7/31 – Bach Three-Part Inventions paired with Poetry

Last year at about this time, we offered the fifteen Bach Two-Part Inventions with poetry inspired by them. This year (not in any spirit of going “one better”!) we offer the Three-Part Inventions – once more with poetic minds responding to their delights, complexities, and instructions to our intellect as well as to our musical sensibilities. Our program notes last year included the composer’s preface to the pieces heard. This time we would like to quote the entire preface, for it covers the three-part pieces as well as the two-part Inventions.

“Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas (inventions), but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile (songlike) style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.”

That preface was to Bach’s final thoughts on these pieces (dated 1723), music which he first conceived three years earlier but over several years reworked into a final state which he felt truly satisfied his aims and his musical inspiration. The impetus for this music was Bach’s desire to write instructive pieces for his quite young son (nine years old when he started), Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. While we usually list all thirty completed pieces as “Inventions” the original designation for each of the two-part pieces was Preambulum, the title for each three-part work was Fantasia.

The last version of them lists the two-part ones as Inventions, the three-parters as Sinfonias. That designation for the latter pieces seems quite apt, since they are not merely more difficult, they are fuller and more complex in their musical expression. The great pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) spoke of the f minor Sinfonia as genuine “Passion music,” finding its contrapuntal complexity as great as anything Bach ever wrote.

If we may, we’d like to repeat a program note from last year’s Inventions “project”. When a great composer writes pieces for “instruction” – such as Bach in his Inventions and Sinfonias, or Chopin or Debussy in their Études – it can be assumed safely that the music goes far beyond technical aspirations, far beyond such things as those mechanical Czerny and Hanon studies beginning piano students must cope with to get fingers behaving properly and coordination between hands. The Bachs, Chopins, and Debussys give us music of “heart,” music of imagination and sweep that has far more than mechanics in mind. It is in that spirit that we offer today’s program of music – and poetry.

Eric Wen has noted, “Beethoven owned a copy of the Inventions, which he studied assiduously, Chopin taught them to his pupils, and Mendelssohn performed them, along with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, to his idol Goethe.”

…back to program notes.