Bach Tuesday St Mary's Ewell: Two Clavierubung Preludes & Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor
🎞️ · 07.03.2023 · 18:03:00 ··· Dienstag ⭐ 0 🎬 0
📺 Jonathan Holmes
🎬 · 07.03.2023 · 18:03:00 ··· Dienstag
😎 · 03.07.2024 · 15:40:29 ··· MiTTwoch
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)
Two chorale preludes from Clavier-Übung part 3
Kyrie, Gott, heiliger Geist BWV 671 is the third of the Kyrie preludes: in the first, the choral occurs in the highest part—God the Father—while in the second it comes in the tenor, the middle of the texture—God the Son (God among us). God, the Holy Ghost, underpins everything, and here the melody is in the bass. The manuals provide an imitative texture, thematically based on the plainsong-derived melody. (The Lutherans did not disdain to use prereformation music.) The late Pierre Boulez revered this piece as a fine example of non-fugal imitation. It closes on a pedal G with a highly chromatic passage, astonishing even by the standards of Bach.
Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam BWV 684
After baptism comes a new life, and that is a reason for joy.
This chorale arrangement is brimming with cheerfulness. Luther’s hymn ‘Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam’ is one with a very special promise: that of a new life. Christ was baptised in the Jordan by St John, and he baptises us to cleanse us of our sins. But the baptismal water is no ordinary water, as it is coloured with the blood of Christ. Through the water of death, the person baptised is reborn in Christ. While the chorale melody sounds in long notes in the pedal, the river water ripples happily in fast notes over two keyboards. In the four-voiced arrangement, there are many question and answer games between the three highest parts, which emphasise once again the carefree unity of those being purified. Bach in English means brook; he loved a play on words, and it must be said that Bach’s river Jordan is more akin to a babbling brook than a mighty slow-moving river!
Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582
This is the earliest work on the programmme and one of Bach’s most famous, the Passacaglia in C minor. Not only has this organ work been arranged numerous times for orchestra, piano, or various chamber groups, but it has made its way into popular culture through films and such diverse renditions as Jimi Hendrix’s Lift Off and the jazz flute version by Hubert Laws, both in 1973.
The form of a passacaglia, often indistinguishable from that of a chaconne, consists of a series of variations based on a repeating pattern in the bass—typically four or eight bars—and relies on traditional chord progressions. Such pieces flourished especially during the Baroque era, when many composers made use of existing passacaglia themes for their own sets of variations. In Bach’s case, his work consists of a theme and twenty variations, the last of which is extended without pause by a fugue, which could also count as Variation 21.
Some scholars have conjectured that Bach may have composed the Fugue first, basing it on two main subjects—the first drawn from a mass by French organist André Raison from his Livre d’orgue, published in Paris in 1699, and the second, which he would tweak to become the Passacaglia’s second half, placed as a pulsing countersubject to the first subject. Yet a third fugue subject in faster note values then enters as a countersubject to the combined counterpoint of the first two. The tweaked second half of the Passacaglia has been found to be similar to a passacaille in a different mass by Raison, which some view as just a coincidence. Whether or not the Fugue or the Passacaglia came first, both show added influences of other composers such as Buxtehude and Legrenzi whose works on repeating patterns Bach was studying around that time.
Many commentators have proposed theories of what sorts of symbolism or symmetries seem to be at work in the Passacaglia, and there are numerous differences of opinion as to where formal divisions and groupings lie. A general consensus, however, seems to be that there is a break in intensity after Variation 12, followed by an “interlude” of three variations and another group of five that ends with great majesty.
The Fugue is the work’s crowning achievement—more complicated than a fugue on a single subject and thus called a double fugue by many, though definitions vary. The upshot is that Bach was thinking about counterpoint in remarkably sophisticated ways and surpassing all of his models in creating an original design. After the first presentation of the subject and countersubject, this pair returns four times, migrating systematically among voices and moving out of and back into the home key—and at the same time incorporating a third subject (countersubject) as well as a layer of freely composed material. All of this leads with dramatic purpose to a resounding conclusion.
· 07.03.2023 · 18:03:00 ··· Dienstag
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