The opening movements of Part I of J. S. Bach’s Clavier Übung, the Partitas, contain some of his most impressive specimens of the harpsichord’s grandeur. Behold the tragedy in C-minor; the brilliant French Overture in D; the spectacular juggling in G; and the final word in Toccata and Fugue form in E-minor.
There are two exceptions. The little music-box Praeludium of the first Partita in B-flat is meant for the cradle of the newborn heir to the dedicatee of Bach’s “Opus 1”, his ducal patron in Cöthen (see Article 11). And then there is the Fantasia that opens the third Partita in A-minor – an insignificant-looking, oddly-dissonant and offbeat work in 3/8 time. It looks like nothing so much as an expanded “Two-Part Invention”, without reaching the dimensions of the Duetti that close Clavier Übung III. Performers tend to race through it, slightly embarrassed at its thinness compared to the other openers. This ducks the difficult task of sculpting the lines on an instrument which, according to Forkel, Bach thought was seelenlos (devoid of soul) – at least as compared to the clavichord. In fact, the 120* bars of this Fantasia contain more musical substance than the other five opening movements put together, while eschewing all outward effect. Landowska said Bach produced some of his finest work in two voices. Her prescient statement applies nowhere so strongly as here.
Interpreters in a hurry are laboring under a misconception as to the breadth of tempo possible for pieces in 3/8, which are sometimes found full of 32nd-note runs. 3/4 might have been take too slowly; its slowest reaches are found in the sarabande. 3/8 is used to ensure some degree of lightness. Beethoven understood that when took the time signature to absurd lengths in the 2nd movement of his C-minor piano concerto: an E-major Largo in 3/8, with liberal use of 128th-notes / semi-(or quasi-)hemidemisemiquavers. Going in the opposite direction, François Couperin chose 3/8 for the chaconne in his Troisième Concert Royal in order to stop the gradual deceleration of the lively dance of his youth, which had always been notated in 3/4. Anyone wanting a couple of other examples of moderate-tempo, slow 3/8 might have a glance at Scarlatti’s Sonata K. 145, or the Andante of Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op. 3 no. 4. “Fantasia” was the original title of Bach’s Sinfonias (the “3-part Inventions”), the most nearly perfect works ever composed for keyboard. The title page of the later fair copy says their main aim is to teach a cantabile style of playing. Such is not possible when this fantasia is played like a drag race between two souped-up jalopies.
Even more generally damaging than this hasty view of 3/8 time is the way most present-day interpreters have lost sight of what makes Baroque music tick. Observe, in the present case, the pungency of the dissonances, which often begin as consonant syncopations in the bass and only last for the space of a 16th note. The complex harmonies which the two voices represent in such cases are best be understood by adding continuo figures to the score. Then there is the dazzling beauty and difficulty of the leaping intervals. All instrumental intervals were intrinsically related to song. Those found here cannot be be taken at a gallop. And Bach is constantly toying with expectations relative to “good” and “bad” beats: accent patterns fixed by rule according to time signature.
These three aspects – dissonance/consonance; the scale of difficulty of melodic intervals; and the rules of rhythm relative to meter – are the three pillars of Baroque music; the faith, hope and charity of an art which has been lost to the world to an even greater extent than the three wishes of St. Paul for his friends in Corinth. A sung text is always the most useful guide to interpretation. In this case we must do without, but the accumulated difficulties present in all three parameters should engender an interpretation leaning toward melancholy, seasoned with a pinch of the crotchety and cantankerous. And we are told by old sources that A-minor is a serious and sad key, tending towards lovesickness. The earliest reference** relates it to the planet Venus.
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There is a widespread misconception as to the meaning of the word “fantasia”. It originally meant any instrumental work not based on a text. Whereas Bach copied out Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali, the Italian’s early fantasias were probably too rare to have reached him. Yet somehow he knew that, especially in southern Italy in the early 17th century, a fantasia was not a free quasi-improvisation like his own Chromatic Fantasy, but a concentrated effort at contrapuntal density, to an even greater extent than the ricercar. Frescobaldi’s fantasias achieved a mosaic-like thematic intensity never seen before or since. J. S. Bach, seizing on the Baroque principle of contrast, cast his A-minor Fantasia in the mold of Figuralmusik instead of prima pratica counterpoint, and chose two parts instead of his predecessors’ usual four. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the choice makes the task far more difficult. It is astounding how Bach sketches four-voice dissonant harmonies, using only two. Kirnberger warns students not to try this kind of thing at home.
I think Bach sometimes wanted to show he could take an 18th-century attitude when being his most esoteric. Lord Chesterfield, to take a classic example, repeatedly counseled his son never to show off the depth of his knowledge in society. He knew such display puts people off, either by making them feel inferior or inspiring them to rivalry. And to take oneself too seriously was simply bad form. Hence this superficially simple menuet disguising the highest musical craftsmanship – goûts réunis of a different sort.
