Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Should Bach be played on a piano or harpsichord? (Opinions)

THIS.

I'd add that in that time period, there was not actually the same stringent attitude of music correlating with instrument. Keep in mind that Bach composed the Well Tempered Klavier for "unspecified" keyboard instruments - could have been the organ, harpsichord, etc.

Also, while the harpsichord can't have any dynamic/tonal infection, other instruments Bach wrote for (voice, violin, gamba, etc) COULD, so it's not like the concepts of crescendo and diminuendo or tonal inflection were alien to him.

I was thinking the same thing. He just had the musical bad fortune to live before the full development of the piano although he did supposedly play an early one in the encounter that produced the musical offering.

Wow. That may be Busoni, but it's certainly not Bach.

I really don't mind adding a register but some of the phrasing editors have come up with are clearly not authentic.

You can learn a lot from the Busoni editions of Bach. But it is not generally acceptable to use them for exam purposes; this with good reason. Check out the Eb fugue.

John

One might also note that in the Baroque period, they generally weren't playing music on their harpsichords, etc., that had been written 250 years earlier for completely different instruments.

I'd also say that Bach didn't compose the WTC for any instrument at all, but rather for an abstract idea of a keyboard that was in a well-tempered tuning. Sure, he could have had any (or even several) of a number of instruments in mind when writing any given prelude or fugue, but he still chose not to give any specific indications. Essentially, AFAIK, the work was conceived as a didactic tool, not as performance material.

It's about wanting to understand the music idiomatically, and play with a sense of the appropriate style, I think.

While it may be true that some of Bach's music is less dependent on a particular instrument than, say, Debussy's, that doesn't mean that it is therefore a good idea to simply ignore instrumental considerations altogether. Bach wrote what he wrote within the instrumental world of his own time, and that world did not include a modern grand piano. It just didn't.

And because Bach didn't write a single note with the modern piano in mind, it means that whenever we play his music on a modern piano, we are transcribing it to an instrument other than one he knew. And doing that transcription means, to me, that we should try to have some knowledge about what we are doing, in terms of differences in instrumental capabilities, timbre, and playing style.

Absolutely.

Also, I wonder about why pianists want to claim Bach's keyboard music for their instrument and believe that Bach would have written for the piano had it existed and therefore it can just be played on the piano anyway.

As wr wrote above, pianists should approach playing Bach in the same way that, say, instrumental groups approach The Art of Fugue. That is, how do I realise this music on my particular instrument (s). Just because a piano has a keyboard doesn't mean it seamlessly and effortlessly substitutes for a clavichord, harpsichord or chamber organ (one or two "organ partitas" have no pedal part, therefore can be played on keyboard alone)

No-one, I believe, thinks Couperin's music can be easily realised on a modern concert grand. Because Bach's music can sound wonderful on all sorts of instruments doesn't mean that we should forgo the work to realise it in a manner that Bach (hopefully) would acknowledge as doing justice to his original design. Free interpretation/re-composing like Jaques Loussier - which I love - is another matter. If we are playing Bach "straight", then we need to be aware of how his music was played on his instruments, as a matter of respect.

I'd love to have a harpsichord but I don't have the space and can't afford it.

I don't think we should get too hung up on what instruments Bach envisaged his instrumental music were played on. At that time, composers placed less (or no) emphasis on the actual tone colour of the instruments than on the actual notes.

Here is Bach transcribing Vivaldi:
http://youtu.be/Av7peBiJRRc to http://youtu.be/tJ49G2-Chhs

...and the 'modern' equivalent http://youtu.be/QA1L0SsEXxU

And a well-known chorale that Bach arranged himself:
http://youtu.be/L2qt2d-k2_o to http://youtu.be/b_G1-QHfzhU

So why did Bach specify instruments such as oboe d'amore rather than plain oboe in some works? (Can't specify from memory)

Why did Handel write trio sonatas for different combinations of instruments?

I would rather give Bach the credit for knowing precisely which instrumentation he wanted, for instance in the cantatas (and why is the 2nd orchestral suite the only one for, in effect, obbligato flute?) than assume he didn't care which instruments played his music. Having said that, I agree Bach's music - perhaps uniquely - works beautifully, given a sensitive musician, on all sorts of instruments.

In any case, even if we might agree that Bach, knowing that his instrumental music might/could be played on clavichord, harpsichord, organ, even early piano, didn't care which, he would, I believe, have thought long and hard if he had the opportunity (time travel!) to compose for the very different modern grand.

Because he wanted the lower notes?

Yes, in some works, the instrumental colors are utilized.
But they are the exception rather than the rule. Unlike for Haydn, Mozart et al.

The number of possible permutations of instruments used for modern performances of The Art of Fugue is unparalleled - because nobody really knows what Bach intended. Even the Goldberg sounds great on everything from string orchestra to saxophone quartet to harp to accordion.

Handel's music, being more homophonic than Bach's, placed more reliance on the actual instrumentation. But still nothing like the Classical composers after him.

But we don't know how Bach would have played it; we have no recordings from that time.
I believe that the main concern for musicians should not be: How would the composer have played it? It should be: How do I play it so that it sounds like music?

I once heard the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 played on an accordion. The performer didn't change the notes, and it sounded good. The accordion is not my favourite instrument; but the result was still Bach.

Sokolov has played quite a bit of Couperin and other French composers of that period in concert. Tharaud recorded an entire CD of Couperin on a modern piano.

This is one piece of Couperin that, I think, works better on the modern piano than on a harpsichord:

http://youtu.be/1lvBZhXEJXY

Thanks, Jason - that's one of the most succinct and intelligent takes on this oft-debated subject. I had a harpsichord for a while years ago and tired of it quickly (and I now mostly share Sir Thomas Beecham's opinion of it).

One of the things the Taubman folks and my coach Thomas Mark talks about is co-contraction. Playing Bach on a harpsichord is no big deal when you have to hold one note down and play others, but on a piano, it causes me nothing but grief, physically.

For others who can do this, more power to them, but personally, I am not going to develop a special technique specific to one composer's music.

This is especially true when it has been written that Bach tried out some the pianos of his day and couldn't technically play his music on them. Other than those pianos built by his friend Gottfried Silberman, on whose design he collaborated, Bach had essentially nothing to do with the instrument.

And, for the record, until Harold Samuel and Edwin Fischer came along, no one played Bach's piano music in recital anyway.

I don't think Bach intended to have the voices of longer duration to be strictly held, it's as much a visual to keep abreast of each voice's individual line or trajectory

An excellent observation. However, there is also a historical performance technique where the line is not written out in full duration but expected to be played full duration anyway, for example BWV 825, Allemande - the line in the right hand is all sixteenth notes, but the player would normally lengthen to an eighth the first, third, fifth and so on sixteenths in each descending arpeggiated line in order to bring out the descending arpeggio. On a piano, it is not necessary to do this since a tenuto over those notes achieves the same end.