Brandenburg Concerto No. 5

Antonio Vivaldi's autograph of a violin concerto, RV 314, dedicated to Johann Georg Pisendel, a violinist with whom Bach had made acquaintance in his Weimar period, and who worked in Dresden from 1712 until his death in 1755

In his Weimar period Bach became involved with the concerto genre. The concertos he copied and transcribed were either by Italian composers, most of them by Vivaldi but also concertos by other Venetian composers such as Albinoni and Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello, or by German composers adopting the style of the Italian concerto, such as Telemann and Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. Most of these concertos were in three movements (in a fast–slow–fast sequence). The violin concerto was the dominant subgenre. A specific idiom for violin solo passages in such concertos, for instance a technique called bariolage, had developed. The solo passages were often in a faster tempo (shorter note values) than the accompaniment.

The tutti passages of these concertos, that is where the whole orchestra joins in, were characterised by a ritornello theme which was often quite independent of the thematic material developed by the soloist(s). A typical concerto movement in this Italian style of solo concerto (as opposed to concerto formats not centred around one or more soloists such as the ripieno concerto) opened with a ritornello, followed by a solo passage called episode, after which a tutti brings back (a variant of) the ritornello, followed by further alternating solo and tutti passages, the movement being concluded by the ritornello. The characteristics of the ritornellos used by Bach in his concertos play an important role in the dating of his compositions: as so few of Bach's concertos survive in manuscripts from the time of composition scholars devised chronologies of his concerto output based on the development of the ritornello format throughout his career. A point of comparison for such chronologies are for instance cantata movements in concerto form, for many of which the time of origin can be established more accurately.

The Italian violin concerto influence is strongest in the concerto's first movement. The concerto's second movement, exceptional for a slow movement in Bach's concerto output, is a pure concerto form, consisting of a regularly returning ritornello and evenly distributed episodes, without the experimentation of the concerto's outer movements. The last movement, with a da capo structure, has no clear ritornello: this is the only extant da capo concerto movement by Bach that has no ritornello structure. In this movement the concertato violin no longer doubles the ripieno violin in tutti passages according to the Italian practice, instead the ripieno violin is mostly doubled by the flute in the tuttis: it is a French practice (with the traverso at that time also being a French novelty) to have a woodwind instrument double the highest string part. This practice is for instance also found in Bach's rather French than Italian orchestral suites, e.g. in BWV 1067, but only in this movement in his concertos.

The typical Italian violino principale (violin soloist) being combined with a typical French traversière (transverse flute) in the concertino also seems to indicate Bach's aim to unite different backgrounds in the concerto, but without making it so crude that these instruments would perform in their respective national styles. Another French element in the concerto's closing movement is the gigue theme which opens it, close to a theme used by Dieupart, and which Bach develops in a French fashion comparable to a similar passage in one of his orchestral suites, in this case the first movement of BWV 1069. The many instances of five-part writing in the concerto's final movement may be seen as another approach with a typical French connotation in the early 18th century.

A single-manual harpsichord conserved in the Bach House in Eisenach

BWV 1050a (1050.1), the extant early version of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto, survives in a manuscript copy, consisting of performance parts, which was produced between 1744 and 1759.[7][8][9] In this version the concerto is in six parts (a sei):

• Soloists (concertato instruments, together forming the concertino):
  • traverso
  • violin concertato
  • harpsichord concertato
• Accompaniment, i.e. ripieno and continuo parts:
  • violin
  • viola
  • violone (playing in eight-foot pitch)

The violone part is only extant for the first movement. In this version of the concerto the three movements are indicated as "Allegro", "Adagio" and "Allegro". The harpsichordist's left hand plays the continuo line, doubled, with simplifications and omissions, by the violone. The accompaniment is minimal as to not overpower the naturally quiet single-manual harpsichord: firstly the accompaniment is reduced in numbers, with no second violin nor cello parts and only one bass part, and secondly the accompaniment gets instruction to play quietly most of the time. The ritornellos used by Bach in this concerto, for instance the extremely Vivaldian ritornello of the first movement, stay very close to early 18th-century Italian an Italianate violin concerto models, thus making a time of origin shortly after the concerto transcriptions of the mid-Weimar period likely.

