Well, here’s today’s question: was it Bach or Mrs. Bach who
wrote the suites for solo cello—those suites that Casals championed, and about
which he said, “they are the very
essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music?”
Hunh?
Look, I’ve played
them for about four decades, and I’ve gone through several feelings about them.
Written sometime around 1720, when Bach had finally found a job that didn’t
require cranking out a religious cantata every week—his archduke or prince or
elector or whoever being of some protestant sect that disapproved of music—the
six suites follow a basic pattern: a prelude followed by four or five dance
movements.
OK—so that’s a
pattern that Bach followed in the partitas for solo violin. So why should
anyone think that it was the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach who had
written the cello suites? Because that’s what Martin Jarvis, a Welshman
teaching in Australia, is claiming.
His first assertion
I agree with: there’s something not quite right about the suites. Here’s how The New
Yorker puts it, “He reports that when he was studying the works in his
youth he had the nagging sense that they differed from other music by Bach.”
And what’s the difference?
Well, to me, the
cello suites are a lot less interesting, less complicated, less sophisticated
than the solo violin works. Want a comparison? Check out the two sarabandes
below—one for violin, the other for cello. And it may be that the—for me—excessively
slow tempo of the cello sarabande dooms it to sound plain and unimpressive, but
I think there’s something else. If J. S. Bach did write the piece, he wasn’t
having his best day.
And I know—that
damn Prelude to the G Major suite makes it onto a lot of “top ten classical
music” lists, but to me? It’s a snore, which is why I spent years paying it at
a breakneck pace, and trying to emphasize the essential chordal nature of the
piece. Why? Because there’s absolutely nothing else going on….
As you can see in
the third clip, Jarvis isn’t afraid of suggesting some rather dark stuff about
Papa Bach. His first wife—did she commit suicide because Bach was fooling
around with Anna Magdalena, who would become his second wife, and the presumed
composer of the cello suites? And why was Bach ordered to get married, but
refused a church wedding? Oh, and then why did the two children of wife number
one burn the love letters and day books of Bach and Anna Magdalena?
Beyond all of this,
is there any serious evidence that Anna Magdalena, not Johann Sebastian, wrote
the cello suites? Well, the only manuscript we have is one written by Anna
Magdalena, and the traditional belief is that she was merely a copyist. We do
have, however, the violin partitas in J. S. Bach’s hand. And then we have
“forensic” evidence: here’s the Independent
on the subject:
Forensic
analysis of her manuscript handwriting shows that it did not have the “slowness
or heaviness” usually attributed to someone who is simply copying but the
quick, uncertain hand of a creator.
Numerous corrections to scores written in her hand,
signal that she had been composing the works all along.
In
the Independent, the cellist Julian Lloyd Weber makes a good point—Anna
Magdalena, who was a singer but not, apparently, trained as a string player—had
her hands full. From the same source:
Anna Magdalena ran a busy and stressful household. She
was pregnant every year from 1723 to 1737, bearing 13 children, seven of whom
died in youth. The couple also raised the surviving children from Bach’s first
marriage.
In
fact, people were quite a bit less fussy about attribution in the baroque era,
when Bach, for example, borrowed from Vivaldi and other composers. And however
much I love Bist du bei Mir, which
everybody thinks is by Bach, I know that it was really written by Gottfried
Heinrich Stölzel. So? It’s still a beautiful piece….
Will
we ever know if Anna Magdalena, and not Johann Sebastian, Bach wrote the cello
suites? Probably not. But it is true that there are very few female composers,
which started me to thinking: Who was the first female composer? Well, I
figured it would be Hildegard of Bingen, in the 12th century, but
guess what? There’s the little case of Sappho, born six hundred years before
Christ.
Lastly,
it has to be said that I am as guilty of sexism as all the rest. I play the
suites virtually every day, since it’s what cellists do. I’ve made my piece
with them: I neither think they are masterworks nor rubbish. My beef, mostly,
is that for them to be effective, we have to give up, give in, and recognize
that baroque performance practice has a lot—if not everything—to help us put
them across. But how have I been sexist?
By
assuming that the suites are lesser music than the other music Bach wrote, and
therefore have to be by his wife. No one, by the way, has suggested the
opposite—that all of the manuscripts we have in Bach’s hand are simply copies
of Anna Magdalena’s work. And however much the idea that Mrs. Bach was a
composer, the idea that Mr. Bach was the copyist?
Revolutionary!
