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Reading Bach's Ideas, Part I

Published: 2000 Author: Jonathan Leathwood

View or download a PDF of the Prelude to BWV 998 (2 pages, 48 K)

I
The Player-Reader

‘BACH’S lute works’: so we are accustomed to call the three suites and other pieces catalogued as BWV 995–1000 plus the Suite BWV 1006a. It is a convenient but controversial grouping. Only the Suite BWV 995 and the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro BWV 998 survive in Bach’s hand specifically designated for the lute (BWV 998 is for ‘lute or keyboard’). The remaining pieces could well have been written for the lautenwerck (a gut-strung harpsichord) or one of the more conventional keyboard instruments. And while ‘integral’ recordings by lutenists accumulate in the catalogue, the notion also persists that Bach’s writing for the lute poses special problems—an assumption which, thanks to the perceived kinship among fretted instruments, has been duly passed on to guitarists.

There are indeed passages in the lute works of Bach which cannot be realised literally on the lute. But nowhere is the problem of the lute’s idiom so characteristic yet so little discussed as in Bach’s notation of the contrapuntal texture, and in particular of bass-note rests. Short bass notes proliferate in such pieces as the très viste (‘very quick’) movement in the prelude to the Suite BWV 995, in the same suite’s first gavotte, and in the prelude to the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro BWV 998. It may well be that as far as lutenists were concerned, Bach could have saved himself a good deal of ink. For one thing, such careful notational distinctions within a multi-voiced texture would be largely lost when the music came to be intabulated for lute. Moreover, many would claim that the lute technique of Bach’s day was ill-adapted to the constant stopping of the bass strings, given a hand position and fingering style in which the thumb was just as occupied with the treble voice.

Something of this discomfort over notation has been inherited by modern guitarists, to the extent that in the bad old days, editors were wont to suppress the rests.[1] Much has changed since then. Not only is the so-called Urtext of the lute works more available in numerous editions,[2] it is also more approachable. Techniques for varying articulation are being studied ever more systematically by guitar students, and few would argue that it is actually impossible for a guitarist to realise Bach’s notation literally. Nonetheless, ‘family values’ persist: Guitarists opt frequently and explicitly to ignore the rests in the bass, following the imagined model of an ancestral lutenist.

Is this ‘Baroque practice’ or merely bad practice? Should authenticity reside with the lute or with the notation? In fact modern lutenists tend to give the lie to the assumed technical restrictions: for example, Lutz Kirchhof’s recent recording of the prelude to BWV 998 respects the bass-note rests of Bach’s manuscript exactly.[3] As for the guitar, many players are questioning the extent to which the modern instrument should fall into any particular tradition. Recent approaches to technique effectively locate the instrument within a gamut of influences, drawing above all on keyboard and bowed-strings which were, even more than the lute, paramount in Baroque music. For many players, though, some articulations and textures will always remain more natural, more native to the guitar than others. Here is Sharon Isbin, writing in her Acoustic Guitar Answerbook:

Because the guitar has a faster decay and a smaller sound than the piano or harpsichord, there are many times when it is desirable to allow a bass note on the guitar to ring through a rest. In the opening measures of J.S. Bach’s ‘Prelude pour la Luth o Cembal’ from the Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro (BWV 998), for instance, the keyboard notation indicates bass-note rests that do not sound convincing when played on the guitar [see example 1].[4]

Because the tonality remains constant throughout the measure, a guitarist can let the bass note decay naturally rather than stopping it abruptly on the third quaver. This gracefully diminishing bass note reinforces the harmonic richness of both the instrument and the phrase. Without it, the upper voices float without a foundation. If one carries out this approach for the remainder of the piece, a sinuous beauty emerges that would be lacking if each rest were followed literally.[5]

Example 1
BWV 998, Prelude

This, from the pen of one of our most substantial and informed interpreters of Bach, deserves some discussion. It seems, though, that there are two inconsistencies, the first having to do with Isbin’s notion of ‘foundation’, and the second with her comments about the relative sustaining powers of guitar and keyboard.

First, we should ask the Answerbook, what is meant by ‘foundation’ here? Surely not harmonic foundation. After all, few would argue that just because a bass note is to be cut short, it thereby ceases to be understood—heard—as harmonic support for the upper line. On the contrary, it persists owing to what Kirkpatrick referred to as our ‘internal damper [sustaining] pedal’.[6] In other words, the rests cannot undermine the contrapuntal framework, because the bass notes ring on in our imagination. Clearly Isbin is here thinking of the resonance of the instrument, rather than the grammar of the counterpoint.

Second, Isbin’s comment that the rests sound ‘abrupt’ and unconvincing on the guitar—they do indeed articulate the bass line very sharply—does not tally with her remarks about the unequal sustaining qualities of guitar and harpsichord. If the rests represent an effect native to the harpsichord, which has a greater sustaining power than the lute, then they will sound more abrupt on the harpsichord, not less.

Isbin’s last argument is surely the best—that when the bass notes are allowed to resonate on the guitar, then a texture is created that the harpsichord can hardly emulate, a texture which Bach might well have enjoyed. This joins with Isbin’s notion of ‘foundation’ in the service of a richness of sonority. Nevertheless, we should beware: if this richness is only pleasing, not necessary in any grammatical sense, we must ask whether it is relevant to this piece, or whether the notation is not pointing to some other sonority which we, the interpreters, must find. After all, the work is designated for lute first, harpsichord second: perhaps so too is Bach’s meticulous text, rests and all. As we shall see in part IV below, harmonic richness in this prelude is as much a matter of the inner ear’s capacity to sustain harmony notes—to create an imaginary acoustic—as it is of notes sustained visually in a notated texture, or aurally by a resonating instrument.

Sharon Isbin’s comments here, and the performance editions of Bach’s lute works prepared by her mentor Rosalyn Tureck [7] are thought-provoking because they highlight and expand a truism: that no notation is a completely transparent window to the intentions of the composer. Now that the Urtext of these works is so widely available, how can we be sure we have learnt to read it? The tradition of notated art music, transmitted as much through written ciphers as through direct lines of performance practice, is as literary as it is oral. We are all player-readers, and the more awe-inspiring and widely known a masterpiece becomes, the more we are inclined to speak of this or that performance as a reading—most conspicuously when it goes against the instructions of the score. The words which Heinrich Schenker chose to begin his treatise on performing might seem self-defeating, given the subject of the book (it was never finished), but they define a necessary condition of the performer’s task:

Basically, a composition does not require a performance in order to exist. Just as an imagined sound appears real in the mind, the reading of a score is sufficient to prove the existence of the composition. The mechanical realization of the work of art can thus be considered superfluous.[8]

With this notion of reading we arrive at the project of this paper. To try to approach it more closely, it seems appropriate to take the same prelude to BWV 998 that we have been discussing. This prelude will be the focus of the analysis in part III. It will be obvious that the role played by rests in Bach’s textures, and in this prelude in particular, is another focal point. Part II, then, is preliminary: it aims to create a context for the prelude, by examining the role of rests in the bass lines of some other works by Bach. A final part returns to issues of texture and performance in the light of the analysis.

As invoked so far, this concept of reading might seem banal enough: that to form an interpretation is to ‘read between the lines’—that is, to understand the unwritten language of gesture. But in what follows, I shall try to show that to read between the lines, in a deeper sense, means more than to hear inwardly the gestures implied by the notation. It is to hear also whole passages of implied but unwritten music against which the music is projected, and from which the gestures chosen by the interpreter gain their fullest significance and force.

Notes

©2000 Jonathan Leathwood