14 Sep Notes on the program: Bach’s Musical Offering
Join Les Dèlices for Bach’s Musical Offering Oct. 1, 3, and 4th in Akron, Berea, and Cleveland
The story goes like this: On May 7, 1747, J.S. Bach was visiting his son Carl Philipp in Potsdam, where he was invited to an audience with the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. A devoted musical amateur, the King hoped to impress – and perhaps intimidate – the great Bach. To begin, the King showed off his recently-acquired Silbermann fortepianos. He then proposed that Bach improvise a three-voice fugue on a theme of the King’s own invention.
This “Royal theme” (or Thema Regium) was so thorny and “cleverly contrived” that, as Arnold Schönberg observed, “it did not admit one single canonic imitation.” That is, it “was constructed to be as resistant to counterpoint as possible.” Despite this, Bach obliged Frederick the Great with great art and style improvising what would be published as the Ricercar a 3 before an audience that probably included up to 40 professional musicians (such as the celebrated flutist and teacher Johann Joachim Quantz, Bach’s own forward-thinking son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the Graun brothers Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb, and Franz & Johann Benda) in addition to the King himself.
Having done that, the King asked Bach to invent another fugue on the same theme in six voices. Understanding the enormity of the challenge, Bach demurred but promised to follow up. Just two weeks later, Bach had completed a total of sixteen movements based on this notoriously challenging Royal Theme. These were:
10 Canons to be placed AROUND the royal theme.
A 4-movement Trio sonata for flute, violin, and continuo
2 Ricercars: the three-voice fugue Bach had improvised on the spot AND the six-voice fugue that Frederick had challenged him to create.
What is a canon?
In Latin, canon means law or root. Truly, canons represent “the strictest form of contrapuntal writing, in which an entire piece of music is built from a single melodic phrase playing over itself at different intervals of time and key, in varying rhythms and tempi, sometimes appearing backward (as in the Cancrizans or “crab canon”), inside out, or upside down (as in the Canon a 2 per motu contrarium).
A canon may even continue (theoretically) forever. Several of Bach’s canons in the Musical Offering are actually perpetual canons. Built from “a single phrase, played against itself at different points in time and space, [the canon] becomes an infinitely unfolding harmony similar to the continuous playing out of Creation.” Like the continuing orbits of the planets such music can mirror the heavens and nature.
Other canons like the Canon a 4 or the canon Quaerendo invenietis (literally “Seek and ye shall find,” referencing Matthew 7:7) must be solved for pitch and duration: the player(s) must determine at what pitch level each voice needs to enter and at what periodic interval or temporal distance. What’s more, different solutions may be possible! “Even when they are not pretty they can be beautiful.”
Compared with canons, fugues are a far more permissive form. But Bach dubbed his three- and six-voice fugues Ricercars, a word whose Latin origins mean to research, to query, or to investigate. In adopting this old-fashioned term to describe these contrapuntal pieces, Bach also gestured at an acronym: Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta – By order of the King: the tune and the remainder, resolved with canonic art.
Bach published these pieces in September 1747 and called the collection Musikalisches Opfer, or Musical Offering. But what was being offered and to whom? Was it a gift to Frederick the Great? Was it an “Offering” to God and humanity? After all, Opfer in German can also mean sacrifice. Or, considering that the Musical Offering was a response to King Frederick’s challenge, is it Bach’s ultimate musical polemic – his argument in favor of learned forms of counterpoint and art inspired by faith and spirituality that countered Frederick’s disregard for religion, his support of modern empiricism, and his penchant for fashionable entertainments and melody-driven music? Bach regularly signed his music Solo dei Gloria, indicating that he composed music in service to God above all, not at the pleasure of the King.
How will Les Délices present The Offering?
But, beyond the enigmas of the puzzle canons, how was one to play or perform the Musical Offering? The published work takes a rather unusual form: it’s printed on a range of paper sizes with different orientations, it has no page numbers, (mostly) no performance instructions, some of the canons can be “solved” with varied results, and no instrumentation is specified except for the trio sonata and two of the canons. Furthermore, some scholars (including Christoph Wolff) believe that “Bach never meant the entire work to be played sequentially anyway.”
For our performance, we’ll begin with the Ricercar a3 (Bach’s initial improvisation on the King’s Theme) performed on harpsichord (alas, not the Silbermann fortepiano that Frederick offered to Bach). We’ve then chosen a selection of the canons to be performed by a mixed ensemble of violin, viola, flute, oboe, bassoon, cello (or viola da gamba), and harpsichord that can elucidate Bach’s counterpoint, ending with Bach’s final statement, the Ricercar a 6, performed by the full ensemble.
At the heart of the program we contrast two sonatas by father and son that typify the conflicting aesthetic values at the heart of the Musical Offering. While J.S. Bach’s Trio Sonata inspired by the Royal Theme gestures at galant melodic figures and ornamentation, it is far from a lighthearted, conversational piece suited to musical amateurs. And although the Trio Sonata was theoretically suitable for Frederick to play, he almost certainly never did. Instead of a fashionable Italianate work in three movements, Bach opted to compose a trio for flute, violin, and continuo in the comparatively old-fashioned four-movement Sonata da chiesa form. The counterpoint is remarkably studied and complex and the Royal Theme is subjected to varied treatment. At times, the Royal Theme is quoted directly (as in the second movement Allegro, where it emerges from batteries of sixteenth notes and syncopations a total of six times) or it is manipulated to resemble a dance form (as the head motive for the gigue-like final movement), but more often the theme’s intense chromaticism results in sobbing dissonances and wide-ranging harmonic modulations.
By contrast, C.P.E. Bach defined “himself to some extent in opposition to his father’s aesthetic ideals.” If his father’s music was “serious, elaborate, and profound,” Carl Philipp’s was melody-driven, theatrical, and full of feeling. I hope that the inclusion of C.P.E. Bach’s sonata for oboe and continuo offers not only a musical palate cleanser amidst a meal of dense counterpoint, but also pays additional tribute to Dr. Mary Oleskiewicz, who edited the complete solo sonatas of CPE Bach, among her many other scholarly works.
– Debra Nagy