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How do you approach playing Bach on the piano (or for that matter any pre-piano composer?) Personally im almost of two minds on the subject...on the one hand it is obvious that bach composed his keyboard works for specific instuments (namely the harpsichord) with specific tonal qualities which give his music the character that it has... Counterpoint truly only makes sense if each voice is allotted equal dynamic value, as it would on a harpsichord, since you can't vary the dynamics on that instrument. But at the same time one could also argue that Bach took full advantage of all the modern resourses at hand and would have eagerly welcomed and admired the piano, and used it...perhaps though if he had a piano his music wouldn't have been composed in the same way... So again how does one aproach playing bach... i dont own a harpsichord so thats not an option, and i dont think that purposly attempting the sound of a harsichord on the piano is the correct approach either.. the piano is a unique instrument which perhaps can add its own character to Bach (which although its not as bach would have performed it, and indeed it may be musically not as good as bach on harpsichord... this is not my opinion, just a thought..) but it is different and does allow one to express things in the music that bach would not have been able to do.. Ex. bring out one voice in the music over an other..or use dynamics etc... however i stop short of giving myself full anti-historical licesnce in interpreting his works, i never use the pedal at all, and i avoide any overtly romantic gestures such as lots of rubato or an enormous range of dynamics, i really dont think use of the pedal or lots of rubato and dynamics benefit the playing of bach at all... i find richter great though he is in most playing is far too romantic for my tastes in bach...
what do you guys think about Bach on the piano

[QUOTE]Originally posted by sandman:
[QB]Counterpoint truly only makes sense if each voice is allotted equal dynamic value[QB]

I'm not so sure that I agree with that statement. Counterpoint, IMO, only sounds right when the voices have variable dynamic value - when you can bring one voice out over the others. Listen to the Brandenberg Concertos. If all the instruments played the same dynamic, it would be very boring. That's why Bach on the harpsichord is very unsatisfying for me.

That said, there are two schools to playing Bach on the piano. The first in the one you subscribe to which is try to duplicate the harpsichord as much as possible on the piano. The second is the recognize that a piano is not a harpsichord and try to leverage the characteristics into your playing.

The older I get, the more I prefer the latter. There is a depth of emotion possible when playing Bach that's just not possible if you play it "straight". I prefer Bach that is closer to my sensibilities and that includes rubato, dynamics and pedal.

Me too - the older I get the more expression I want to hear in Bach's keyboard music, as long as it is tastefully and thoughtfully done. I also don't agree that the voices in counterpoint should have the same dynamic level. This would not be the case in Bach's choral and ensemble music. I think the fact that the harpsichord can only play one dynamic level at a time is a limitation of the instrument that does not establish a rule for counterpoint.

Bach clearly did not have any qualms about transcribing works for different instruments, and I don't believe he would object to his keyboard works being played on a piano. In fact, I think he would enjoy the range of expression you can get from a modern piano, although he would likely have some preferences in how his works should be played.

Throughout his career, Gould sought to strip any emotionalism from his playing. He thought that expression and emotion were artificial, a way of dumbing down the music so that an audience could understand it. He also disliked having to alter his music to fit the piano and/or venue (e.g. wet vs. dry rooms). He tried to distil music down to some pure elements of tones and rhythms. In my opinion he completely missed the boat. Ultimately we make and listen to music for many reasons, which mostly boil down to enjoyment. Some people enjoy spectacular stunts. Others enjoy emotion. Others enjoy intellectual stimulation. Getting offended at your audience for enjoying your music seems a bit off to me. As does getting offended at music that offers emotional and visual enjoyment (e.g. late Beethoven, and any romantic period music).

Just my opinion, of course

Ryan

And me too--I agree with all that's been said so far. I think Bach played with a nice legato is very beautiful on the piano. Not the same type of legato as one would use for Chopin; less so, but enough so that the notes flow from one to the other. I'm also not against using the pedal judiciously. I'm sure many will disagree but I like prelude #1 with a little pedal. When I play this piece I think to myself, "Bach has been to the beach in his life!". Isn't that funny, but it's really what my feelings about it conjure up. Those ocean breezes, that fresh smell, long hair flying in the wind... Aaah.

One other thing. Roslyn Turek (sp?) in one of her videos says that a lot of Bach's keyboard music was written for clavier which is not a plucked instrument like the harpsichord. The clavier strings will actually struck and this makes it closer to a piano than a harpsichord.

Also am I correct in thinking that the piano was beginning to make it's appearance late in Bach's life and he actually got to try one?

At any rate, I'm sure he would have loved it.

This is a topic that I feel very strongly about.



