There are many considerations in forming an interpretation of a piece of music, the era of its composition, attention to issues of historical style and practice, finding a reliable text to work from, issues of structure, harmony, and counterpoint, and more. But for me, two basic formal features of western classical music that seem too often to be neglected are how to present a coherent narrative for the listener in regard to repetition and development.
As material is repeated, there is the fact that as a repetition, it has two important characteristics for us to acknowledge: the first time you hear something, it is new, and we experience it in just that way, in its unfamiliarity. As it is repeated, it gains in familiarity, yet each repetition has a unique place within the music as it unfolds. As we perform these repeated passages, we have the opportunity to make them unique in a variety of ways. As much or our repertoire shares certain features that derive from nature, principally symmetry and asymmetry, we have the possibility of using these characteristics to both provide variation of expression and in doing so to move the narrative of the piece forward. For example, most phrases in Beethoven are asymmetrical. This makes it easily possible to inflect a repeated phrase differently, say by phrasing it dynamically up and down or down and up to subconsciously clarify its asymmetry for the listener. We can vary the stresses within the phrase. Think of any sentence you wish to speak and say it repeatedly with an accent on a different word each time. That is the idea. On the cello, we have several additional ways of coloring the sound, as well, bow speed and placement, speed and width of vibrato, for example. Below is a funny example of variety and repetition from the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday.
I was trained as a “modern” cellist, most of my career was on modern instruments with endpins and metal strings, always exploring any new developments in each, and more. But as a modern player, I also studied scores, searching for authoritative “urtext” editions, manuscripts, and first editions of the “standard” repertoire. The idea was to seek understanding of a composer’s intent, and exploring the context of the period in which they lived and worked. I was often frustrated with learning Bach’s Solo Suites, especially as I grew up playing in an orchestra that specialized in the Cantatas, and there just seemed so many discrepancies between this music, which had strong foundations in the original texts, and how the Suites appeared in print and was heard in performance.
As a result of this, for me, regarding Bach, the best editor is the one who does the least. Anything that is not in the manuscripts that exist is editorial. Do you want to learn Bach, or someone else’s opinion on what Bach intended? I believe that there is no real choice to a musician who wishes to seek a composer’s intent, you go with the least editing. You don’t seek to interpret an interpretation of an interpretation. That result seems to be more like the result of a game of “telephone.”
[The game of telephone: Players form a line or circle, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they just heard, to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread, or, more generally, for the unreliability of typical human recollection.]
“On November 2016, Bärenreiter Verlag published Bach’s Cello Suites of “New Bach Edition, Revised Edition” (NBA rev. 4 / Editor: Andrew Talle).” This is the most recent edition, yet it contains some errors:
Here is a review of the new Barenreiter Bach Suites (2016). Barenreiter also publishes a synoptic edition the compares line by line the early manuscript copies and the first published edition.
Of these, I prefer the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe (edited by Alfred Dorffel), which was edited by a musicologist/organist, not a cellist. Why is that a good thing? Because decisions about slurs are about being consistent with the preponderance of the extant manuscripts, not someone’s bowing ideas. The parts are very clean (no fingerings). This is this best free download to start with, IMO. You can look at lots of options from the IMSLP list if you need fingerings and bowings, but they often have little to do with what Bach wrote.
Zander Masterclass
WhispelweyMasterclass
I think we must study Bach Choral works, arias from the cantatas (check the cello parts, Bernard Greenhouse played in the Bach Aria Group for years, after all), and the keyboard suites. Fingerings are not that big of a deal, look at the chords and scales and the fingering is usually pretty obvious. If they aren’t, then that is where to concentrate your initial efforts (scales and arpeggios, with a teacher, if possible, but there are many scale/arpeggio books available). Bowings in the Suites are problematic only in that there is no original manuscript from Bach’s own hand, only copies made by others. By looking at the works I suggest, you will see what common types of articulation patterns exist consistently in Bach’s writing for cello (like arpeggiated chords, commonly 3+1 or 1+3, etc., not as commonly 4 (or 8) to a bow as many “modern” editions contain, 2+1+1, et al), but modern cellists rarely seem to do this, even if it is in the existing manuscripts and the Gesellschaft, so any online “tutorial” is likely more of the same distorted stuff. Casals’ “revolution” was to program the Suites in performance (most uncommon at the time), and that you should study them and make them your own, not that you should play them as he himself did. That was Bernard Greenhouse’s experience gained from working with the great Catalan cellist.
By looking at the keyboard works, you see similar patterns of articulation. Bach most often played the keyboard, and I believe that his thinking on articulating in archetypal works like French dance suites (they are “types” by definition) is clear in these works. By listening to great keyboard players in this repertoire, you get a very different idea of tempo, pacing, and consistent articulation. Zander pretty much nails it, in that regard. The suggestions he makes are compelling.
These things are the very basis of what makes Bach’s music what it is: when harmonic rhythm changes, this needs to be clear, ditto a hemiola; how melodic material changes dependent on the chord it occurs within, and where the key changes take place tell us much about the journey we are on, and structurally, where we are within that journey. These are the indicators, the signposts and the scenery on our path, and we need to animate our understanding and our performance with them.
Robert Schumann wrote piano accompaniment to the suites, and it’s available at IMSLP. Antonio Janigro (who had been a student of Diran Alexanian, who published the first widely distributed edition of the Suites containing the Anna Magdalena manuscript facsimile) played the suites on the piano and played the Schumann arrangement from memory in class; very illuminating.
