The Sonate auf Concertenart: A Postmodern Invention? David ...

Sonate auf Concertenart, p. 41
dialectical structure with bilateral symmetry. Within such a movement, the alternation between
tutti and solo that initially might occupy one's attention fades somewhat in relative significance, as
the solo part is contrapuntally interwoven with the others and other formal principles come into
play. The opening ritornello is never repeated in its complete form, and in this connection it is
worth remembering that an opera-seria aria often contains a complete ritornello only at the
beginning of the A section; there may not be any other ritornellos except at the end of the A
section, both then being in the tonic. It is true that Vivaldi, Albinoni, and others were regularly
incorporating greater numbers of full or partial ritornellos in quick concerto movements by 1710
or so. But the aria, with its smaller number of ritornellos and somewhat more substantial role for
the soloist, must have presented an equally influential model for Bach and others.
Similar considerations apply to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, whose first movement
has been regarded as both a ritornello form with an unusually long first ritornello and a da-capo
113
form with a disproportionately short A section. Both analyses have points in their favor, but,
like the broadly comparable preludes of English Suites nos. 1-5--which might have been
preliminary compositional essays for movements of this type--the movement represents an almost
unique type, invented by Bach around 1713, that could not have appeared more than a few years
earlier or later: not much earlier, since the solo concerto with its principle of alternation between
tuttis and solos (on the model of the virtuoso aria) had not yet been invented, not much later,
since by 1725 or so what we now understand as through-composed ritornello form was being
routinely employed in the quick movements of virtually all concertos. 114
What Bach has done in such works is not so much to combine genres as to employ a
diverse set of conventional compositional devices, especially those that articulate form, in original
and unique ways. This is, of course, generally recognized as one of the defining features of his
style. My proposal would, however, enhance our appreciation of Bach's originality, for we would
have to understand the relatively youthful composer of the English Suites, the Weimar organ
chorales and preludes, and the Brandenburg Concertos as grappling with new and potentially
powerful modulatory and articulatory techniques, in genres that were not yet understood
according to the sharply drawn formal structures and style categories delineated in modern
textbooks. Bach nevertheless managed to create works that are both coherent and rich in their use
In his account such designs resemble variation forms rather than, as here, the A section of an
operatic aria containing two main statements of the first stanza of the text.
113
Butler, "The Question of Genre," 9, designates it "sonata da capo form."
114
The Fourth Brandenburg Concerto has also elicited debate as to whether it is "a solo
concerto for violin with ripieno strings and woodwinds, or . . . a concerto grosso for a concertino
of violin and woodwinds with ripieno strings," as Marissen puts it in The Social and Religious
Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995),
62. As Marissen suggests, this is a false dichotomy, although his argument that here Bach was
"moving beyond the two-way (concertino/tutti) textural contrast of the traditional baroque
concerto" (64) runs against the grain of what has been said here about Baroque "tradition" in such
works.