Cello Suites (Bach)


The six Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012, are suites for unaccompanied cello by Johann Sebastian Bach. They are some of the most frequently performed solo compositions ever written for cello. Bach most likely composed them during the period 1717–1723, when he served as Kapellmeister in Köthen. The title given on the cover of the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript was Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso.
As usual in a Baroque musical suite, after the prelude which begins each suite, all the other movements are based around baroque dance types. The cello suites are structured in six movements each: prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, two minuets or two bourrées or two gavottes, and a final gigue. Gary S. Dalkin of MusicWeb International called Bach's cello suites "among the most profound of all classical music works" and Wilfrid Mellers described them in 1980 as "Monophonic music wherein a man has created a dance of God".
Due to the works' technical demands, étude-like nature, and difficulty in interpretation because of the non-annotated nature of the surviving copies and the many discrepancies between them, the cello suites were little known and rarely publicly performed in the modern era until they were recorded by Pablo Casals in the early 20th century. They have since been performed and recorded by many renowned cellists and have been transcribed for numerous other instruments; they are considered some of Bach's greatest musical achievements.

History

An exact chronology of the suites cannot be completely established. Scholars generally believe that—based on a comparative analysis of the styles of the sets of works—the cello suites arose first, effectively dating the suites earlier than 1720, the year on the title page of Bach's autograph of the violin sonatas.
The suites were not widely known before the early 20th century. It was Pablo Casals who first began to popularize the suites, after discovering an edition by Friedrich Grützmacher in a thrift shop in Barcelona in 1889 when he was 13. Although Casals performed the suites publicly, it was not until 1936, when he was 60 years old, that he agreed to record them, beginning with Suites Nos. 2 and 3, at Abbey Road Studios in London. The other four were recorded in Paris: 1 and 6 in June 1938, and 4 and 5 in June 1939. Casals became the first to record all six suites; his recordings are still available and respected today. In 2019, the Casals recording was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The suites have since been performed and recorded by many cellists. Yo-Yo Ma won the 1985 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance for his album Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites. János Starker won the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance for his fifth recording of Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites.

Manuscript

Unlike with Bach's solo violin sonatas, no autograph manuscript of the Cello Suites survives, making it impossible to produce modern urtext performing editions. Analysis of secondary sources, including a hand-written copy by Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena, has produced presumably authentic editions, although critically deficient in the placement of slurs and other articulations, devoid of basic performance markings such as bowings and dynamics, and with spurious notes and rhythms. As a result, the texts present performers with numerous problems of interpretation.
German cellist Michael Bach has stated that he believes the manuscripts of the suites by Anna Magdalena Bach are accurate. According to his analysis, the unexpected positioning of the slurs corresponds closely to the harmonic development, which he suggests supports his theory. His position is not universally accepted. The most recent studies into the relationships among the four manuscripts show that Anna Magdalena Bach's manuscript may not have been copied directly from her husband's holograph but from a lost intervening source. Thus, the slurs in the Magdalena manuscript may not come from Bach himself and would not be clues to their interpretation.
Recent research has suggested that the suites were not necessarily written for the familiar cello played between the legs, but an instrument played rather like a violin, on the shoulder. Variations in the terminology used to refer to musical instruments during this period have led to modern confusion, and the discussion continues about what instrument "Bach intended", and even whether he intended any instrument in particular. Sigiswald Kuijken and Ryo Terakado have both recorded the complete suites on this "new" instrument, known today as a violoncello da spalla; reproductions of the instrument have been made by luthier Dmitry Badiarov.

Editions

The cellist Edmund Kurtz published an edition in 1983, which he based on facsimiles of the manuscript by Anna Magdalena Bach, placing them opposite each printed page. It was described as "the most important edition of the greatest music ever written for the instrument". However, Kurtz chooses to follow the Magdalena text exactly, leading to differences between his and other editions, which correct what are generally considered to be textual errors in the source.