Among the best training for playing Bach is to play the continuo (and solo) parts of the Cantatas and Masses (particularly Arias and Recitatives), followed by the orchestral suites. You can get the music on imslp.org and play along with recordings to get a feel for it. This will give you the sense of the range of articulations (be mindful of the words in this regard!) in the vocal works, and the rhythmic inflection in the Dance movements of the orchestral suites. Then get a clean, un-bowed and un-fingered edition of the Suites and do your own hiking. It isn’t Mt. Everest, it’s the Appalachian Trail.
In the 1980s, my first former mother-in-law (at my suggestion) transcribed the 4th Suite for Harpsichord. I recently found a very old, not very high quality cassette tape (remember those?) of a performance. I attempted to make it reasonably listenable, and the result is linked below. I think it offers an excellent example for cellists to consider thinking about the Bach Suites not as cello pieces, but more as “pure” music.
Beethoven’s five Sonatas for piano and cello offer a magnificent distillation of twenty years of development as a composer into two hours of listening. His mastery of the conventional musical forms and structures of the time was clear from his earliest published works, and that mastery made it possible for him to subvert the listeners’ expectations in ways that would create a radically new expression of emotion in music.
The “original instrument” and “period performance” movements of the second half of the twentieth century gave audiences and performers alike new insight into and experience of the sound of western classical music as it might have been performed historically. Despite those developments, the solemn ritual of modern concert life has little to do with the manner in which much of this music was presented when new. Small-scale chamber works were not often presented in grandconcert halls, but were meant for performance in more intimate environs. The domestic nature of these events was well described by the violinist and composer Ludwig Spohr, and music was often one of many simultaneous entertainments. Conversation, food, wine, card games and music intermingled in the social fabric, and one was free to listen attentively or not, and there could be lively comments made to the players even as they performed.
It was for just such an occasion that the Opus 5 sonatas presented here were written. They were dedicated to King Friedrich Wilhelm II, a gifted amateur cellist for whom Haydn and Mozart composed string quartets with unusually prominent cello parts. These Sonatas served to introduce young Beethoven to Europe’s influential musical society. Beethoven performed these works with the great French cellist Jean-Louis Duport, the solo cellist of the King’sorchestra. In these two works, Beethoven establishes his mastery of the conventional forms even as he utterly defies their conventions. Most of the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart with which Beethoven’s audience would be familiar were cast in three or four movements, and were typically ten to fifteen minutes in length. Both of the Opus 5 Sonatas are twice that duration, and each consists of only two movements. Even more radical is that each begins with an extensive slow introduction, a feature usually employed by Haydn and Mozart in symphonic literature to signify a particularly serious work. More importantly, that attention is richly rewarded as these works unfold. In these two sonatas, dramatic contrasts of volume and mood, and of sound and silence in the introductions serve the purpose of demanding that the audience pay heed. Not a bad idea for a young composer looking to make his way in the world. The first sonata has another unusual characteristic that Beethoven develops further in his “late” works. Nineteen minutes into the first movement, thetempo changes abruptly threetimes within a few seconds, first with a sudden slow echo of the introduction, followed by eighteen extremely fastmeasures before returning tothe original tempo. In the second movement, the tempo becomes much slower for just two measures, again echoing the introduction, just seconds before its conclusion. It is both radical and brilliant. In working on such a large canvas for his “domestic” works, Beethoven set the stage for the “heavenly lengths” of the works of later composers.
By the time he completed the Sonata in A major, twelve years after those of Opus 5, Beethoven was at the peak of his fame. The first four symphonies, nine of the string quartets, and four of the piano concertos were before the public, and his growing deafness had yet to keep him from performing. The A majorsonata is both the most widely performed of these sonatas, and is, at least on the surface, more conventional than its predecessors. It is cast in three movements, but instead of the expected fast-slow-fast progression, its movements proceed as fast, faster, and fast again. The opening movement has a lyricism and generosity of spirit that is reminiscent of the first “Razumovsky” quartet or the later “Archduke” trio. The middle movement, called a scherzo, is not in the form conventionally associated with that term. In place of the clearly defined scherzo-trio-scherzo one might expect, he presents two alternating contrasting themes, the first of which features a melody that begins (and remains) on the “wrong” beat, while the second is more lyrical and more gracefully comported. The last movement is in “sonata” form rather than a rondo, and begins with a slow introduction that at first hearing could seem to be the slow movement one might have expected.
The two sonatas of Opus 102 came into being after the longest period of compositional inactivity of Beethoven’s career. Crises in the personal, physical and professional realms had combined to affect his creative output for almost two years. When he did return to serious work as a composer, his music was transformed. These sonatas contain many of the hallmarks of Beethoven’s later music: the use of counterpoint, the contrast of ethereal, almost ecstatic passages alongside more agitated ones, sudden changes of tempo, and the use of “cyclic” formal elements are all contained in these two brief works.
The first of these sonatas is cast in two movements, and it is the most unconventional, the shortest, and perhaps the most profound of all the sonatas. The entire sonata is shorter than the first movements of either of the Opus 5 sonatas, yet the materials are so diverse and are so perfectly argued and presented that by its conclusion, one has been taken on an extraordinary emotional journey. Beethoven originally labeled it a “free sonata,” and it opens with a serenely lyrical introduction in C major that leads to an allegro in A minor that is by turns furious and ruminative. The second movement opens with a short Adagio that never truly settles into either C or G major before giving way to a brief return of the introduction from the first movement. Finally, the movement settles into an allegro that is equal parts ecstatic and ebullient music.
The D major sonata is Beethoven’s final accompanied sonata of any sort, and it is the only truly conventional work of this set. Its three movements are in the more typical fast-slow-fast arrangement, although the slow movement does connect to the finale without pause. It is with the finale that Beethoven again upturns convention, as the entire movement is a fugue.
