Bach's French overtures and the politics of overdotting

Early Music

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 35-44

  Dirst, Matthew ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54349114134     PISSN: 03061078     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/em/25.1.35     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. M. Collins, 'A reconsideration of French over-dotting', Music and letters, 1 (1969). pp.111-23 (esp. p.113)
2. F. Neumann, 'The question of rhythm in the two versions of Bach's French Overture, BWV831', Studies in Renaissance and Baroque music in honor of Arthur Mendel, ed. R. Marshall (Kassel, 1974). pp.183-94
3. For a brief history of the arguments in favour of rhythmic alteration in French overtures, see the preface to S. Hefling, Rhythmic alteration in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music: notes inégales and overdotting (New York, 1993), pp.ix-xiii, where the various contributions of Arnold Dolmetsch, Thurston Dart, Robert Donington, Erwin Bodky and others are summarized
4. Opposing arguments can be found in Neumann's many articles on the subject: 'La note pointée et la soi-disant "manière française"', Revue de musicologie, 1 (1965), p.66
5. 'The French inégales, Quantz, and Bach', Journal of the American Musicological Society, xviii (1965), p.329
6. 'The dotted note and the so-called French style', Early music, v (1977), p.318 (a translation of 'La note pointée')
7. 'Facts and fiction about overdotting', Musical quarterly, lxiii (1977), p.161
8. and 'Once more: the "French overture style"', Early music, vii (1979), p.42
9. Hefling, Rhythmic alteration, p.149. Despite Hefling's best efforts to avoid provoking the ever-vigilant Neumann, the latter answered with a highly critical review (his musicological swansong), 'Notes inégales for Bach, overdotting for everybody? a commentary on an attempt to revive Dolmetsch's "rhythmic alterations'", Historical performance, vii (1994), pp.13-26
10. D. Schulenberg, The keyboard music of J. S. Bach (New York, 1992), p.305
11. P. Williams, 'French overture conventions in the hands of the young Bach and Handel', Bach Studies (Cambridge, 1989), p.189
12. Anna Magdalena's copy of the C minor Ouverture is thought to have been made between 1727 and 1731, thus suggesting a revision and transposition sometime in the early 1730s. For a more complete discussion of the chronology of BWV831, see W. Emery and C. Wolff, NBA, v/2, Krit. Ber
13. On the dating of the lute suite, see T. Kohlhase, NBA, v/10, Krit. Ber., pp.90ff. Hans Eppstein speculates (NBA, vi/2, Krit. Ber., p.1) that the cello suite was written 'probably soon after 1720 . . . in any case, before 1725/26'
14. A distinction noted in D. Fuller, 'The "dotted style" in Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti', Bach, Handel, Scarlatti tercentenary Essays, ed. P. Williams (Cambridge, 1985), p.107
15. See especially R. Marshall, 'Bach the progressive: observations on his later works', The music of Johann Sebastian Bach: the sources, the style, the significance (New York, 1989)
16. A number of explanations for the transposition of the whole work have been suggested. In one theory, B minor is the polar axis around which the other works in Clavier-Übung I and II revolve: see Emery and Wolff, NBA, v/2, Krit. Ber., p.50
17. Neumann ('The question of rhythm', p.183) notes Emery's guess that the Preller version was copied in the 1730s. Emery and Wolff (NBA, v/2, Krit. Ber.) suggest a date somewhere between 1745 and 1753. The latter date seems more likely, given the fact that Preller was born in 1727
18. Preller may have studied with Bach for a short time: see H.-J. Schulze, 'Wie enstand der Bach-Sammlung Mempells-Preller?', Bach Jahrbuch 1974, p.104
19. John O'Donnell ('The French style and the overtures of Bach', Early music, vii (1979), pp.190-96) explains away part of the overdotting debate by arguing persuasively for a gradual deceleration of tempo in the French overture over the course of the 18th century. In order to preserve the fundamental rhythmic character of the Lullian model in these slower overtures, composers added additional dots (or ties or rests) to long notes and shortened the note values in upbeat figures. This quite sensible idea suggests that the choice of tempo will affect the degree to which the dotted figures in a French overture can be over- (or under-) dotted. And it goes both ways: the dotted notation of these figures and their frequency in the texture will affect the choice of tempo. Although I do not share O'Donnell's view that there is a mean tempo to be found for the Bach overtures, his idea concerning the gradual change in tempo of the genre as a whole does help to explain the revision of the present work
