Three Trios by J. S. Bach

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While I was putting a well-known Bach piece into Finale the other day (well, PrintMusic, anyway), I noticed that really, the movement was in just 3 parts.  (Note: this is different than a 3-part sermon, or something similar.  A piece of music "in 3 parts" means that there are 3 lines of music.  For 3 sections we would say, 3 sections, or 3 movements, or something like that.)  Perhaps fortuitously, it turns out that many of the pieces I’m most nostalgic for are trios, that is, written in 3 parts.  Now, bear in mind that with J. S. Bach, specifically, and also with other composer of the Baroque period, instrumentation is not rigid; they indicate the essential instruments--the featured players, called the obbligato parts--but also might indicate that there has to be something like what we would call today “the rhythm section,” which was a bass instrument--usually a double bass, or a bass and a cello, or a bass and a cello and a bassoon-- as well as a harpsichord, organ, or lute, or any or all of those, depending on how big the rest of the orchestra was.  This was called the continuo.  However, very often the music for obbligato instruments were harmonically complete, and made the continuo actually redundant.  At other times, Bach wrote a piece to be performed with only three parts; actually the only instances I know are organ pieces.  So when I call a particular piece a trio, I intend to mean that the piece was either an organ piece written in precisely three parts, or that it could be reduced to three parts (by leaving out all, or some, of the Continuo).  I’ll try to make the situation clear in each instance, but really, you probably don’t care.

BWV 140  One of the most famous Cantatas of J. S. Bach (and his cantatas were by far the largest and most important portion of his compositional output,) is Cantata No. 140: Sleepers wake, for night is flying.  It was written in Leipzig (where Bach spent the last several decades of his life) and was based on a hymn of the well-known hymnodist Philipp Nokolai.  Somehow, this very four-square hymn-tune of Nikolai’s, as well as the magnificent cantata by Bach, has caught the fancy of people the world over, not least in English-speaking countries, and several movements from it are performed frequently.

The fourth movement, particularly, is an amazingly vigorous piece of writing, and it is set for either a Tenor soloist, or, as sung today, a chorus of tenors (which might have been as few as four), with an incredibly catchy counter-melody in the violin.  The piece is therefore the tenor melody (the hymn-tune), the violin melody, and a bass line, and chords on the organ, or a theorbo (a kind of big old-time precursor of the guitar), and that’s all.  It’s a trio!  When you hear it performed nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there are only three essential parts actually written out by Bach; the rest is made up by the performers (according to strict rules, however).  This is the first piece I'm going to introduce today, in the spare trio version.  At the end, there is a link to a complete, grand realization of the same piece, followed by a verse of the basic Nikolai hymn, performed by a full orchestra, just so you can hear how much potential there was in the hymn, to begin with.   It is a very irregular meter: 8,10,8,8,10,8,6,6,4,8,8.



I can’t resist the temptation to comment on the violin melody, which is, to say the very least, jaunty in the extreme.  I actually wrote out the ornaments: mordents, trills, grace-notes --the little notes that lead up to the main note-- then had to get rid of them and put in the notation for the ornaments, which is harder in this editor than to do them by hand.  They make the music score look somewhat cluttered, but believe me, nowhere as cluttered as if the notes were actually written out.  In a couple of places I had forgotten to replace the written-out notes with the ornament notation.

As you might be aware, the last several decades have been occupied with the authenticity movement, which tries especially hard to perform period pieces (and this one is certain a case in point) as they were probably performed at the time they were written.  There is a certain amount of indirect evidence to show that, for instance, pieces were taken generally faster than they were in the first half of the last century, when there was a huge explosion of interest in Baroque music, but in which the performances were clearly too slow for the modern ear to make sense of the complex musical textures.  However, the various authorities overstated their cases, in my humble opinion, and the performances of the 1960's and 1970's were actually a little too fast.  Other issues that came under the scrutiny of the authenticists were: instruments (and rightly so; many beautiful 18th century instruments had been converted to use steel strings, for instance, and a number of brave owners of Stradivarius violins took the leap to convert the instruments back to what they would have been before they were upgraded, and put gut strings back on them, and so forth), and ornamentation.  It is clear that a lot of ornamentation was ad lib, and my choices for ornamentation may or may not meet with the approval of the authorities.  But the authorities do not have much of a leg to stand on, since all the evidence is indirect.  I have erred in the direction of possibly over-ornamentation.  But it is a very florid melody, and would probably have been performed with a little more zip than some purists would have liked, and that’s how you’re going to hear it.  Note: Bach wrote an organ piece based on this movement, written out as a pure trio.  The version in the video clip above is essentially the organ trio written out for strings and trombone.  The version linked at the end of the post is the cantata movement, with the continuo played by the organ, and the tenor voices again given to the chorus trombones.

BWV 85  Even before I studied the piece above, I had been working with another aria, namely the tenor aria from Cantata 85.  This one is less well known, but the aria was noticed by Sir William Walton, the British Composer, and used in his ballet suite, The Wise Virgins.  Family friends of my youth had an album of the ballet suite, and I got to know and love this beautiful trio.

The text of the aria (or “song”) can be translated as “Behold what His love can do!”, and is on the one hand a sweet pastorale.  On the other hand, the frequent jumps of a fourth (two notes with two notes between them) are associated generally with what we call “jigs”, the lively dances that sailors are suppose to have indulged in in olden days, when they had their ration of rum, or a dance of villagers is a festive mood.  Which is it: a pastorale, or a jig?  Many Bach tunes are to dance meters, but morphed by Bach so that they have more serious or contemplative moods.  Pay attention to the bass line: in this piece, as in the first one, the bass is clear and confident and solid, a familiar and expected characteristic of a Bach bass line, and for some people, including myself, the most important line in the harmony.

Caution: in the performance below, the top melody has been divided between two instruments!  It is still in fact a trio, the two instruments (a flute and an oboe, actually) are just sharing the part.  I could have (with a little work) shown the video with just three lines of music, but it would have been a little tiresome.



The two upper melodies twine about each other, almost as if this were a love-song.  Once you notice these things, you want to hear the piece over and over again.  (By the way, for those who are just learning to follow music, those little curves over the notes are of two kinds: the black / white curves connect a note at the end of one measure with the same note continued in the beginning of the next measure, making a single, long note.  The colored curves over a group of notes are phrasing marks, and are, in the case of string music, actually bowing indications; the group is all to be played up-bow, with a single bowing, or down-bow.  In this performance, of course, it is not a real violin, just a violin sound.  Somehow the software is able to fake bowing; don't ask me how!)

In this performance, the pace is brisk, and you can perhaps understand my reference to it as being related, at least in certain characteristics, to a jig.  A more sedate (and actually more accurate) version is here, an earlier effort of mine, a lot more solemn and quiet, and heavily orchestrated.

BWV 525.  Bach wrote six so-called Trio Sonatas for the organ.  They were intended to be played in church wherever a non-liturgical piece was appropriate.  What is interesting about them is that they were strictly in three parts: the two hands playing two keyboards (as you know, Baroque organs already had at least two manuals, or keyboards for the hands, in addition to the pedals, to be played by the feet), and of course, the feet playing the bass on the pedals.  The two hands being on separate manuals allowed them to freely cross each other, enabling the composer to show his skill without being compromised by physical limitations.  I got it into my head to transcribe this piece for guitars, and that is what I’m presenting below.  Sorry about the minimal video; it is just an mp3 disguised as a video, for the purpose of giving you an example of a Bach trio actually consciously written as one.  Here it is:



Here is the link to the expanded performance of verse 4 of Sleepers, wake.

Added later:  I could not resist the temptation to add a fourth Bach trio, this one is from the Musicalische Opfer, the Musical Offering.  There is a story behind this work.

Bach’s son, Wilhelm Friedmann Bach (I think I have the right son; if not, please substitute a suitable son here, please!) was a principal musician in the court of King Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia.  Having heard of the skill of the older Bach, he had the son send for J. S. Bach on the occasion of the arrival of one of the new Fortepianos at the court.  J. S. Bach duly arrived at court after a long journey, and was invited to play the new instrument (or instruments), and to improvise on a certain theme he was given (by the King).

Bach is said to have made up a piece or two based on the theme, but said that he could do much better.  Returning home, he composed a number of musical canons and variations on the royal theme, including a lovely trio for Flute, Violin and Cello (plus, of course, harpsichord continuo).  I’m including the gorgeous second movement from the trio, the Allegro.  This next statement might not make much sense to most readers, but the style of the trio is very modern, for Bach.  His younger son Christian Bach was a leader in the (at the time) modern music movement, which moved from the Baroque style to the classical style of Haydn and Mozart.  The big difference is the tendency towards a more open, light and airy style.  The removal of the continuo makes it even less dense.  Bach lovers of course love the density of the older style, but this graceful movement shows what Bach might have done if he had chosen to write in the modern style:



OMG, as they say; I just discovered a version of this by electric guitars, using distortion.  Play this at your own risk.

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