That's not true. Most harpsichords contain three or four stops (kind of like an organ) - full harshipchord, lute stop, and a 4' or 8' stop. Each one of these has a very distinctive sound - the full harpsichord sounds like a modern day piano with the pedal held down; unlike the lute stop the sound reverberates for quite a while. The lute stop sounds like a guitar and is very soft. The 4' and 8' stops can be used on either full or lute setting to achieve less or more sound (respectively).

All contrapuntal voices equal volume? Why? Some lines are more expressive than others and deserve to be brought out. Imagine a four-voice fugue as a string quartet. Each player would back off as the next came in with the subject. Likewise when the subject was inverted, presented in augmentation, stretto, etc.



Bach actually played a pianoforte at two times in his life - 1736 and 1747, both times at the request of the piano builder Silbermann. In the first meeting, Bach thought that the tone was good but otherwise dismissed the instrument. In the later encounter, Silbermann had made improvements on the instrument and Bach was more pleased. Bach didn't live long enough to write specifically for the piano, but it had his endorsement at the end of his life and we can assume that had he lived longer he would have written for it.



I agree. We are realizing his music on a modern instrument. If we want to hear what Bach sounds like on a harpsichord, we'll go listen to Bach's music on a harpsichord.



So you think Bach played his own works with sterility because of instrumental limitations? His harmonic language is more advanced that most of the low-quality salon trash that came out of the Romantic age. There's so much struggle in Bach's music - improvisations that go on and on, desperately searching for a cadence (e minor toccata), fugues that reach cataclysmic heights (Chromatic Fantasie & Fugue), the first ever keyboard transcriptions of other composers orchestral works (not to mention his own works such as the Italian concerto, which is nothing else than a concerto grosso transcribed for keyboard). That alone makes a strong enough case for the expressive quality of Bach's music.




Don't confine yourself. The pedal in Bach is by no means taboo, and if anything is one of the greatest fallacies in piano pedagogy ever. Use it wisely and carefully, but don't emasculate it from the music; it can add a lot in terms of helping you phrase, changing colors, etc. Like I said, if we want to hear Bach on a harpsichord, we'll listen to it on a harpsichord.

Brendan

Pianists tend to think in long melodic lines or phrases. You might try to break things down into smaller motivic units by varying articulation. In other words, slur together the stepwise segments and detach at the skips and leaps. For example, with Bach Invention No. 14 (B-flat Major) try various ways of connecting and detaching the motives in the right and left hand (which is considerably more easy than connecting everything for the RH). Then decide if you REALLY LIKE each result. I think there is a discussion of these kinds of articulation decisions in the Alfred edition of Couperin's "L'art de toucher le clavecin" (I'll have to check this).

George Szell had a famous, nasty low opinion of the sound of the harpsichord that I tend to agree with (think two skeletons doing something unspeakable on a tin roof).

[ July 31, 2001: Message edited by: MacDuff ]

I feel the idea that one ought never to inject modern performance practices into Bach's music is wrong. We can approximate what a baroque performance might sound like, we can adopt historically informed performance practices. But that doesn't, imho, always seem necessary nor desireable. As already pointed out, Bach had no hesitation adapting works from one instrument for another. So I don't see that Bach would dislike our playing his music on the piano. Given his adaptations, I think Bach would find it normal for a musician to adapt a work to the particular strengths and limits of his/her instrument. In this sense, I don't think it helpful to imitate a harpsichord. That, in itself, raises interesting questions --for example, the use of ornamentation and pedaling. My own approach has changed with time. I find that lately I use less and less pedal. I am more frugal about ornamentation. More and more, I agree with the view that use of ornamentation ought to be guided by the limitations and characteristics of the instrument. As this concerns the modern piano, I am increasingly inclined to abandon some ornamentation.

About Gould! Well, I love Glenn Gould's Bach. So I am in complete disagreement with Ryan's views. Glenn's Bach is full of surprises and never completely faithful to the score. Gould seemed to have the idea that composers -including Bach- sometimes got it wrong. His ability to play each voice, to skillfully manipulate tempo, and so forth were nothing short of revolutionary. I don't agree that Gould tried to rid expression and emotion from his playing (where else would all of that damned humming have came from?). Listen to his Strauss or his recording of the Liszt-Beethoven arrangements. You may not always agree with it, but something is definetly expressed. As for the audience, so much of Gould's work (including his leaving the concert stage) seems to, imho, spring from genuine regard for the listener (the experimentations with recording, his work as a broadcaster, and so forth). I think he cared greatly about the act of communicating --through the piano or otherwise. Enough about Gould.

My favorite Bach interpreter is Tatiana Nikolayeva. Her Bach is supreme. So different from Gould's and, imho, so absolutely angelic. Beautiful ability to bring out the voices, lines of polyphony, shading, and depth. Just glorious in every way!

