Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works (review)

Guidebooks to collections of significant art works have sometimes been scorned in scholarly circles. Perhaps they have been associated with a sort of nineteenth-century bourgeois subjectivity that those of a modernist, specializing bent have seen as anathema to serious engagement. Nevertheless, the genre has seen a resurgence within the post-war revival of philological, textual scholarship. Pevsner’s guides to English architecture, for instance, set the gold standard for the notion of a specialist speaking in a language accessible to a broad range of readers. In Bach scholarship some of the most influential scholars of the sources, Werner Neumann and Alfred Dürr, wrote comprehensive guides to the cantatas, and, on the English-language side, Peter Williams has covered the organ works. Increasingly, the divisions between scholars, performers, intellectuals, and amateurs have been broken down (the Berlin Bach sources are now available free on the internet), and the notion of a comprehensive guide no longer carries much stigma. Indeed, since the 1980s there has been an avalanche of new scholarly guides, characterized by the Cambridge/Oxford Companion/Handbook to virtually everything you didn’t realize you needed to know. In Bach studies at least two authors have emulated Williams’s approach with recent surveys of the keyboard works: David Schulenberg and David Ledbetter. The latter’s book on the Well-Tempered Clavier is striking for its thoroughness and Tovey-esque analytical prowess.

Ledbetter has now addressed the unaccompanied solo instrumental works, namely the two great collections for violin and cello and the various works for lute and solo flute. The title clearly aims to capture performers, something that is reasonable given the number of string players who cut their teeth on the unaccompanied works. Indeed—one might unfairly suggest—many are simply processed through them. As Ledbetter states at the outset (he has an association with a music college, after all) ‘instrumentalists generally are too narrowly fixed on the repertory of their own instrument and need to broaden their horizons’ (p. vii). Throughout, he shows sensitivity to instrumental issues, commenting, for instance, on the fact that scordatura not only influences chording and resonance but also has an effect on hand shapes (p. 24). He notes that the extraordinary Adagio beginning the third sonata for solo violin (BWV 1005) takes account of the four strings, with each part entering on a new string (pp. 146–7); there are also numerous insights into bowing and slurring. Ledbetter deals with the issue of whether or not Bach used the da spalla (shoulder) position for the cello with characteristic equanimity: the ‘notion that one instrument is more “correct” than another is alien to Bach’s environment’ (p. 46). Nevertheless, the title of this study perhaps does not quite sum up what it’s about: performers expecting a bar-by-bar guide on how to play these pieces are going to be disappointed, but the book has a far greater potential readership than just the performing community.

If there is a single thread that characterizes Ledbetter’s approach, it is the attempt to demonstrate Bach’s own sense of ‘connoisseurship’, his ability to assimilate a remarkable range of influences, styles, and gestures and combine these in imaginative and productive ways. This is a study that aims to cultivate our understanding and interpretation (whether we are performers, listeners, or analysts), as if from the standpoint of the composer himself, ‘sharing in his act of creation’ (p. 2). Ledbetter struggles against the assumption that Bach’s music is simply unique and therefore has little to do with pre-existing traditions (p. 12); nevertheless, this is balanced with the notion that there is indeed a special quality in Bach’s music, but one that is best appreciated by understanding the compositional context and the composer’s creative choices: ‘Too reverential an approach can blind us to the real nature of Bach’s greatness’ (p. 13). If there are any dangers evident in this approach they might lie...