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ABOUT THE PROGRAMBENJAMIN PESETSKY
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)
Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B Minor, BWV1002
Johann Sebastian Bach’s manuscript of the Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas dates from 1720, during his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen, though their inception probably goes back to his first time in Weimar in 1703. There he met the composer Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656–1705), whose 1696 Solo Violin Partitas are important precedents, and probably inspirations, for Bach’s more famous set.
Westhoff was a leading violinist and composer in the generation before Bach, and was among the first to write polyphonic music for solo violin, devising ways for a lone violinist to play multiple independent lines at the same time. This required both an inspired compositional mind and a virtuoso’s understanding of the instrument. Bach, like Westhoff, was a violinist as well as a composer, and so was perfectly equipped to continue developing what, at the time, must have seemed an impossibly modern style.
In the early Baroque, the title “partita” referred to a variation form, usually based on Lutheran chorale melo- dies. Bach and Westhoff were among the first to apply the title to dance suites. In Köthen, Bach had time to focus
on such secular forms: his employer, Prince Leopold, was
a Calvinist and had no need for elaborate liturgical music. Bach, a Lutheran, spent most of his career specializing in exactly such music—but for his six years in Köthen, turned to mostly secular music, which he happily wrote for the skilled musicians of Leopold’s court. The arrangement led to some of Bach’s greatest instrumental pieces: the solo works for violin and cello, the French keyboard suites, the orchestral suites, and the Brandenburg Concertos.
Just as the enormous Chaconne in the Partita No. 2 sets that piece apart from the rest of the set, the Partita No. 1 also has a unique movement structure: it is the only one where
each dance is immediately followed by a double: a fast, French style of variation that elaborates on the music just heard.
The Allemanda was a French impression of a German
dance, which Germans like Bach reclaimed when they
wrote dance suites. The Courante was once a noble court- ship dance, which typically involved two partners stepping toward each other and then away. The Sarabande came from the New World via Spain: what was once a fast, bawdy dance was transformed into a slow seductive one as it reached northern Europe. The Bourrée—which Bach uses in the First Partita in place of the more typical Gigue—was a rustic peasant dance. (By Bach’s day, none of these dances were intended to be danced: they were only for listening.) The doubles, meanwhile, are pointillistic, offering a second look at each of the movements, as if through a scattering lens.
PAUL HINDEMITH (1895–1963) Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 25, No. 3
Paul Hindemith was born in 1895 near Frankfurt and became one of the most important German composers at the height of his fame during the interwar years. After the Nazi Party banned many of his works, he travelled to Switzerland and then moved to the United States, where for a time in
the 1940s he was the most performed composer living in
the country. He taught a generation of young composers at Yale and at Tanglewood, but was seen as an irrelevant relic in postwar Europe.
Though Hindemith used a mostly tonal language, his
music is often gruff, underpinned by an original harmonic theory he systematized in the mid-1930s. He was also ex- tremely knowledgeable about the unique qualities of different instruments, and wrote a sonata for nearly every member of the orchestra.
The Sonata for Solo Cello dates to 1922, and Hindemith is said to have written most of it in a single day. It was pub- lished as part of his Op. 25 collection, which also includes
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The Music at Tippet Rise