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

Sonate auf Concertenart, p. 7
My proposal is not intended to rule out the presence of sophisticated inter-generic
references in Bach's chamber works and other late-Baroque music. But although interpretations
along such lines may be unimpeachable as modern hearings of this repertory, they do not
necessarily reflect the composer's intentions or the ways in which a contemporary listener would
have understood the works in question. To be sure, we lack clear windows into early eighteenthcentury
ways of hearing these pieces, but theoretical and critical writings, as well as titles and part
rosters in original sources, provide a glimpse. From these it is evident that even the division
between solo and tutti, so fundamental to modern views of the concerto, was relatively
insignificant from some early eighteenth-century perspectives. Hence apparent allusions to the
solo-tutti distinction may not have served as markers of the concerto in works such as the two
sonatas illustrated above. Indeed, which if any of what are now thought to be the conventions of
concerto writing were well defined around 1713, when Bach is thought to have begun
transcribing instrumental concertos for keyboard instruments? 10
The problem deepens when one attempts to identify precisely which passages in a given
sonata movement correspond to the tutti and solo passages--that is, the ritornellos and the solo
episodes--of an archetypal concerto movement. The exercise often begins simply, as in the outset
of the two works shown in examples 1 and 2. But as the music proceeds, different listeners are
11
apt to reach different conclusions as to which passage represents which part of a concerto. The
problem is not confined to works of J. S. Bach, and although it might be ascribed to deliberate
genre blurring, it is logical at least to reconsider the underlying premise that individual passages in
such movements serve as functional equivalents for either the "solo" or the "tutti" (or "ritornello")
sections of a concerto.
Tomaso Albinoni's Mature Concertos," in Bach Studies 2, ed. Daniel R. Melamed (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24-5, traces the use of a "double Devise" in Bach's concerto
movements not to "his own da capo aria" but to the "characteristic" use of this technique in the
later concertos of Albinoni.
10
The now-customary dating of these works depends on the argument of Hans-Joachim
Schulze that Bach's opportunities for studying and playing the works of Vivaldi and others
probably broadened considerably in 1713, when Prince Johann Ernst of Sachsen-Weimar returned
from university studies in Utrecht; see his Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert
(Leipzig: Edition Peters, 1984), pp. 146ff. Karl Heller raises the possibility of Bach's work having
taken place over a more extended period, noting the existence of alternate versions; see his
Kritischer Bericht to Johann Sebastian Bach: Bearbeitungen fremder Werke: Concerti BWV
972-87, 592a; Sonaten BWV 965, 966, Fuga BWV 954, in Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe
sämtlicher Werke, Serie V, Band 11 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1997), 18-19. One might also point to
considerable differences in the degree to which the individual concertos are reworked for
keyboard performance.
11 See, for example, the differing analyses of the first movement of Bach's A-major flute
sonata BWV 1032 by Marissen and Swack in the articles cited above.