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(From Quora, courtesy of Alex Johnston) :
Is it likely that JS Bach improvised for patrons at something near the level of his surviving compositions?
We actually have an anecdote which tells us how good an improviser Bach was, and also what the limits on his skill were. What this story tells us is that he was phenomenally good.
Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emmanuel was employed by Frederick the Great as a court musician in Potsdam. Frederick was an erudite and enlightened monarch and by most accounts a pretty decent musician (flute). There are slightly conflicting accounts of exactly how they met, but the following is taken from Forkel’s biography, as told to Forkel by Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedemann.
Frederick had heard a lot about what a great musician CPE’s father was, and had become very curious to meet him. He started subtly and then not-so subtly hinting to CPE that he wanted JS to pay him a visit.
Eventually, JS took the hint and travelled to Potsdam to see his son and hear the court music. According to Bach’s elder son Wilhelm Friedemann, Frederick was just about to perform himself at a private concert when he was given a list of people who’d just arrived at court. On seeing Bach’s name, he announced ‘with a kind of agitation’ Gentlemen, old Bach has come. Bach, who’d just arrived at CPE’s lodgings, was immediately brought to meet Frederick.
Frederick, clearly geeking out at the prospect of meeting Bach Sr, abandoned the whole concert idea so that he could show Bach his new fortepianos. He invited Bach to try them out, and Bach duly improvised a bunch of things on them, to Frederick’s great satisfaction.
Bach then asked Frederick to give a theme that he could use to improvise a fugue. Frederick duly gave him one, and Bach improvised a three-part fugue on it.
Here the stories differ. Frederick in later life said that Bach went on to improvise four-, five- and six-part fugues on the same theme, but according to Forkel, Frederick asked Bach to improvise a six-part fugue on his theme, and Bach politely declined on the grounds that not all themes were easy to improvise a fugue over. (Bear in mind that most people can’t even improvise one musical line, let alone more than one at a time: six is freakishly difficult.)
Instead, Bach pulled a theme out of his own head and improvised a six-part fugue on the spot, and then promised Frederick that he’d get a six-part fugue on his theme in due course.
Bach’s visit was in May 1747, and in October of that year he duly published the Musical Offering, which contained two fugues, one in three and one in six voices, ten canons and a trio sonata, all of them based on Frederick’s theme. The ‘Ricercar à 6’, the crowning glory of the work, is one of Bach’s greatest works. Bach had one copy of it printed on special high-quality paper and sent it to Frederick with a royal dedication.
So, yes: we can be reasonably sure that Bach could improvise at something like the level of his surviving work. In the case of the six-part Ricercar, Bach’s difficulty probably came from the fact that he hadn’t thought of the theme himself, and indeed had never heard it until Frederick played it to him.
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05-25-2023 11:33 PM
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Yes, it is a very famous story...
though 6 is difficult I would not really focus on it))
I believe improvization of 3-4 voices fugue was quite common for a professional keyboard player those days.
The question is its artistic quality.
In my opinion great classical improvization is like an ability to improvize a poem on spot (also quite popular skill in many early cultures) - it is not only about making proper meter and correct rhyme, it is about sense.
And usually even if they have a theme they improvize a form, so they build up a whole building (jazz improvization is over the form it implies a huge difference in aesthetics)
Note how both very idiomatic and characteristic the theme of Musical Offering is - it immidiately suggests (and determines!) lots of opportunities.
Bach's themes usually already contain all the possible solutions of harmonic realization in couterpoint texture.
Though I should admit that technical and competitive aspects was also quite an important entertainment in baroque times.
Check this video about Guidonian hand at 11:33 there is a fragment about the contest that contained very tricky way of improvization
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I remember reading this story years ago, and ignited my interest in how this could be possible. It wasn’t a skill unique to Bach, although it’s clear from the account that he was unusually, perhaps uniquely good at it.
So one route into it is actually Italian through partimento. Partimenti are short unfinished pieces that the student is expected to flesh out into a piece of music… so imagine a sort of classical lead sheet.
in fact fugal improvisation is naturally introduced in the more advanced partimento exercises in Fenaroli for instance. In fact, even earlier on there are many clever contrapuntal puzzles in these apparently simple exercises.