My apologies to all for this being such a lengthy post. I loved the story about George Szell. You couldn't slap the smile off my face after I read that.

well i don't know about Bach, but i absolutely love playing Scarlatti's works, mostly originally written for harpsichord as well... and i wouldn't play them as though i was playing a harpsichord... i'd do it with lots of care for tone and dynamics... one of the best examples [imho] of doing this with pre-piano works is Horowitz's Scarlatti recordings... you have to hear them... and Argerich also played her K. 141 in d minor very well...

Thanks everybody, there are some great ideas here... your suggestions especially with regards to counterpoint are very helpful...
someone had just mentioned ornaments in bachs music, i was of the opinion that the ornaments can be played at the whim of the perfomer... that they're not set in musical stone as it were, is this true... for example im learning the prelude and fugue in f#major from book 1 of WTC, and in my edition (it is an urtext edition) it clearly specifies trills throughout the score, but i find in my playing that it makes more rhythmic sense and flows more smoothly when i play them as mordents...so two questions...are the ornaments which appear in Bach scores written by him, or are they additions by editors... and secondly in your opinions how much liscence can one take with the ornaments in Bachs music?
if anyone else is learning or has learnt that prelude and fugue i would be interested in knowing how you play it.

Netizen, my comments about Gould aren't conjecture - he made them himself. Listen to or read his comments about his early recording of Bach's 2nd Partita. All I can say is that I can hear a growing coldness in his playing as you listen to his works in chronological order. All I hear is his disdain for Beethoven (most) and Mozart in his recordings of their sonatas (which he also confirmed in interviews). He clearly did not like Bach's toccatas, which you can hear in the recording (and which he again confirmed in interviews). I used to be a total Gould fanatic - Gould was all there was for Bach. But I guess as I grow older and hear alternative recordings and hear more of Gould's comments, I just don't care to listen to his recordings any more. I mean really, Beethoven, Bach, et. al. got it wrong??? This viewpoint is supposed to be a good thing in a recording and performing artist???

One thing Gould did succeed in doing by leaving the concert stage is to insulate himself against critism. I have often wondered if his experiences performing with orchestras, capped by the infamous Brahms Bb concerto, was the catalist for his retirement. No more conductors tapping their foot while carpenters raised the piano to just the perfect hieght. No more public appologies for the interpretation (e.g. Brahms Bb). Just a thought...

[ August 01, 2001: Message edited by: ryan ]

Hi Ryan,

I appreciate your comments on Gould. He is certainly a ligthening rod for criticism. Ultimately, I suppose we stand on separate sides of the matter. I simply do not hear the "coldness" that you hear. I hear pranks, contemplation, play, imagination, arrogance, and all sort of things. Do I like them all? No. Do they matter to me? Yes. This is because, in my own case, they change things, open a vista that I'd not glimpsed before and, more importantly, Gould is one of the few pianists who really makes me think. Think not only about a particular piece of music, but about the role of the interpreter, of performance. I am not always, usually not, persuaded by Gould, but I am provoked. That I rank as a good thing. Even when he takes us in directions most would find plain wrong.

The early part of this summer I thought I should re-visit the Mozart Sonatas. I was going to California, so I packed several recordings of the Mozart -including Gould's. I had not listened to Glenn's Mozart in a long time, a very long time. Of the various recordings, it was the one I kept coming back to. It provoked me to laugh aloud at times --so outrageous are some of the interpretations--and at other times I heard things I had not heard before in Mozart. Some them made me feel, well, somewhat angry. Driving in the car, I reached over and snapped off the stereo I was so offended by it. After a few moments, I was a little taken a back by my reaction. I still hate it, but ...

Gould's career as a performer didn't really begin, I'd contend, until he left the concert stage. No sooner does he stop playing in the concert hall, then he begins a manic schedule, working in radio,television, the recording studio, film composing, and writing. His writings, including his interviews, are a hoot (I love his contention in Rolling Stone that he can teach anyone all there is to know about playing the piano 15 minutes). All of this, seems consistent with the essential polyphony of Gould's life and music: Saying he's doing one thing, while doing another. Gould provides unlike any other pianist a spectacular, in the true sense of word, running commentary/criticism on classical music and performance. But that's my view and, at least in my world, there's room for plenty of other views (including those of folks who strongly dislike or even hate Gould).

One more story I have to tell --especially since I enjoyed MacDuff's sharing with us George Szell's comment about harpsichords. It's about a recording session involving Szell and Glenn Gould. Right from the start, Gould begins neurotically adjusting the bench. Up, down, up, down. A little more up, a little more down. The clocking ticking away and Szell getting more and more impatient. Finally, when Gould says to Szell that he's ready to start, Szell replies: "Mr. Gould, if your fingers are as sensitive as your ass, this should be a great recording."

I love that anecdote about Gould and Szell.

