Air, from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, BWV 1068
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany, on March 21, 1685, and died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750. He probably composed his Ouverture (Orchestral Suite) No. 3 in the late 1720s, when he lived in Leipzig, but no further details regarding its date or possible performance are known. Performances of selected movements on Boston Symphony concerts date back to March 1883, when Georg Henschel led the Air and Gavotte.
A very large part—we will probably never know how large—of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is lost. Probably two-fifths of his cantatas have disappeared (this figure is based on an assessment of the size of his output made shortly after his death), but a much larger percentage of the purely instrumental music is lost, simply because there would have been no institutional means of organizing or preserving it. Unlike cantatas, which would be kept in churches and organized for future performance according to the particular Sunday of the church year for which they were intended, instrumental scores and parts might be handed to performers, passed on to others, ripped, lost, partially returned, and so on. Sometimes copies are kept in manuscript collections that an individual has managed to make for his or her own use; sometimes these anthologies are themselves lost or overlooked for a time.
In the meantime we must assume that the surviving orchestral works of Bach—the six Brandenburg Concertos, the four orchestral suites, and upwards of twenty solo concertos—represent only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the surviving works were composed, or at least put into present form, during the six years (1717 to 1723) that Bach spent in the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. Since Bach himself was a Lutheran and the prince’s court was Calvinist (with almost nothing in the way of elaborate music during the church services), this appointment represented the one period in the composer’s life when he had no official church duties and devoted himself entirely to the production of secular music—birthday cantatas, chamber music, and orchestral works—for his music- loving patron. Only when the prince, in December 1721, married a woman who was “not interested in the Muses” did the happy relationship between composer and patron crumble; this event no doubt partly motivated Bach’s decision to seek other employment.
The numbering of the four orchestral suites is conventional; it has no connection whatsoever with their order of composition. The First and Fourth suites come from the Cothen period, though their precise date of composition or first performance is unknown. They call for a much larger orchestral ensemble than the Second and Third suites, which were evidently composed in Leipzig roughly a decade later.
The term “suite” is also a modern convention, used to describe a composition consisting of a series of dance movements that follow one another in succession. Bach himself called these works after their first and largest component, a grand overture, and, indeed, they are published as Ouvertures (in French, as an indication of the musical style). The French overture, which originated in the ballet overtures of Jean-Baptiste Lully in the 1650s, quickly spread throughout Europe to be used as a festive musical introduction for operas, ballets, and suites.
The third suite has long been one of the favorites in the series, largely on the strength of its second movement, a sustained melody of ravishing tranquility that Bach simply called “Air,” though it is most often referred to today by the incongruous title “Air on the G string,” after an arrangement for solo violin made by August Wilhelmj in 1871, placing the melody more than an octave lower than the pitch at which Bach wrote it, so that it could be played on the violin’s lowest string (the one tuned to G) with rich effect.
As if to make up for this quiet movement, the remainder of the suite is filled with energetic dance pieces—a brisk pair of Gavottes played alternativement (that is, with Gavotte I repeated after Gavotte II has been heard, in the manner of the later Menuet and Trio in the classical symphony), a festive Bourée , and a rollicking Gigue.
STEVEN LEDBETTER
Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.