Partimento is associated with the Neapolitan/Italian school rather than Bach’s German tradition, as we know the former tended to stress working on harmony and counterpoint at the keyboard rather than Bach who was more notation based in his teaching and unsurprisingly very strict on voices and parallels and so on (according to Derek Remes)… Giuseppe Verdi studied Fenaroli and he certainly enjoyed a fugue.
However, IIRC (it’s been a minute) CPE Bach has some partimento fugues in his book on keyboard playing, which was the first time I saw anything like that - and I remember thinking, ‘oh so that’s how they did it.’ CPE was a student of his father and Remes at least seems comfortable drawing a line from JS Bach’s teaching practice into his son’s.
I’m not saying JS Bach himself was leaning on these sorts of things to improvise in front of Frederick the Great, but it certainly seems like the sort of thing you would do to hone your chops in childhood and adolescence. There are common patterns and contrapuntal archetypes that form the basis of this technique and the musical flow. For example, you can expect the young Bach to have throughly mastered the cycle of fourths in every possible voice leading permutation and a million different embellishments. His refusal to improvise on the theme given right away is to me quite telling (it was also written to be difficult; ole Fred always had to win didn’t he?)
his legendary six voice show stopper was probably at least partly prepared by the sounds of it. Not necessarily practiced in entirety - but a composer-improviser would be able to explore a theme for possibilities like stretti, sequencing, inversion and so on ahead of time even if they hadn’t arrived at a set composition. I can only imagine Bach had a load of such themes and developmental ideas in his back pocket, ready to go…
As John Mortensen points out in his book ‘improvising fugue’ of all the great number of fugues composed in the baroque era, few approach the technical level of Bachs written works. So our idea of what a fugue is is coloured by Bach’s anomalous excellence
And there are people around today who can improvise fugue, although maybe not in six voices; I’m subscribed to a few on YouTube and it’s the sort of thing church organists get into (they find it funny to play fugues with a top 40 tune as the subject etc, saddos). Not sure if anyone can do it on guitar, I’m sure there must be someone.
in fact improvising a fugue does not mean that Bach was necessarily improvising to the same level as the well tempered clavier. In improvising I have heard it argued that things like parallels and parts dropping out and so on would be acceptable (and probably quite hard to hear sometimes too.) But with Bach - who knows?
re guitar - I don’t think it’s impossible that one could improvise something texturally similar to the two fugues from the ‘lute’ suites, or certainly Guiliani’s much easier fughetta (which is not quite a full blown fugue, but getting there and tbh looks much like a realisation of a simple Fenaroli partimento); which is to say quite a different animal from Bach’s greatest contrapuntal works for clavier,
There are accounts of the lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss contending with Bach in a battle of improvisation, including fugue. Again to have been a fly on the wall!Last edited by Christian Miller; 05-26-2023 at 04:33 AM.
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Although doesn’t Elam say they say no one was actually able to do it haha? :-) (bet Bach could have, the absolute NERD)
Originally Posted by Jonah
Also thanks to your post I’m now thinking of fugal improvising as being equivalent to a freestyle rap battle, and I enjoy that. Have to go and watch Eight Mile again (underrated movie imo).
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Perhaps the highly chromatic nature of the main theme in The Musical Offering (compare it to the The Art of Fugue) presented a greater challenge to Bach than most and he had to sleep on it for a day or two. Strangely enough, I came to know the six-part fugue in my teens through Anton Webern's idiosyncratic orchestration before hearing and then learning to play the piece on keyboard:
Speaking of improvised fugues, Robert Levin has pretty incredible chops in this area. Check out the opening section in this video where he improvises a Bach-style fugue on pitches randomly selected from a hat.
A friend of mine has interviewed Levin on a couple of occasions. At the end of one session, Levin requested the Köchel number of any Mozart piece and my friend selected k540 (the Adagio in B minor). Levin proceed to play the first half of the piece as written and then seamlessly 'recomposed' the rest.
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Yes. I remember reading a discussion of what made this subject so difficult written by I want to say Schoenberg (but it’s been a long time so I may misremember) and I remember the main point being that most of the development of material Bach does in the Musical offering is based on the countersubject he wrote to the King’s theme. So he kind of side stepped it. Originally Posted by PMB
but as I say it’s been while since I read it so might misremember. Perhaps someone else remembers the article.
EDIT; it’s referenced on Wikipedia - make of that what you will. Schoenberg suggested the theme was written by CPE Bach anonymously, who was Frederick’s composer.