I appreciate and understand what you are saying about Gould. Like him or not, he was very, very unique. A truly interesting personality. And a powerful one too, to have so affected how Bach's keyboard music was interpreted in the last century. I don't mean to come down so harshly on him, although I cannot forgive him for his commentary on Mozart's Sonatas and Beethoven's later works That, and over time I have found other interpretations that I enjoy listening to more than many of Gould's. I must admit that when I have questions about how to interpret something in Bach, I always check to see what Gould did

Ryan

Sandman,

The autograph of the F# Prelude (BWV858/1) has the marking 'tr', hence this indication in your urtext. I use the ABRSM edition and follow the suggestion of the editor, Richard Jones, which is to play a shake in triplets (3 per semiquaver) without a turn. This works well in a reasonably moderate tempo, say dotted quaver = 76. It may be a bit tricky if you want to play it faster. Czerny's edition, for instance, uses mordents and suggests a tempo of 96, which he calls allegretto. I would at least try the shake, even if it means slowing the tempo. It shouldn't upset the rhythm if played accurately - perhaps at first try emphasising the first note of each triplet in the shake, making sure it coincides exactly with the beat. Of course, you may find you prefer to play it as you were, but it is at least worth experimenting.

Interestingly, the fugue (BWV 858/2) is missing from the autograph, together with the beginning of the following prelude, and is usually printed from early MS copies, so there may be some variation even between Urtext editions. This fugue also has an ornament in the subject, this time a shake with a turn. For the fugue I find Czerny's suggestion of crotchet = 88 about right.

As for your more general questions, in an Urtext edition the ornaments will be written as they appear in Bach's autograph (if it survives, as in this case it does). But how those markings are actually to be realised is often contentious. I'm sure others are more knowledgeable about this than me, and I hope they will add to or correct what I have said.

BTW, this is a really nice P & F isn't it?

Yok,
I went to look in my Tovey Ed. but then I realized that both books were at church. You might want to see what Tovey says about this. just my $.02

Howdy (I'm new 'round these parts),

Glenn Gould played Bach more beautifully than any big-name classical pianist I've heard (on record). He almost NEVER used any pedal. My first piano teacher (from twenty-five years ago) says, "If Bach had had access to a keyboard with a pedal, he most CERTAINLY would have encouraged its use for the purposes of legato and greater expressivity."

I don't know. I think harpsichordists are often just as "musical" or "expressive" as pianists, and they don't have access to a damper. Further, the harpsichord's soundworld (distribution of resonant overtones, etc.--forgive my relatively sloppy terminology, but I'm going back to school for my degree, so I'll have it down pat soon :-) ) doesn't DESTROY a melodic line. It merely sounds differently articulated from the same melody performed on a piano, with or w/out "benefit" of damper.

Now, Debussy would HAVE to have a damper, as would late Beethoven, etc. But Bach? I don't know.

Trouble with Bach is that his best keyboard works--for me the E & G French Suites, the Toccata in C minor, all the Partitas--are SO perfect, their beauty remains intact under the harshest of circumstances. There's a mathematical purity about the work which is still wholly human in spirit which may never have been equalled afterwards, in terms of the Western musical canon.

All I know is, the lesser Baroques (Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Handel, etc.) HAVE to be performed on a harpsichord, or they sound TOTALLY WEAK (to me, anyway).

10-4,

ph

Hmmm, Gould played Bach more beautifully than Alicia de Larrocha, Murray Perahia, Jorg Demus, C. Arrau, R. Turek, A. Schiff, S. Richter, and many others? That is a pretty tall claim

Ryan

Ryan, I appreciate what you've said and, to be sure, Gould just isn't everyone's cup of tea. I'm happy to hear you've not totally given up on the poor devil.

phfierstein,

Ryan's right that'a pretyy big claim. As clear from earlier posts, I'm a Gould fan. But he's not the only game in town --least not for me. There's Gulda, Nikolayeva, Richter, and the list goes on. Actually, I don't think --in my own case-- that I could pin Bach on just one pianist. Or should that be the other way around. Hmmmm.

[ August 02, 2001: Message edited by: netizen ]

[ August 02, 2001: Message edited by: netizen ]

netizen, I haven't completely given up on Gould

I did want to add a comments about the "lesser" Baroques (which I don't really consider to be lesser) only being played on harpsichord. Murray Perahia, S. Richter, Alicia de Larrocha, Pogorelich, Horowitz, and others have made very strong and very beautiful recordings of Handel and Scarlati on piano. These recordings are powerful arguments to playing Baroque music on the modern piano. When I listen to these, I have to close my eyes, sit back, and enjoy.

Ryan

Give me Bach or Baroque on modern piano anyday, anytime. No harpichord or clavichord! I can't stand it at all.