occasions where Bach provided the initial elements of a part, he did so to signal a notational change-usually to tell the scribe to copy the music in a key different from that of the parent manuscript. I might cite two examples here. In 1724, Bach amplified the scoring of the Weimar cantata Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt (BWV 18) with a pair of recorders that double Violas 1 and 2 of the original instrumentation at the upper octave. While the violas, tuned to the high Chorton pitch standard inherited from the original version, play in G minor, the recorders play in A. The wind parts thus involved transposition to both a new register and a new key, not to mention a new clef; Bach eased his copyist's task by writing out the opening bars of each part as a guide. In the 1740s, Bach prepared a version of the cantata Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben (BWV 8) that transposed the work from E major to D. Although he wrote most of the instrumental parts himself, the three that he did not all show autograph title, clef, and signatures.

I do not mean to imply that the entry of initial clefs by Bach inevitably denotes transposition; indeed, the unfigured continuo part of BWV 1067 offers a useful reminder on this very point. Nevertheless, in light of the other examples just considered, we may well suspect that Bach and his assistants took the music of BWV 1067 from a source notated in a key other than B minor. It does not, in fact, take much effort both to confirm this suspicion and to establish the key in question. As we see from Table 2, the violin and continuo parts show a number of corrections and other features suggestive of transposition up a tone. The autograph flute part, although it does not contain any clearly altered notes, reveals an unusually high percentage of accidentals placed squarely a degree too low, as well as a single appoggiatura written as f#" instead of g" and two more on a" that lack their leger lines. As the viola part could in principle derive from its lost predecessor in the set-and hence from a model in B minor-we might not so readily think to investigate it for hints of transposition. Yet not only does it contain its own share of misplaced accidentals, but the composer unmistakably thickened the first note in m. 9 of the Sarabande upward from a low start, and he just as unmistakably wrote the third note of m. 8 in the Battinerie as e' rather than the f#' that the harmony demands.

A final, if more circuitous, pointer arises from a detail in the second-violin part. At m. 15 of the Menuet, the first note as entered by the copyist read g'; as Plate 1 makes clear, someone other than the copyist, no doubt Bach himself, carefully excised it and replaced it with the same note an octave lower. With the original reading restored, the string and continuo parts descend to exactly one tone above the lowest limit of the violin, viola, and cello: A, D, and D, respectively. By all indications, therefore, Bach and his copyists drew the parts to the ouverture from a source-more likely than not a score-that presented the music in A minor.

What can we establish about the A-minor version of the ouverture other than its key? As Bach entrusted the string and continuo parts of the transposed version to copyists, we can assume that they simply followed their model verbatim; in this respect, therefore, the ouverture as we know it-barring any revisions made after copying-would not have differed at all from its predecessor. But the solo part, clearly, did not go unchanged, otherwise Bach would hardly have gone to the trouble of writing it out himself. This fact obviously raises the question of the original solo instrument. We can safely eliminate the flute. Even if we could imagine the solo line written in a way that would avoid the present occurrences of d'-the lowest note on the Baroque flute-in both solo and tutti passages, the overall tessitura would still put the music uncomfortably low for the instrument; and in any event, it seems hardly credible that Bach would have written a concerted work with so little regard for the properties of its featured instrument that he ultimately felt obliged to transpose it to a more favorable key.

The next obvious candidate, the oboe, also appears unlikely. Here, the lower end of the range poses no problem, although a single d#' in a tutti section would have had to read differently-c#', as it would have become in A minor, does not lie within the capabilities of the Baroque oboe. But the particular sorts of agility required have no parallel in any oboe music of Bach's that I know; and we would have to imagine both the Polonoise and its Double in a form more radically different from the surviving one than the neat script of the autograph flute part gives us any warrant for doing.

Barring the remote possibility of an instrument in another register entirely, only one alternative remains: the violin. Admittedly, the part does not seem to contain much distinctively idiomatic writing; even the most determined attempt to locate opportunities for multiple stops comes up empty, and places where Bach might have exploited the lowest string prove almost as hard to find. But the relative absence of display may reflect conventions specific to the genre. Johann Adolph Scheibe, for one, drew a distinction between the relatively modest demands on the solo instrument in what he called the Concertouverture and the greater virtuosity typical of the Italianate concerto. An ouverture in G minor for violin and strings by Bach's cousin Johann Bernhard Bach illustrates the point nicely: here, too, the solo part lacks any multiple stops, and it descends beyond the d' string in only a single measure. Within BWV 1067 itself, moreover, a passage heard initially within a few bars of the first solo entry effectively removes any doubts about the original instrumentation; as Example makes clear, Bach surely conceived mm. 60-62 and 124-26 of the opening movement with a play on the open e" string in mind. Should this evidence not suffice, I might draw attention to a detail in the autograph flute part noticed by Klaus Hofmann after I sent him an early draft of this paper: even a fleeting glance at Plate 2 reveals unmistakably that Bach fashioned the first letter of the heading "Traversiere" out of a "V."

II

My reference in the last paragraph to the G-minor ouverture of Johann Bernhard Bach had more behind it than simply the wish to lend substance to some comments of Scheibe. Johann Bernhard's ouverture owes its survival to J. S. Bach: it comes down to us through a set of parts written largely in his hand. Andreas Glöckner has dated their copying to 1730; some of the evidence he presents could even suggest limiting the time frame to the later months of the year. Bach clearly intended the materials for use with the student Collegium Musicum that he had taken charge of in the spring of 1729.

Given this background, we may find it more than a little provocative that the opening movement of Johann Bernhard's ouverture displays a striking number of resemblances to the first movement of BWV 1067, both in the overall rhythmic character of the quick fugal sections and in specific details of structure and thematic material. Example 2a, for instance, shows a passage heard near the end of the fast section in Johann Bernhard's piece; its alternation of rocking solo figures and tutti interjections inevitably recalls the passage from BWV 1067 reproduced in Example 2b. A still more telling relationship links Example 3a and Example 3b, which show the end of the first tutti and start of the first solo episode in their respective movements. Like his cousin, J. S. Bach has the solo instrument enter running, so to speak. This itself might not seem especially noteworthy; much the same thing occurs in the first movement of Bach's ouverture BWV 1068, as well. But what happens next brings home the connection. Johann Bernhard's solo lead-in settles onto a decorated version of his fugal theme; as we see from Example 3c, J. S. Bach, while disguising his tracks more artfully, does exactly the same. Given these similarities, it hardly comes as a surprise to find a more than passing degree of kinship between the fugal themes themselves, with their upbeat kickoffs, prominent syncopation, and descent from the fifth degree-something readers comparing Example 4a with Example 4b can hardly fail to notice. The initial rhythmic gesture, moreover, not only cements the bond between the two themes but also sets BWV 1067 apart in a small but significant respect from the rest of Bach's French ouvertures. In every one of these, the subject of the central fugal section begins within the final cadential measure of the introduction, creating a rather breathless transition of the sort illustrated in Examples 5a-c; in BWV 1067 and Johann Bernhard's ouverture, on the other hand, the upbeat start produces the more relaxed cadential articulation illustrated in Examples 5d-e. The difference even extends to note values of the music that follows: although BWV 1067 and the work of Bach's cousin have the same time signature as BWV 066 and 1068, they move in values twice as large-eighths, quarters, and halves instead of sixteenths, eighths, and quarters.

(Continues...)

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