The magic of the menuet, a dance which held a remarkable grip on Europe for more than a century, is being invoked here. A required “accomplishment” for educated men and women, it was sometimes notated in 3/8. Bach seizes on what was often the most trivial dance noise as a vehicle for supreme mastery. A good menuet, as does this Fantasia, needs a perfect combination of lightness and gravity, suited an ethos which has utterly vanished except in the final dances of some types of Noh. Combine these qualities with the difficulties mentioned above and you have the fundamental tension which is the hallmark of great art.
Bach wanted something dignified at the beginning of this Partita, as a counterweight to the madness that follows: a rhetorically extreme Allemande, his wildest Corrente, a Sarabande which is really a galante Polonaise, a Burlesca, a Scherzo, and a final Gigue resembling a steamroller. The Fantasia is really the slow movement of the Partita. Mindful of the reference to Venus mentioned above, shall we assume that the work as a whole is a narration of insanity ensuing after unrequited love, like Schubert’s Winterreise? Judging from the sarabande, the girl in question must have been Polish.
When Bach was attacked in print by a pedant as being “too learnèd” in his compositions, a friend wrote a response in his defense, wherein he said that Bach “can be as galant as the rest when he wants to”. The title page of the collected Partitas***, after listing the usual dances, adds, “und andern Galanterien”. There are bizarre examples of Galanterien in the six Partitas, whose composer was searching for extremes after the more conventional triumphs of the earlier suites. They are his farewell to the dance. A contemporary wrote that anyone who could play one of them really well had his fortune made (see article 11).
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The central idea of the A-minor Fantasia is a figure in three 16th notes which can be traced to an obscure, slurred ornament which German theorists called an Anschlag: the third note is consonant, but is preceded by the two dissonant notes directly above and below it, forming an oblique triangle on the page. Here it often comes on unexpected places in the bar – usually on the normally weak second beat. These two factors lend the piece its ofttimes near-atonal, offbeat qualities.
The overall structure of the Fantasia follows a tonic-dominant-tonic line which Schenkerian analysts would reduce to the formula A-E-A. Bach adds canon and invertible counterpoint to the recipe. The opening consists of eight bars in strict canon containing the motifs to be used in the piece. This material is developed using melodic variation and sequences, with the Anschlag figure always present. The opening canon then appears transposed to the dominant (voices inverted), followed by new permutations of the first episode; a transitional second episode with new material brings us back to a re-ordered repeat of material from the first section in the tonic; ending with a coda, a cadenza, and a brief, witty closing ritornello. I have no idea how Bach invented this highly original structure, which is somewhere along the road to C.P.E. Bach’s rondos and those of the Viennese Classics. It certainly goes far beyond the standard French rondeau, which Sebastian knew well, and of which there is an example in the C-minor Partita. “New Grove” says, “The rondeau’s assimilation into the music of other nations and its transformation into the rondo of the Classical period have not been adequately investigated.”
There is another line of development to be considered. A new kind of sinfonia was arising somewhat along these lines in Italy, especially in G. B. Sammartini’s Milan. Early opera buffa composers wrote rondos as finales to overtures. Lorenzo Lotti conducted the Dresden opera 1717-9, but his overture-sinfonias are too primitive to have served as an inspiration. J. A. Hasse only arrived in Dresden in 1731, so Bach could not have picked it up from Dresden’s “pretty tunes”, as Bach called them. However he came up with it, the blend of contrapuntal mastery, menuet-like Affekt and innovative structure is typical of his fusion thinking.
My own fantasy about this fantasia – recording it for this website – had to be dropped after months of work, like so many projects in recent years. The terrifyingly complex and exposed two voices of this masterpiece of modest appearance require such delicacy and control of touch and timing that they are beyond the reach of this 71-year-old former stroke patient. There would be no point in adding another half-baked rendition of it to the plethora already available.
Allerseelen, 2023
* For what it’s worth – and Gustav Leonhardt thought all Bachian numerology was nonsense, which much of it (such as the alleged prediction of the date of his own death) certainly is – 120 is an interesting number. It is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 120; it is the factorial of 5 (5!); a has a host of other sterling qualities listed in the Wikipedia article “120 (number)”.
**Abraham Bartolus: Musica Mathematica, Das ist: Das Fundament der allerliebsten Kunst der Musicae, wie nemlich dieselbe in der natur stecke, und ihre gewisse proportiones, das ist, gewicht und mass habe, vnd wie dieselben in der Mathematica, Fürnemlich aber in der Geometria und Astronomia beschrieben sind ... (Leipzig 1614).
*** They were issued separately from 1726 to 1730, with the 6th coming out in 1731 as part of the complete set: “Clavir Übung...Opus 1” (see article 11).
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