Johann David Heinichen’s Grundliche Anweisung (1711): Comprehensive Instruction on Basso Continuo, with Historical Biographies Translated by Benedikt Brilmayer and Casey Mongoven (review)

Johann David Heinichen’s General-Bass in der Composition (Dresden, 1728) is one of the major sources on the study and practice of harmony in eighteenth-century Europe. It stands alongside writings by Mattheson, Rameau, and C. P. E. Bach as an expression of Enlightenment-era rationalization and rule-making about not only harmony but performance, composition, and even aesthetics.

The present volume is not, however, a translation of that work but rather of its smaller early version published in 1711. Heinichen, who in 1710 had left Leipzig for Italy, would return to Germany only in 1717 to take a position as Kapellmeister at Dresden, where he would remain until his death in 1729 The present volume already reflects its author’s Italophile tendencies, but it is not the comprehensive manual that the later version aims to be, nor are the rather austere four-part realizations found in the musical examples likely to reflect actual accompaniment of Italian vocal music of the time, although they must represent what a serious teacher in Germany expected a student to be able to make out of both figured and unfigured bass lines.

Contrary to the translators’ assertion, this was by no means ‘the first German treatise on basso continuo accompaniment from a bass’ (p. vii). Heinichen’s title suggests that he intended to surpass the recently published Musicalische Handleitung, oder Gründliche Unterricht (1706; repr. 1721) of Friedrich Erhard Niedt, which is less modish and based more in the north German tradition. Like Niedt, Mattheson, and most other German writers on the subject, however, Heinichen is not really a theorist but a recorder of and commentator on current practice. In a rambling foreword whose learned, polemic style reflects his legal training—unlike some contemporary composers who studied law, he actually practised it for several years—he sides with Mattheson against old-fashioned approaches to the modes, counterpoint, and temperament. Yet he rarely gives reasons for his prejudices, and his famous musical circle—introduced in the penultimate chapter of this book and the chief reason it is ever cited—is more an ad hoc way of relating modulation to a geometrical design than a reasoned explanation of what modulation is or how it works.

Like other writers of the time, Heinichen is hobbled by the lack of a vocabulary or a conceptual framework for analysing harmony and tonality; he uses the metaphors of the tonal circle and ‘related’ (verwandt) and ‘remote’ (weit läuftig) keys without asking what these expressions really mean in relation to music. Thus he does not attempt to explain why it is easy in certain cases to get from one key to another, harder in other cases. Rather, he deduces simple rules of modulation from the geometry of his circle. The same mechanical sort of thinking leads him to devote many pages to repetitions of a single musical example, transposed to various keys and accompanied by tedious commentary. To be sure, even a second-rate thinker (and composer) can give us a sense of his time and place; Heinichen and his books were part of the environment for Bach and others of greater talent.

As a previous reviewer of this work, Saraswathi Shukla, has noted (Early Music America,Winter 2013 issue, p. 48), the translators never explain their choice to translate Heinichen’s earlier and less important publication. Nor do they even mention the later one. Yet selections from the latter have long been available to English-speaking readers in the partial translation and study by George Buelow (Thorough-Bass Accompaniment according to Johann David Heinichen (rev. edn., Ann Arbor, 1986)). Buelow noted that the later version comprises some three and a half times the number of pages of the original (p. 278). Heinichen added a ninety-page...