Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052R

Program notes

About the Work

There is no manuscript of a violin concerto in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach. What survives is a concerto for harpsichord and strings, BWV 1052, the first in a collection of keyboard concertos that Bach wrote out in his own hand in Leipzig around 1738, probably for the concerts of the Collegium Musicum, the society of students and professionals he directed there. Most of those harpsichord concertos are known or believed to be arrangements of earlier concertos for other instruments, and this one has long been thought to go back to a lost concerto for violin. The solo part gives the game away: again and again it has figures that lie awkwardly under a keyboard player’s hands but fall naturally on a violin, such as passages that rock back and forth across an open string.

The letter R in the catalogue number stands for reconstruction. Since the nineteenth century, when the violinist Ferdinand David made the first attempt, scholars and players have tried to work backwards from the harpsichord version to the violin concerto behind it, and several versions exist. They can draw on another witness as well. In the 1720s Bach used all three movements in church cantatas, with the organ playing the solo: the first two in ‘Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal’, BWV 146, and the finale in BWV 188.

When the supposed original was written, and for whom, nobody knows, and a few scholars have doubted whether there ever was a violin version, or even whether the piece began as Bach’s own. It is easy to hear why most people believe in it. Bach had studied Vivaldi’s concertos closely as a young man, and this is his most fiery response to them: a concerto that takes the Italian model of orchestral refrains and solo episodes and fills it with a severity and drive that are all his own. It is also among the most difficult of the violin concertos associated with his name.

What to Listen For

The first movement begins with the whole orchestra and the soloist in bare unison, a stern, angular theme with no harmony at all. That refrain returns throughout in different keys, and between its appearances the violin takes off in long chains of rapid figuration. Listen for the passages where the soloist saws across the strings, one note fixed while the others move against it; in the harpsichord version these sound busy, on the violin they sound wild. Towards the end the orchestra stops and the soloist winds up the tension alone before the unison theme crashes back.

The Adagio is laid out in the same way, on a smaller scale. The strings play a grave unison theme in G minor, and it then goes on repeating in the bass, like a slow tread, while the violin sings a long, richly ornamented lament above it. The movement ends as it began, with the theme alone.

The finale is a fast dance in triple time, tense and springy, with a main theme that leaps and syncopates. The solo episodes grow more and more brilliant, and near the close there is again room for a short cadenza before the orchestra has the last word. The concerto stays in the minor to the end.