RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SCORING AND STRUCTURE IN THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF BACH'S SIXTH BRANDENBURG CONCERTO

Abstract

THE UNQUESTIONABLY VITAL ROLE of 'Vivaldi fever' in the dramatic change around 1713 in J. S. Bach's compositional style in all genres is referred to regularly in recent general studies of his life and works.' In specialized studies on the reception of Vivaldi in Bach's concertos, however, it frequently appears that the approach to this relationship brings with it serious analytical problems. Many historians first construct formal models for Vivaldi, against which they then compare the content of Bach's music. This has an important methodological consequence: although students of Bach's and Vivaldi's music cannot fail to perceive the great richness and complexity of Bach's concertos, they overemphasize his and Vivaldi's stylistic similarities, especially since they consider Bach's concertos to be Vivaldian only when their content is manifestly moulded into Vivaldi's form.2 Bach's chamber concertos (that is, concertos for a group of solo instruments without a separate ripieno section) represent an especially intriguing field for the study of Vivaldi reception, for their surface stylistic features frequently tend, so to speak, to 'distract' us from noticing the application of Vivaldi's ritornello procedures. For example, the opening movements of the First, Third and Sixth Brandenburg Concertos, because of their attenuation of textural and thematic contrasts, have generally been considered to fall outside Bach's involvement with Vivaldi's music. The misleading critical report in the standard scholarly edition of the concertos can be employed to support the suggestion that early versions of these pieces predate the known arrival of Vivaldi's concertos in Germany,3 and this can provide in turn the text-critical basis for objectifying a pre-Vivaldian view of the concertos.4 In this essay, however, I propose to show, by means of a discussion of relationships between structure and scoring in the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto,