HOW COULD I FORGET????? Bach's Birthday!!

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Oh, I could kick myself: every year I try to celebrate the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach on March 21st, essentially the date of the Spring Equinox.  (As discussed in several earlier posts, at the time of his birth, different countries happened to be using different calendars, so his birthday was different in Germany and in Italy, for instance.  Still, during his lifetime he would have given his birthdate as March 21, so that's when I celebrate it.)

It so happened that I wrote about Karaoke on that day, which was Monday, which connects nicely with the fact that, once Bach moved to Leipzig, he used to visit the local water-hole, called Zimmermann's Cafe, at which it was customary to have an evening of chamber music.  (Many Germans are in the habit of gathering with an ---essentially fixed--- group of friends at a table in the local tavern, every week at the same time, and drinking beer, or coffee, or whatever.  In our little American city, a number of people who like to practice talking German do the same on a Friday Night at Froggie's, and I have often gone to watch them.  Of course, not knowing too much German, I talk to them in English, which throws them off their stride.)

The Zimmermann's Coffee House weekly events (usually on Tuesdays, I believe) of Bach and his sons and some of his friends, was a relaxed, non-religious gathering, in contrast to the flavor of Bach's official duties as Cantor of St Thomas's School, and three of the churches of Leipzig, for which he provided music.  Already, in his days at Cothen and at Weimar, Bach had composed a number of wonderful concertos for various instruments: oboes, flutes, and violins, principally.  Bach himself played the violin and the viola, and he has been quoted as saying that he enjoyed playing the viola especially, and being "in the middle of the harmony."

By the time the family moved to Leipzig, where Bach lived for several decades, his oldest boys were becoming adept keyboardists.  So Bach re-wrote his violin concertos for keyboards instead, possibly to enable his sons to star in them, possibly because you could get away with a smaller ensemble with keyboard concertos.  (In Baroque times, an orchestral ensemble featured a keyboard anyway, most of the time, so using the keyboard as the solo instrument killed two birds with a single keyboard.)  In addition, it appears that Zimmermann's occasionally had two harpsichords available, which enabled double-concertos.

As I have said in earlier posts, tragically only these rewritten concertos have survived, in some instances, and musicologists have had to try and reconstruct the original violin concerto from the existing harpsichord "arrangements".  The reconstructed works have often become very popular indeed, and few people realize that they are actually conjectural realizations of lost concertos which were known to have existed at one time, but have not come down to us in their original form.

A famous instance is BWV 1064.  This one has survived in a 3 harpsichord version, but it was originally (as written in Cothen, we imagine) a concerto for violin, oboe, flute and orchestra.  Christopher Hogwood gave himself the challenge of reconstructing the original triple concerto, and I first heard it on WQED in 1980, or thereabouts.

Sadly, it appears that the reconstruction for flute, violin and oboe has lost favor, and is very rare.  A reconstruction for three violins is very common, and here is one on YouTube.  I'm reluctant to upload one for fear that the performance right holder will insist that it be taken down ...

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