An occasion to work with a traverso performer may have presented itself during a visit the composer made to Dresden in September 1717, shortly before he moved to Köthen, a visit which is primarily remembered for the aborted contest with Marchand. Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin was a virtuoso traverso player working for the Dresden court since 1715. Bach may have known Buffardin through his brother Johann Jacob, who had been a pupil of the French flautist in 1712. Bach also knew two top Dresden violinists: Volumier, the concertmaster who had invited the composer to Dresden, and Pisendel. If Bach wrote the concerto for Dresden it seems to allude to the strife regarding the Italian versus the French style which occupied its musicians at the time, Bach delivering a work which without complexes combined characteristics of both styles. Another coincidence is that the concerto's middle movement is built on a theme composed by Marchand, as if Bach wanted to show off to his prospective competitor how he could elaborate that theme quite differently from its composer's original treatment.

The possibility of a performance of the early version of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto in Dresden in 1717 was first tentatively proposed by harpsichordist and musicologist Pieter Dirksen in the early 1990s. Although the hypothesis rests on a complex of circumstantial indications without direct evidence, it has been picked up by Bach scholars.[10]

Double manual harpsichord

Formally the fifth Brandenburg Concerto is a concerto grosso, with a concertino consisting of three instruments. However, throughout the concerto the harpsichord takes the leading role among the soloists, with, for instance, a long solo passage for this instrument near the end of the first movement: neither of the other soloists has a comparable solo passage. In this sense the concerto has been called the first keyboard concerto ever written. Vivaldi, and other composers, had occasionally given solo passages to keyboard instruments in their concertos before Bach, but never had a concerto been written which gave the harpsichord a soloist role throughout on the scale of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto and its predecessor BWV 1050a.

Nowhere throughout the concerto is the concertato violin allowed to shine with typical violinistic solo passages: Bach allotted all of the specific solo violin idiom, including extended violin-like arpeggio and bariolage passages, to the harpsichord. Nor does the naturally quiet traverso get a chance to cover the harpsichord's contributions to the polyphony. Neither the violin nor flute soloists get solo passages faster than thirty-seconds: these very fast episodes, typical for a concertato violin, are in this concerto also exclusively reserved for the harpsichord. In the early version of the concerto the concertato violin always has to play piano or quieter whenever the harpsichord plays a soloist passage. The extended harpsichord solo of the first movement in the concerto's final version adds more imitations of typical violin solo techniques. Central in the B section of the A–B–A da capo structure of the last movement the harpsichord gets a solo accompanied by all the other instruments, including the flute and the concertato violin, which through this keyboard solo of around thirty bars often play unisono with one another.

The final version of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto survives in two autographs:[7]

• D-B Am.B 78, known as the dedication score, is the manuscript containing the six Brandenburg concertos, and the March 1721 dedication to the Margrave of Brandenburg, with BWV 1050 as fifth concerto.[11]
• D-B Mus. ms. Bach St 130 is a set of performing parts of BWV 1050 which originated shortly before the dedication score was issued to the Margrave of Brandenburg.[12]

When introducing the concerto as fifth item in the dedication score, or shortly before (1720–1721), Bach completely revised the work in a set of seven performance parts, copying these with some further refinements into the score. In this version of the concerto the harpsichord is a two-manual instrument allowing a more varied approach to the dynamics: the concertato violin is no longer instructed to play piano in combination with the harpsichord's solo work, while, on the other hand, the harpsichord has to shift to a softer register (i.e. other manual) where playing in a continuo role during tuttis. The harpsichord's solo near the end of the first movement is expanded from 18 to 65 bars. Also, where the earlier version is written for a harpsichord with a four-octave keyboard, the harpsichord part of the final version extends beyond these four octaves. In the Brandenburg Five version of the concerto Bach reworked and expanded an additional cello part from the violone part of the earlier version, and the violone, now playing in 16-foot pitch, gets a full-fledged ripieno part. However, taking account of doubled ripieno and continuo material, the concerto is still basically a concerto in six parts.

