Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance (review)

Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance. By Joel Lester. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [x, 186 p. ISBN 0-19-512097-3. $29.95.]

Johann Sebastian Bach's sonatas and suites for unaccompanied strings have been a focus of pedagogy, private study, and public performance since they first became widely available in the nineteenth century. Yet this repertory has rarely received the analytical scrutiny so often applied to Bach's keyboard music. This book goes a considerable way toward rectifying that omission, using the three sonatas and three partitas for violin--especially the four movements of the G-Minor Sonata BWV 1001--as the basis for an exploration of various aspects of theory, style, reception, and analysis in Bach's instrumental music in general.

As Joel Lester declares in his preface, this is "in part a performance guide for violinists, in part an analytic study, in part a rumination on aspects of Bach's style, and in part an investigation of notions of musical form and continuity" (p. v). One thing, then, that it is not is a work of academic musicology, and Bach scholars seeking current information about such things as the works' sources or compositional history will be disappointed, although Lester does make illuminating points about the interpretation of Bach's notation (e.g., slurs) in the autograph manuscript. Similarly, the book evinces little interest in or attention to historical instruments or eighteenth- century performance practices. Indeed, the author expresses a distinct lack of sympathy with this approach--particularly in his "closing thoughts" (pp. 157-59)--basing his suggestions for performance on his analyses and his familiarity with performing traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as revealed through editions, recordings, and (one must assume) his training as a violinist.

Nevertheless, music historians and specialists in historic performance practice may find much of value in the book, as will the mainstream performers and students to whom it seems primarily directed. It might even be useful as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in the analysis and interpretation of eighteenth-century music, for its close readings provide numerous thought-provoking models for the interpretation of Bach's notation, voice leading, and approaches to form. In addition, the book makes valuable contributions to reception history, especially in the realms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditions of Bach editing and performance, while distilling much of the history of eighteenth-century music theory that Lester covered more systematically in his Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

The book's analytical approach is Schenkerian in a general way without being rigorously or systematically reductive--that is, more in the tradition of Carl Schachter or the early Schenker than present-day academic Schenkerism. Although it is an exaggeration to state that the analysis has been carried out "without recourse to analytical, structural, and aesthetic notions that arose in post-Baroque eras" (p. 151), Lester does incorporate what he refers to as "ideas contemporaneous to the pieces" (p. vi): in particular, the view of music as the composing out of a voice-leading framework or skeleton, as set forth by such eighteenth-century writers as Friedrich Erhard Niedt, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Thus the book's opening analytic foray concerns not a violin piece but the opening prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier (part 1), whose derivation from a series of five-part chords leads naturally to an analysis of the opening Adagio from the G-Minor Sonata as the elaboration of a figured-bass line (p. 33ff.).

Lester also draws on Johann Mattheson's early-eighteenth-century metaphor of musical form as rhetoric, although I am not convinced that the concept of "heightening levels of activity"--an important principle in Lester's analyses (p. 151 and passim)--corresponds exactly to anything formulated by Mattheson or other eighteenth-century writers. Still, Lester's articulation of this principle is a...