JOHANN BERNHARD BACH
Born in Erfurt, Germany, 1676
Died in Eisenach, Germany, 1749
Orchestral Suite No. 1 in G Minor
By the late 1600s, professional musicians with the last name Bach were as ubiquitous as the spruce trees that filled the dense forests of Thuringia, in what is now central Germany. Johann Bernhard Bach, born in 1676 in the capital city of Erfurt, learned his craft from his father, a church organist. When a second cousin died in 1703, J.B. Bach took over his position as a keyboard player about 30 miles away in Eisenach, the birthplace of another second cousin who was nine years younger: Johann Sebastian Bach. J.B. Bach’s role was mainly as a performer in an ensemble that was for a time directed by the other musical titan of that generation, Georg Phillip Telemann. But Bach did write his own music, too, including orchestral suites in the French style that Telemann mastered and made into a mainstay of German musical life.
Most of J.B. Bach’s music was lost, but some of the suites survived thanks to J.S. Bach, who made copies of them to perform with the amateur musicians he directed at the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig (an ensemble founded by none other than Telemann, back when he had been a college student). J.B. Bach’s Orchestral Suite in G Minor is also sometimes listed as an Ouverture, the same French heading given to the substantial first movement that follows the traditional pattern of a slow outer sections filled with dotted rhythms — those long-short alternations that impart a ceremonial snap to the music’s procession — surrounding a faster middle section, where the prominent part for a solo violin first comes to the fore. In the remainder of the suite, three French dance styles represented, as well as two more free-form movements: one a melodious air with a walking bass, and the other a restless fantasy. As J.S. Bach wrote in an obituary of his cousin (whom he outlived by a year), J.B. Bach “composed many beautiful overtures in the manner of Telemann,” and it’s a stroke of luck that we still have this and a handful of others as proof.
GEORG PHILLIP TELEMANN
Born in Magdeburg, Germany, 1681
Died in Hamburg, Germany, 1767
Quintet in E Minor, TWV 44:5
Unlike the many Bachs, Telemann found his way to a music career without any direct precedent in his well-educated family, where most of the men ended up in the church. In fact, his mother went to great lengths to try to keep him from music, leading young Telemann to teach himself to compose and play various instruments in secret. When he left his hometown of Magdeburg and moved to Leipzig in 1701, his plan was to study law, but locals got wind of his musical talents, and soon he was composing for area churches. He went on to work for a duke in the Bach stronghold of Eisenach, followed by a period in Frankfurt, and then in 1721 he landed what was arguably the most prestigious post in all of Germany, directing music for the principal churches of Hamburg. Producing music of staggering quality and quantity there for the next 46 years (including more than 1,000 cantatas), Telemann basked in his unrivaled reputation in Germany, one that dwarfed that of his friend J.S. Bach or his pen pal over in England, the fellow German G.F. Handel.
Telemann helped expand the range of German music by bringing in the best of styles from afar. This Quintet (or Sonata à 5 to be more precise) leans into the style of Italy, especially the “church sonata” mastered by Arcangelo Corelli in Rome. Since the Roman Catholic Church prohibited the performance of any dance music in church buildings at the time, Italian composers came up with a template of church-appropriate music that usually had four movements organized as slow-fast-slow-fast, as in this example. The two Allegro sections show off Telemann’s mastery of the formal counterpoint that became Bach’s bread and butter, exploiting the possibilities that come with separate parts for two violins, two violas, and the shared basso continuo line covered by cello, bass, and any other accompanying instruments.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born in Eisenach, Germany, 1685
Died in Leipzig, Germany, 1750
Oboe Concerto in G Minor, BWV 1056R
Luckily for Bach, Telemann had just recently accepted the top job in Hamburg when another plum position opened up in Leipzig in 1723. Bach was able to secure the job of Thomaskantor, a demanding role that entailed both directing music for the principal churches of Leipzig and training the young choristers under his care. Somehow he also found time to let off steam directing the amateur musicians who participated in Telemann’s old group, the Collegium Musicum, which often performed in a congenial coffee house. To fill the group’s programs, Bach dipped into his catalog of works he had amassed during earlier periods in Weimar and Cöthen, where he had more opportunities to make music outside of the church. And since he had an abundance of keyboard virtuosos available in the ensemble — namely his own sons — Bach took it upon himself to rework old concertos he had written for oboe or violin and turn them into the first concertos ever designed to feature harpsichord.
There’s some mystery surrounding the source material for this concerto, reconstructed from Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in F Minor. The fast outer movements probably came from the same work, which could have featured violin or oboe. The slow movement likely started its life in an oboe concerto, but it found a second home as the sinfonia (i.e. overture) for a cantata Bach wrote around 1727. The melody begins with the exact same turn of phrase as a Telemann Flute Concerto that probably came first, inspiring Bach’s own elaboration.
GEORG PHILLIP TELEMANN
Overture from Burlesque de Quixotte, TWV 55:G10
Telemann wrote more than 100 orchestral suites, spread across 60 years of his long and prolific career. Going beyond the French template of following an overture with assorted dances, he made some of his most original statements in works that used the suite as a vehicle for program music, whether it was depicting the flowing waters of Hamburg, the stock market of Paris, or, in this case, the adventures and mishaps of Don Quixote, the hero of Cervantes’ Spanish novel that had become a fixture of European culture since its first publication in 1605. The overture of his Burlesque de Quixotte is a standard example of the French form, including those same dotted rhythms in the outer sections, although maybe the fast middle section has a bit of quixotic fervor in its breathless motion and emotional ups and downs. Telemann saved the more explicit scene painting for subsequent movements, like when Don Quixote battles the windmill.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Concerto in C Minor for Oboe and Violin, BWV 1060
Once Bach scholars deduced that the harpsichord concertos prepared for the Collegium Musicum were actually arrangements of earlier works, they combed the scores for clues about the source material. In the case of the Concerto for Two Keyboards in C Minor (BWV 1060), details in the two solo parts led them to reconstruct what must have been a concerto for oboe and violin. In the Allegro opening movement, the part for the second keyboard soloist undoubtedly originated on the violin, with figures divided between two adjacent strings, one moving melodically, the other holding constant. In the first solo part, the sustained tones suggest that the music was first conceived for oboe, given its ability to shape long, slow-moving phrases with the breath. The gorgeous middle movement weaves the two solo voices in fluid counterpoint, supported by a gentle, rocking pulse of accompaniment. In the fast finale, the more virtuosic material goes to the violin soloist, who barrels through quick sextuplets under leaping figures from the oboe.
© 2024 Aaron Grad