Arrangements

Bach transcribed at least one of the suites, Suite No. 5 in C minor, for lute. An autograph manuscript of this version exists as BWV 995.
Using the Bach edition prepared by cellist Johann Friedrich Dotzauer and published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1826, Robert Schumann wrote arrangements with piano accompaniment for all six Bach cello suites. Schumann's publisher accepted his arrangements of the Bach violin sonatas in 1854, but rejected his Bach cello-suite arrangements. His only cello-suite arrangement surviving is the one for Suite No. 3, discovered in 1981 by musicologist Joachim Draheim in an 1863 transcription by cellist Julius Goltermann. It is believed that Schumann's widow Clara Schumann, along with violinist Joseph Joachim, destroyed his Bach cello-arrangement manuscripts sometime after 1860, when Joachim declared them substandard. Writing in 2011, Fanfare reviewer James A. Altena agreed with that critique, calling the surviving Bach-Schumann cello/piano arrangement "a musical duckbilled platypus, an extreme oddity of sustained interest only to 19th-century musicologists".
Joachim Raff, in 1868 while working on his own suites for solo piano and for other ensembles, made arrangements of the suites for piano solo, published from 1869 to 1871 by Rieter-Biedermann.
In 1923, Leopold Godowsky composed piano transcriptions of Suites Nos. 2, 3, and 5, in full counterpoint for solo piano, subtitling them "very freely transcribed and adapted for piano".
The cello suites have been transcribed for numerous solo instruments, including the violin, viola, double bass, viola da gamba, mandolin, piano, marimba, classical guitar, recorder, flute, electric bass, horn, saxophone, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, euphonium, tuba, ukulele, and charango. They have been transcribed and arranged for orchestra as well.

Structure

The suites are in six movements each, and have the following structure and order of movements.
  1. Prelude
  2. Allemande
  3. Courante
  4. Sarabande
  5. Galanteries: two minuets in each of Suite Nos. 1 and 2; two bourrées in each of Suite Nos. 3 and 4; two gavottes in each of Suite Nos. 5 and 6
  6. Gigue
Scholars believe that Bach intended the works to be considered as a systematically conceived cycle, rather than an arbitrary series of pieces. Compared to Bach's other suite collections, the cello suites are the most consistent in order of their movements. In addition, to achieve a symmetrical design and go beyond the traditional layout, Bach inserted intermezzo or galanterie movements in the form of pairs between the sarabande and the gigue.
Only five movements in the entire set of suites are completely non-chordal, meaning that they consist only of a single melodic line. These are the second minuet of Suite No. 1, the second minuet of Suite No. 2, the second bourrée of Suite No. 3, the gigue of Suite No. 4, and the sarabande of Suite No. 5. The second gavotte of Suite No. 5 has but one unison chord, but only in the original scordatura version of the suite; in the standard tuning version it is completely free of chords.

Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007

The prelude, mainly consisting of arpeggiated chords, is the best known movement from the entire set of suites and is regularly heard on television and in films.
  1. Prelude
  2. Allemande
  3. Courante
  4. Sarabande
  5. Minuet I / II
  6. Gigue

    Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008

The Prelude consists of two parts, the first of which has a strong recurring theme that is immediately introduced in the beginning. The second part is a scale-based cadenza movement that leads to the final, powerful chords. The subsequent allemande contains short cadenzas that stray away from this otherwise very strict dance form. The first minuet contains demanding chord shiftings and string crossings.
  1. Prelude
  2. Allemande
  3. Courante
  4. Sarabande
  5. Minuet I / II
  6. Gigue

    Suite No. 3 in C major, BWV 1009

The Prelude of this suite consists of an A–B–A–C form, with A being a scale-based movement that eventually dissolves into an energetic arpeggio part; and B, a section of demanding chords. It then returns to the scale theme, and ends with a powerful and surprising chord movement.
The allemande is the only movement in the suites that has an up-beat consisting of three semiquavers instead of just one, which is the standard form.
The second bourrée, though in C minor, has a two-flat key signature. This notation, common in pre-Classical music, is sometimes known as a partial key signature. The first and second bourrée of the 3rd Suite are sometimes used as solo material for other bass instruments such as the tuba, euphonium, trombone and bassoon.
  1. Prelude
  2. Allemande
  3. Courante
  4. Sarabande
  5. Bourrée I / II
  6. Gigue