Precarious Presumptions and the "Minority Report": Revisiting the primary sources of the Bach Cello Suites

Abstract

Precarious Presumptions and the "Minority Report": Revisiting the primary sources of the Bach Cello Suites Zoltán Szabó Inedition.2CelloMarchSuitesManifesdy,2013,becameanewattemptingavailable.1edition1oftobelieveJohanncreatethistheSebastianto"ideal"betheBach'sedition106thnewsolohas CelloSuitesbecameavailable.11believethistobethe106thnew edition.2Manifesdy,attemptingtocreatethe"ideal"editionhas provedanirresistibletemptationformusicians(overwhelmingly cellists)overthelasttwohundredyears.Theirgoalswerenotalways thesame:somejoinedinthesearchfortheHolyGrailofthe composer'sultimateintentions;otherspurportedtocreateapractical publicationwhereallnotesandrhythms,fingeringsandbowings, dynamicsandarticulationmarkingswereplayablewithrelativeease andmadepracticalsenseatthesametime;stillotherstookthe pragmaticapproachofusingtheireditorialworktodisseminatetheir ownartisticinterpretationofthesuites. Whatevertheguidingobjectives,thisextraordinarynumberof editions(andtheequivalentnumberofdifferenteditorialconcepts behindit)isconceivableonlywhereeditorsfeelauthorizedtoexercise acertainamountofartisticintervention.Suchinterventionismore easilyjustifiedwhenamanuscriptinthecomposer'shandhasnot 'SeeJ.S.Bacò,CelloSuitesBWV1007-1012,ed.,YokoyamaShin-Itchiro (http://shin-itchiro.seesaa.net/2013). "Theprecisenumberofprivateandonlinepublicationsavailabletodayishardto establish.Forthepurposesofthecurrentinvestigation,a"newedition"meansa publicationwrittenforsolocellowithnewcontent,publisher,andeditor.Therefore, thenumberoftranscriptionsandreprints(reachingseveralhundreds)werenottaken into account here. BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute of Baldwin Wallace University 2 Bach survived - as is indeed the case with the Cello Suites. In the absence of an autograph, the suites would have been lost forever and soon forgotten, like so many of Bach's other compositions, had they not been copied by four different scribes over the course of the eighteenth century. Two of these manuscripts date from Bach's lifetime: the so-called Source A copied by Anna Magdalena, Bach's second wife, and Source B by Johann Peter Kellner, a Thuringian cantor and organist, barely twenty years old at the time. Two are much later, dating from the second half of the century: Source C, the "Westphal" copy and Source D, the "Traeg" copy. In principle, to have several copies of the same masterwork should offer certain benefits; one could assume that the composer's intentions for the notation could be reliably established through examination of multiple sources. Unfortunately, however, the four handwritten copies are significandy different from each other and there is no clear indication that any one of them is substantially superior. Be that as it may, all subsequent editions have been based in some way on one or more of these copies - though by no means in equal measure. In 1 879, more than half a century after the appearance of the first edition, Alfred Dörffel's ground-breaking publication for the first complete edition of Bach's works sowed a crucially important seed, the fruit of which has been propagated by most later editors. Dörffel (1821-1905) came upon Anna Magdalena Bach's manuscript of the suites in the Berlin Royal Library (Königliche Bibliothek, now Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). He immediately recognized its significance and rescued it from obscurity.3 In his preface to the twenty-seventh volume of the Bach Gesellschaft Gesamtausgabe (containing the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin and the Cello Suites), Dörffel named manuscript copies by Anna Magdalena Bach and Peter Kellner, as well as three previously published editions (Probst 1 825, Dotzauer 1 826, and Stade 1 864) as his sources.4 In the next paragraph he ranked them in order of importance, saying: 3Although the library had obtained Anna Magdalena^ copy in 1841, no previous editors could make use of it, simply because it was not known and therefore unavailable to them. 4See Dörffel's editions, "6 Suiten fur Violoncello" in J. S. Bachs Kammermusik , vol. 6; "Solowerke fur Violine" and "Solowerke für Violoncello," vol. 27/1" in BachGesellschaft Ausgabe, (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1879), vol. 30. Sources of the Bach Cello Suites 3 The first manuscript has to be regarded as the orig [Originalvorlage] . It is not in Bach's own hand, but was wr second wife, Anna Magdalena.5 In these two sentences Anna Magdalena's superio copyist colleagues was asserted unequivocally for th was not going to be the last. Her manuscript w established as primus inter pares, the pre-eminent editors were obliged to pay attention to it, althoug agreed on its reliability and authenticity. By referring the Originalvorlage , Dörffel may have confused edito twentieth century, who wrongly assumed that "Origin autograph. This was most certainly not Dörffel's f stated that the manuscript in question was written by lena, and yet Paul Grümmer in 19446 and Alexande 19577 still insisted on the wife's script being the husb recently as 1977, Kazimierz Wilkomirski posited in his edition of the suites that: Recent research has shown that [Anna Magdalena's] manuscript of the Suites is no copy, but the original. I share this view; the extracts...