All six of the Brandenburg Concertos are sometimes indicated as concerto grosso: the first, third and sixth of these concertos have however no concertino versus orchestra distinction. The concerto grosso was a Roman invention, typically featuring two violins and a cello as concertino, with a string orchestra of multiple string instruments per part. Venetian composers seemed slow in adopting the genre, and as Bach and his German contemporaries rather turned to Venetian music they may have been hardly aware of it. The fifth Brandenburg Concerto seems intended to be performed with one instrument per part, as to not overpower the harpsichord with its relatively restrained volume, and was not referred to as a concerto grosso by its composer. Neither are Bach's other concertos with a concertino of three instruments (BWV 1049/1057, BWV 1063–1064 and BWV 1044) referred to as concerto grosso in contemporary documents.

Traverso

The five tutti passages in the concerto's slow middle movement each take four bars. The identical opening and closing tutti passages are in B minor, with the violin playing the leading melody line. The flute takes the lead in the other tuttis. The central tutti passage is the only one, apart from the outer ones, in a minor key. The first of the two major key tuttis is a mere transposition of the opening tutti to its relative major, also switching the violin and flute roles. The fourth tutti, in G major, variates the melodic material.[13]

The harpsichord takes the lead in the intermittent solo episodes: the harpsichordist's right hand, accompanied by a bass line in the left hand and some figuration by the other concertato instruments, variates on the tutti material in soloist episodes varying from five to eleven bars in length. The structure of the movement is thus more or less symmetrical, with some added weight to the fourth tutti and episode:[13]

• Opening tutti in B minor (leading melody played by violin)
  • 5-bar episode
    • Tutti in D major (leading melody played by flute)
      • 6-bar episode
        • Tutti in F♯ minor (leading melody played by flute)
      • 6-bar episode
    • Tutti (variated) in G major (leading melody played by flute)
  • 11-bar episode
• Closing tutti in B minor (leading melody played by violin), repeats opening tutti

The music of this movement is exclusively performed by the three concertato instruments, with the right hand of the harpsichordist being allotted the soloist role, and the other instruments, together with the continuo line of the harpsichordist's left hand, producing the orchestral accompaniment – as a whole this distribution of roles is quite different from that of a trio sonata movement. The violone part of the early version of the concerto breaks off after the first movement, leaving uncertain whether it was intended to perform only in the outer movements or also in the middle movement: it is possible that in this version the violone reinforced the continuo bass-line in the tuttis.[13]

The movement's tempo indication is a standard "Adagio" in the older version, changed to "Affettuoso" in the final version. The latter indication may reflect more clearly what Bach wanted to express in the movement. Additionally, while some of the harpsichord's melodies involve sustained notes (which would not sound for a long enough time if the movement is played too slow), Bach may have wanted to accelerate the pace a bit by the new tempo indicator. Bach contrasted the harpsichord's long notes to short-note figuration by violin and flute: these instruments, although naturally more suitable to play sustained notes, play no long notes throughout the movement.[13]

Structure

The movement is written in ternary form following this pattern

Section A starting in D major.

Section B starting in B minor.

And then an exact repeat of Section A.

The piece uses fugal exposition which has a structure of a fugal subject and answer and is based on a gigue (a German dance).

Instrumentation

The piece has two groups of instruments:

The Concertino:- the soloist group.

The Ripieno:- the accompanying group.

There would be some musical confrontation between these two groups.

This movement is surprising for the Baroque era as the harpsichord has a dual role. The general role of the harpsichord in baroque music was to fill in harmonies. However, in this particular movement, it also has a soloist role, which was never seen prior to this piece.