These program notes were written by Elise Groves for a concert of Trio Sonatas by J.S. and C.P.E. Bach. This concert was presented by The Bach Project in conjunction with Ashmont Hill Chamber Music on October 22, 2023.
Somewhere on a music theory test the question is always asked: “How many performers does it take to play a trio sonata?” The answer, like most things in life, is complicated. Trio sonatas evolved from the three-voice texture used in Italian vocal chamber music in the early 1600s. When adapted for an instrumental chamber ensemble, the most common strategy was to use two melody instruments for the top two voices (some combination of flutes, recorders, violins, or oboes) and then a lower voiced melody instrument (cello, viol, or bassoon) with a harmony instrument (organ, harpsichord, or theorbo) for the third line. Thus, the instrumental trio sonata generally requires four players, which satisfies most music theory professors. The great variety and flexibility of the trio sonata as a genre made it a favorite of Baroque composers throughout Europe for well over a century.
When J.S. Bach (1685-1750) put his stamp on the trio sonata genre, he did it by almost completely avoiding the usual three-voices-with-four-players texture. In some compositions he reduced the players to two – a solo melodic instrument plus a harpsichord with each hand taking a separate line – while in others he converted the trio sonata to a form for solo organ with each hand playing an upper melody line and the feet taking over the bass line. The Trio super Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr’, BWV 676 is a single movement trio based on a chorale tune. Taken from the third volume of Bach’s Clavier-Übung, it is not a true trio sonata but instead an exploration of the trio texture for organ using a chorale tune as a basis. Clavier-Übung III was composed between 1735-1739 and takes the form of an organ mass – a prelude and fugue bookend the collection with 21 pieces in between based on chorales following the form of a Lutheran mass and the catechism.
The Trio Sonata in C minor, BWV 526, comes from a collection of trio sonatas for organ assembled in the late 1720s. The organ sonatas were likely intended for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach but were used by many of Bach’s students and are considered some of his most challenging organ repertoire. Some portions of this collection were reworkings of earlier compositions or other pieces, though so much of Bach’s chamber music is lost that it is difficult to know what was newly composed and what might have been based on a lost source.
The collection known as Das Musikalische Opfer or The Musical Offering owes its composition to the connections of Wilhelm Friedemann’s younger brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. C.P.E. Bach was employed as a court musician by Frederick the Great of Prussia from 1738-1768. When J.S. Bach visited his son in 1747, the king gave him a theme on which to improvise. This theme formed the basis for The Musical Offering which included two ricercars, ten canons, and the Sonata sopr’il Soggetto Reale, BWV 1079. While the instrumentation for other movements of The Musical Offering is unclear, the trio sonata was written specifically with flute and violin in mind for the two upper parts. Frederick the Great was an accomplished musician and composer in his own right, and his skill in playing the flute resulted in a wealth of flute repertoire written by composers in and around his court.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) was J.S. Bach’s third surviving child (after Catharina Dorothea and Wilhelm Friedemann) and received most of his musical training from his father. His godfather was Georg Philipp Telemann, whom he would succeed as director of music in Hamburg in 1768 after thirty years of employment at the Prussian royal court. The Trio Sonata in B minor, H. 567, and Trio Sonata in A major, H. 570, both date from roughly 1731-1735 when C.P.E. was still living at home in Leipzig before his appointment in Berlin. He revised them in 1747, probably for use in Frederick the Great’s court. C.P.E.’s chamber music shows the transition from the Baroque period to the Classical – while his early works like these trio sonatas are clearly written in Baroque style with two melody instruments and a continuo bass line, his later chamber music includes accompanied sonatas that are a precursor to what would become the piano trio. Frederick the Great had several fortepianos in his musical collection, and it was as a keyboardist that C.P.E. Bach built his reputation as a performer. Over the course of his life, he would also publish more collections of keyboard music than any other genre. In recent years there has been excellent scholarship on C.P.E. Bach’s compositional output: for this concert, performing parts based on the critical edition Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works (www.cpebach.org) were made available by the publisher, the Packard Humanities Institute of Los Altos, California.
From its earliest published versions (Salamone Rossi, 1607) to the forms that later evolved into the string quartet and the piano trio around 1760, any and every composer of instrumental music explored the possibilities of the trio sonata. With a wide variety of colors and textures yet enough limitations to provide structure, nearly 150 years of composers from all over Europe put their own stamp on the genre – exploring what was possible and how many performers would be required.
