Keyboard Concerto in A, BWV 1055
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Thuringia, in central Germany, on March 21, 1685, and died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750. Scholars date his A major keyboard concerto, BWV 1055, to 1738, and hypothesize that it—like most of his other keyboard concertos—originated as a concerto for a different solo instrument, in this case oboe or oboe d’amore. The first performance of the A major concerto would have been given—probably with one of Bach’s sons as soloist—soon after its completion as part of the concerts of the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, of which Bach was director. The first Boston Symphony performances of the piece were September 22-23, 2022, led by Andris Nelsons with Awadagin Pratt as soloist.
In addition to the solo keyboard part (here played on piano), the score of the Concerto in A, BWV 1055, calls for a string orchestra—first and second violins and violas—plus continuo, played here by cellos and basses.
The genre of the concerto as we know it—a work combining a single or multiple solo instruments with a larger ensemble—only began to solidify in the late 1600s. The term “concerto” itself, the origin of which isn’t quite clear, had already been in use for some time. The first important concertos for solo instrument and ensemble were those by the Italian Giuseppe Torelli (1658-1709). A generation later, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), one of the great violinists of his age, published his solo concerto collection L’estro armónico. This collection established the concerto as a medium in which the soloist or soloists were clearly the center of attention, their parts demanding virtuosity and independence radically distinct from the humbler music of the ensemble. Vivaldi’s works are the model for the concerto tradition as passed down to us today, through Mozart and Brahms to Thomas Adès and Jessie Montgomery.
Upon its publication in Amsterdam in 1711, Vivaldi’s L’estro armónico quickly made its way throughout Europe and became enormously influential. In Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed for solo harpsichord or organ many of Vivaldi’s concertos (as well as those of other composers) in part as a way of assimilating the best models of the age. Much of this self-education took place in Weimar, where Bach was employed from 1708 to 1717. These efforts culminated in the six Brandenburg concertos, in which Bach synthesized and invented a variety of approaches to the use of single or multiple soloists with ensembles of various sizes. In the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, the harpsichord, instead of its usual role as a member of the continuo accompaniment, plays a virtuosic solo part throughout, as well as an extended cadenza. With this piece, Bach invented the keyboard concerto.
After taking up the post of Kantor of the Thomasschule in Leipzig in 1723, Bach initially had less time to devote to “pure” instrumental music. He instead concentrated on composing church cantatas, completing two full church-year cantata cycles (each comprising more than sixty large-scale works) in his first two years there. He completed two more cycles by 1729, and a fifth by the 1740s. He was also responsible for the music and educational programs of Leipzig’s four principal churches, involving four choruses of boys drawn from the boarding students of the Thomasschule.
For the sake of musical and dramatic variety Bach employed many different kinds of music in his cantatas, including instrumental movements akin to overtures and concertos. Several concertos found in various cantatas are transcriptions of earlier Bach works—for example, the organ concerto that appears in the cantatas nos. 29 and 120a originated as the Preludio of the composer’s familiar Partita in E for solo violin. The opening Sinfonia for oboe solo, strings, and continuo from the 1729 cantata Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe is based on the same concerto that furnished the Adagio of the F minor keyboard concerto, BWV 1056. Nearly all of the concertos for keyboard with ensemble that Bach wrote in the 1730s were based on earlier works featuring different solo instruments, usually violin, but in some cases a wind instrument.
The creation of these keyboard concertos served both artistic and practical needs. In 1729 Bach became director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, a society of professional and amateur musicians founded by Georg Philipp Telemann in 1704. The society gave weekly concerts—serious but entertaining events open to the public—outdoors during the summer and at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house during colder months. They featured music by other contemporary composers as well as by Bach himself, including his Coffee and Peasant cantatas, chamber music, and concertos. Many, even most, of these pieces were written expressly for performance by the Collegium. Much of this music, too, served as training tools for his students and his own sons.
As mentioned above, the accompanied keyboard concerto was virtually a new compositional genre invented by Bach himself. Vivaldi’s famous concertos were typically for solo or multiple “melody” instruments—violin, cello, mandolino, oboe, bassoon. Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto is considered the prototype of the concerto for keyboard and ensemble, but Bach didn’t explore its possibilities during his first years in Leipzig except in a few cantata movements. After becoming director of the Collegium, he returned to the idea, but most of these “new” concertos were in fact reworkings of earlier concertos—Vivaldi’s and his own—for melody instruments. The concerto for four harpsichords, BWV 1065, is a reworking of a piece by Vivaldi for four violins and orchestra, for example. The concertos for solo keyboard and accompaniment, BWV 1052–59, and those for multiple keyboards and accompaniment, BWV 1060–64, are evidently based on earlier solo concertos by Bach himself (excepting BWV 1061 for two keyboards and accompaniment, derived from a piece for two unaccompanied keyboards).
Most of those earlier works, probably dating from Bach’s years in Weimar and Cothen (1708–1721) are now lost; for some, their origin as works by Bach is occasionally still in question. (Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has suggested that in dating the concertos on limited evidence, scholars have been “rather generous” to this early period.) Bach’s process for transcribing the works to their new settings is fairly clear from comparisons between the handful of extant earlier concertos and manuscript copies of the Leipzig-era keyboard concertos. He first wrote out the original solo part verbatim, then made changes, some of them extensive, to make it work for the harpsichord, including filling in the left-hand parts. Sometimes transposition—raising or lowering the key—was necessary to accommodate the harpsichord’s range. In cases where no original version has been found, scholars use details of pitch range and melodic figuration to try to determine the original instrument. A very wide melodic range would suggest violin or cello, a narrower compass recorder or oboe. Modern musicologists have reverse-engineered convincing, performable versions of presumed source works; Wilfried Fischer’s reconstructions (with an “R” appending the BWV number, e.g., BWV 1052R) were included as part of the New Bach Edition, the most complete representation of the composer’s catalog.
In the case of the A major concerto, BWV 1055, we have no source for the original; scholars have surmised that it may have been written for oboe or oboe d’amore. Bach or his sons would have played it on a harpsichord; these days it’s heard probably as frequently on harpsichord as on a modern piano. The concerto has the typical three movements, fast-slow-fast. For the opening of the Allegro, a syncopation arising from a bass note followed by an off-the-beat melodic idea provides a clear motivic marker for section transitions within the movement. As is usual in a Baroque concerto, the strings and solo instrument largely share material for the recurring first part, called the ritornello; this alternates with the sparsely accompanied, showier passages for the soloist. There is an almost constant sixteenth-note pulse throughout. The Larghetto second movement, in 12/8 meter, is in a lamenting F-sharp minor, strongly inflected with chromatic notes and dissonances. The main accompaniment figure is four notes, short-long, short-long, the first pair high, the second lower—a two-part sigh with a lulling, rocking motion. The finale (Allegro ma non tanto—fast, but not too fast) is in 3/8, the main theme a leap upward followed by a series of quick, falling scales. This recurring idea also serves later as a counterpoint in the strings to the piano’s extensive solo excursions, which are more introspective than the movement’s opening music implies. Its chromaticism and a wide-ranging scheme of key changes are notable, even for Bach.
Robert Kirzinger
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
