I find your assessment a bit overstated, but I don't disagree. I've had similar thoughts about the lute suites, which supplies me with a ready excuse, if I need one, for not putting in the effort to learn to play them. Not everything Bach wrote is the B minor Mass; there's plenty of pedestrian stuff in the cantatas.
The real problem with the lute music is that Bach obviously wrote it for fortepiano, which he confused with the trumpet, because he didn't own either instrument and neither was available for rent at the Guitar Center in Leipzig until 1753, by which time Bach was dead and no longer interested. Since Bach judged playability by what he could do with his fingers, and trumpets were not played with fingers, you can see where difficulty would arise: modern lute players and guitarists simply don't have the highly-developed embouchures required to play the high notes. And for this the blame Bach? On Apr 30, 2012, at 8:06 AM, Christopher Wilke wrote: > (I'm going to risk getting my head bitten off.) I know it is heresy > to question anything that Bach composed, but ultimately I don't find > his lute works to be all that great. The quality is very uneven, with > some movements being out of this world and others providing a one way > ticket on the bullet town to Sleepy Town. Take BWV 995, for example. > After a thrilling prelude/overture, there is that dreadfully dull > allemande. Many will claim that's it's ineffable genius simply because > the dots on the paper came from JSB's quill. Compositionally speaking, > that allemande is a bland and pedantic motivic exercise that a composer > like Bach could have phoned in while changing Wilhelm Friedemann's > diaper in the middle of the night. Really, it's just bad.(Take both > repeats? Please no! The lighting is very dim in here and I ate right > before the concert. I'm afraid I might...zzzzzzzzzz.) The courante is > only marginally more compelling, but then the sarabande is incredible > again. I find it very difficult to get excited about this stuff, > especially when it is so difficult to pull off technically. > Whatever your feelings about the musical quality of the lute pieces > taken as a whole, it is difficult to claim that Bach took advantage of > the idiomatic resources of the lute. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