20. I share some of Neumann's reservations about this kind of wholesale rhythmic adjustment: in bar 13 of the C minor overture, how should we know to shorten only the semiquavers in the right hand? O'Donnell's contraction of the upbeat figures in BWV1066/i ('The French style', pp.190, 336) poses similar difficulties
21. and W. Malloch, 'Bach and the French Overture', Musical quarterly, lxxv (1991), p.194). Hefling's suggestion that the overture to Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV61/i, 'can be easily and effectively overdotted' (p.149) raises the same problem: how should the passages of even semiquavers in bars 28, 88 and 91 of that work be rendered?
22. Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and post-Baroque music with special emphasis on J. S. Bach (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp.41-2
23. Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and post-Baroque music, p.43
24. Neumann, 'The French inégales, Quantz, and Bach', p.357
25. F. Neumann, 'Bach: progressive or conservative and the authorship of the Goldberg Aria', Musical quarterly, lxxi (1985), pp.281-94
26. Neumann, 'Bach: progressive or conservative', p.294
27. Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte zu spielen (Berlin, 1752), trans. and ed. E. R. Reilly as On playing the flute (New York, 2/1985), p.316, §42. Reilly's omission of the negative in the last sentence of the quoted passage is surely a typographical error: the last sentence in the German original (p.301) reads 'daß in Deutschland nicht mehr üblich sind'
28. Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Johann Abraham Schulz, in J. G. Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig, 1771-4), p.643: 'Doch nennet man in Frankreich noch itzt jedes Vorspiel vor der Oper eine Ouvertüre, wenn es gleich gar nichts mehr von der ehemaligen Art dieser Stücke hat.'
29. Daniel Gottlob Türk, Klavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Klavierspielen . . . (Leipzig and Halle, 1789; R/Kassel, 1962), pp.392-3
30. Johann Adoph Scheibe, Der critische Musikus (Hamburg, 20 Jan 1740; Leipzig, 1745) p.637
31. English translation adapted from The Bach reader, ed. H. David and A. Mendel (New York, 1945/72). p.234
32. The Forkel - Hoffmeister & Kühnel correspondence: a document of the early 19th-century Bach revival, ed. G. Stauffer (New York, 1990), pp.28-9 (trans. A. Mendel)
33. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, p.625: 'Est ist in verschiedenen Stellen dieses Werks [Dichtkunst, Gesang, Musik, u. a.] angemerket worden, daß der wahre Ursprung aller schönen Künste in der Natur des menschlichen Gemüthes anzutreffen ist; daß Menschen von mehr als gewöhnlicher Lebhaftigkeit der Phantasie und der Empfindung, die zugleich ein schärferes Gefühl des Schönen haben, als andere, aus eigenem Trieb und nicht durch fremdes Beyspiel gereizt, gewissen Werken, oder Aeußerungen des Genies und der Empfindung, durch überlegte Bearbeitung eine Form und einen Charakter geben, wodurch sie zu Werken der schönen Kunst werden.'
34. The review was wrongly attributed (by Georg Ellinger in 1894) to E. T. A. Hoffmann: see D. Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann's musical writings: Kreisleriana, The poet and the composer, music criticism (Cambridge, 1989), pp.448-9
35. For an excellent summary of this revolution in late 18th-century German culture, see N. Boyle, Goethe: the poet and the age, i (Oxford, 1991), chap. 1
36. Quotations adapted from the following translations of F. Smend, Goethes Verhältnis zu Bach (Berlin and Darmstadt, 1955), pp.14ff
37. The Bach reader, p.370
38. G. Herz, Essays on J. S. Bach (Ann Arbor, 1985), p.95
39. and H.-J. Schulze, 'The French influence in Bach's instrumental music', Early music, xiii (1985), p.180