EDIT EDIT: interesting about the the ‘riddle canons’. Reminds me of some of the stuff in partmenti. I think the musical culture of the era was full of these puzzles. In general I was interested to learn, Bach sometimes did not write pieces out in full in autograph - continuo and ornamentation are obvious examples, but also preludes might be written out in short hand - implying some degree of compositional intelligence and improvisational acumen was expected of the performers of the era as opposed to simply ‘playing the dots.’
Again, analogous to jazz, except I’ve leaned the hard way jazz horn players invariably play verbatim what’s on the chart unless you tell them to solo, for some reason.Last edited by Christian Miller; 05-26-2023 at 05:03 AM.
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He's also done Swedish ice-cream truck and I'm a Barbie girl
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yea this is the sort of thing they like to do Originally Posted by pauln
tbh Bachs works are full of these type of pop cultural references, but no one today remembers the popular drinking songs in eighteenth century Leipzig apart from a few academics…
will baby shark one day be the same?
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Judging by his output alone, Bach had to have improvised at near the level of his compositions. He simply didn't have the time to "think it over". He basically imagined the music, and on the paper it went. And when you consider that beyond the surface level of his music being beautiful, the technical structures and little surprises he throws in, it makes it that much more impressive.
About the 6 voice fugue, that theme is freaking weird, and heir Bach was probably thinking, wtf was that???
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As Gjerdingen puts it ‘we would be hard pressed to copy music as fast as they (professional composers of the c18) composed it’ Originally Posted by vintagelove
whether or not Bach improvised similarly to how he wrote? It seems likely, but it’s hard (perhaps impossible) to know. That said I do think some of Bach’s works are clearly more clearly technical and intellectual than others.
So I’m not sure he effectively improvised to paper the whole of WTC (nor of course the musical offering for obvious reasons) although I would guess for example that many of the oratorios and cantatas were effectively first draft, fitting in with his duties as a church musician. Which is not at all to say they are not great music (although the Christmas oratorio is a bit boring.)
But I don’t know the scholarship there .. so if anyone does…
Also Bach was highly rated as an improviser in his own lifetime and not so much as a composer. His compositions were thought to be too.. well … baroque. As in distastefully over-the-top in terms of complexity and ornamentation. This makes sense when you compare him with Corelli, Vivaldi or for that matter his own sons or his students such as Goldberg who leaned more toward the fashionable galant style (CPE being highly influential on the next generation that included Mozart). this might suggest either his improvisation was more to the taste of the era (so simpler), or perhaps the kinds of complexities he enjoyed were more welcome in improvisation than composition.Last edited by Christian Miller; 05-27-2023 at 06:05 AM.
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I wonder why is Bach's music is so much not-understood today among musicians.
They are ready to talk about different technical skills and technical compositional challenges of his, various element of recognized harmonic or melodic turnarouds, discuss possible technical methods (or rather 'tricks') how it can be imitated, huge focus on pure counterpoint.
And though all this is a part of that era and his music too, somehow the most important thing is consistently avoided.
The contents.
Presumtion that Bach thought in terms of counterpoint or partimenti or even harmony (which he did of course) is nothing in comarison to the way he thought in terms of contents.
It is like analysing eclusively lines and colours in Botticelli's Spring or Giotto's fresco cycles.
"You know it looks like it was a common practice those days, you draw a good line here and then a good line there, fill in the circle with yellow, behind that line put the blue... it is not that difficult, of course Giotto did it in his great way... and here it is really tricky, look how many lines are there at a time... hm... I guess he really thought in terms of lines.... they all did those days... look here is the book... it says 'draw the line', it is all about drawing lines... though of curse lines should be empotional, art is emotional for sure... what? Oh yeh.. it has something to do with that St.Francis whoever he is... but you know we cannot say for sure .. who cares.. lets get back to lines, at least the lines we can copy if we really try.. . Form? Composition? Not really, it is probably too subjective, or too formal... lets get into details, after all it is all abstract you know.. lines colours... St.Francis.. haha... Giotto had a good glass of wine you know (as we do), was a common guy you know (as we are), used lines and colours in various order (as we can)... sure he was a genius, because he used so many lines and colours... just wow... but you know if you try you can probably do it, just lines and colours you know'
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My friend's improvization recital.. first on harpsichord and the on piano
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