J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo, or the universality of thought

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The creative power of J.S. Bach’s chamber music reached its peak during the years 1717 and 1723, which was a time-span of extraordinary fertility at the court of Köthen where works like the Brandeburgh Concertos, The Well Tempered Clavier, Invenzioni, English Suites and French Suites, Suites for solo cello, Sonatas for violin and cembalo, besides the six Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo, of 1720, saw the light of day. This is a legacy of priceless purely instrumental master pieces, whose conception is certainly linked to the fact that for the only time in his life Bach did not find himself during this period doing service at a church. On the other hand, he already had occasion at Weimar to assimilate the “genetic heritage” of the instrumental concert born in Italy in the decades straddling the 1700s – for example by transcribing for organ or harpsichord at least six Vivaldi Concerts – jointly with the practical one of the virtuoso use of the violin which had also at that time crossed the Alps and influenced several composers before him, with the important difference that in comparison with the Italians, the Germans generally preferred “unaccompanied” annotations for the solo instrument. Yet if for Biber or Walther, the same as for Vivaldi (though in a quite different manner), the counterpoint essentially constituted a technique between the various ways of annotation, Bach would on his part found on it the same form of compositional thought, raising musical buildings which are remarkably more complex and constructed by higher principles of structural cohesion and internal unity. This being the crowning of an illustrious tradition, it is for this purpose that the Six Solos for Violin without Accompanying Bass Book First (this is the title of the autograph) demonstrate an unprecedented technical mastery and expressive variety of the score for violin (one often forgets that Bach was also a master violinist!), even if the formal model is that famous one of the Italian church sonata (Slow Introduction-Fugue-Andante cantabile-Presto) for the three Sonatas, and that of the variable sequence of stylised dances as belonging to the French suite (but also of the Italian chamber sonata) for the three scores. And it is within this skeleton that Bach requires the violin to play in a way it has never played before, and perhaps how it will never play again. The six pitches, it should be said, are those most adapt for the instrument, to the extent that they present a minimum quantity of accidents and proceed according to a very logical order, while the wide and visionary Bach design moves on from a progressive transfiguration of the melodic line towards the harmonic concentration, according to that gradual passage from horizontal to vertical position occurring as a metaphor also in the human parable, and on which the music, as all arts, reflects.
There is great strength without ever a hint of violence in these works, power and depth of the compositional thought even in the touching simplicity. It is a score which presents itself as being immediate and which reaches, with its sparkling purity, richness and force, the high summits of speculative thought, which is still not that much if it could be affirmed without risk that for the unheard of concept this cycle represents one of the absolute peaks of western music.

Federico Scoponi