Many thanks, Mathias, for reminding me of Clive's Page! I never looked at his
baroque
lute stuff before (because I didn't own one...). It's a good resource.
Regards,
Stephan
Am 12 Apr 2006 um 22:38 hat Mathias Rösel geschrieben:
> This is what Clive Titmus wrote about BWV 996:
>
> Praeludio con la suite da Gio. Bast. Bach aufs Lautenwerk
> (BWV 996)
>
> Foreword:
>
> A lute transcription of Lautenwerk suite in E minor, BWV 996, is truly
> a daunting task. First it seems neccessary to convince the
> conservative musical community that other than traditional
> connections, there is little reason to suppose that the work was
> written with the lute in mind. The work assumed its present spurious
> identity as Lute Suite No. 1 in spite of the title (supposed to have
> been added by J.G. Walther, who prepared many early keyboard sources
> of Bach's works), and supported by the advocacy of influential German
> scholars who promulgated a lute-playing Bach; Wilhelm Tappert, Albert
> Schweitzer, Hans Neeman and F.G. Giesbert. Despite a valiant attempt
> to debunk this image by Hans Radke in his article War Johannn
> Sebastian Bach Lautenspieler? (1964), the characterization of Bach as
> the composer of four lute suites whose syntopical organization is
> comparable to the suites for violin,cello or harpsichord -- as a
> composer fully conversant with the lute's idiom, and its technical and
> musical potential as a vehicle of large-scale suite composition -- has
> remained.
>
> A recently-written reference work, the dictionary-style Oxford
> Composer Companion guide to J. S. Bach, edited by Malcolm Boyd, lists
> the suite, along with BWV 995, 997, 998, 999, 1000 and 1006a, as being
> among Bach's 'lute' works, though the suite is clearly full of
> technical impossiblities. A commendably even-handed assessment of the
> arguments about Bach's luterelated repertoire in this volume by T.
> Crawford seems to contradict the classification, turning the tide in
> favour of keyboard origins. If we adopt the view that the lute had
> little direct influence in Bach's musical thinking, it frees us from
> the rationalization that we simply don't understand the lute or its
> music well enough, which was the case when the work was included in
> the first Bach complete publication Bach Gesellschaft (1936), or the
> Neue Bach Ausgabe, (V/10, 1982, T. Kohlhase ed.). The latter
> publication included the piece in a neologist category of Werke für
> Lauteninstrumente, though normally a keyboard instrument would not be
> considered to be in the lute family, whatever its tone-colour and
> stringing.
>
> Since its initial appearance in the Bach Gessellschaft edition (in its
> E minor and A minor versions) the suite has been widely published in
> many guitar transcriptions, appearing first in Bruger's original
> transcription (still available) for guitar/lute hybrid with additional
> basses and subsequently in transcriptions by Stingl, Wensieki, Bream,
> Bellow, Willard, Scheit, Teuchert, Koonce, et. al. Julian Bream's
> foreword, for example, referred to "...bold figurations so
> characteristic of the lute". Yet none of these publications has
> altered the perception that Bach wrote suites specifically for the
> lute, and in fact most of them have not questioned the principal
> assumptions upon which the transcriptions are made. Despite clear
> passages of luthée style (arpeggiated presentation of a fundamentally
> chordal texture), particularly in the Allemande, Bourée and Sarabande,
> the other movements are obviously far beyond the lute in their thick
> texture(including four-tone chords at cadences, parallel thirds in the
> bass line) and uncharacteristic ornamentation.
>
> D. Rhodes published a lute transcription (possibly the first?) of the
> work in tablature in 1976, transposed to G minor, in which he argues
> for lute origins: "...the profundity of technical skills which this
> excessively difficult work demands points to an extraordinary player,
> as we know S. L. Weiss to have been..." The tablature transcription
> puts sections of the Gigue and Praeludio into uncomfortably high
> positions on the fingerboard, in addition to transposing many bass
> notes into the lower octave. His adventurous solutions, including a
> change of pitch, single stringing and limited scordatura nevertheless
> render the piece difficult to perform even for experienced and
> technically accomplished players.
>
> Of these putative lute pieces, the Lautenwerk suite is the earliest of
> the group, supposed to have been composed before 1712, and further
> therefore among the earliest surviving pieces from the composer in
> standard Baroque-period keyboard notation. Without resorting to
> anachronisms such as altered intervals in the standard D minor tuning,
> changing the pitch of the lute to preserve the tonality, single
> stringing (suggested by Rhodes, above), added frets or other devices
> (including mechanical ones, such as fretting devic
