Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014–1019

In the 1958 Neue Bach-Ausgabe edition, the editor and musicologist Rudolf Gerber was unaware that the 1725 manuscript had been largely copied by Bach's nephew, who was only a pupil at the Thomasschule at the time.

[7] The slow movements contain some of Bach's most beautiful and profound essays in serious, sad, or lamenting affects.The first musical description of the sonatas for obbligato harpsichord and violin BWV 1014–1019 appeared in Spitta (1884).

In the majority of slow movements, however, the role of the upper keyboard part is subordinate to that of the violin and—although composed with independent material—serves the function of providing an obbligato accompaniment.

As numerous commentators have pointed out, with its affecting anapaests, the compositional style and impassioned tone resemble those of the obbligato violin solo in the celebrated alto aria "Erbarme dich" from Bach's St Matthew Passion.

There are arpeggiated semiquaver figures in the harpsichord right hand, while the quavers in the left hand—with their French tenue slurs gradually descending in steps—provide a rhythmic pulse gently driving the movement forward, almost like an ostinato bass.

For the remainder of the movement, Bach ingeniously permutes all the musical material at his disposal, with thematic passages from the ritornello interspersed with more elaborately developed variants of previous episodes.

In the Adagio in triple time, the violin plays the cantabile melodic line in dotted rhythms in its lower and middle registers as if an alto solo.

In the concluding four bar coda, the violin and harpsichord play semiquaver figures imitatively as the tonality modulates to G major, leading into the final Allegro.

Eventually a four bar passage of semiquaver scales in the harpsichord part leads to a cadence and then a reprise of the second interlude, before a fourth and final statement of the subject and countersubject.

Symmetrical in structure and written in strict da capo form, its opening 21 bar ritornello is scored as a tutti section for all three parts.

The toccata-like semiquaver theme descending in the violin is matched by a rising quaver countersubject in the upper keyboard, with a rhythmic quasi-continuo in the bass line.

For the remainder of the ritornello the semiquavers pass to the bass, with an arpeggiated version of the motifs for two bars which leads into a short coda and a cadence marking the beginning of the middle section of the movement.

The middle portion of the movement lasts 48 bars and is also symmetrical in structure, made up of two fugal sections and a central episode in which the non-thematic material in the ritornello is heard again.

The subject is then taken up in the upper keyboard, while the violin part plays figures drawn from the continuo line, including characteristic quaver leaps in sixths.

The second complete statement of the theme is in the harpsichord with the canon in the violin, which passes into its "noble" lower register playing an expressive descending sequence of long sustained notes in suspension.

As this episode ends, the entire theme is heard once again but now in the bass line (in a slightly adapted form) with the violin in canon two bars later, resuming its descending sustained notes until the final cadence.

The first version of the sonata also had an Adagio in B minor with a similar function but, as Richard Jones comments, the later replacement is "more elaborate and of greater expressive weight and substance."

Schweitzer and subsequent commentators have pointed out—without drawing any definite conclusions beyond the practise of self-borrowing—that the subject, countersubject and other motifs in the ritornello have strong affinities with the aria for soprano and continuo Phoebus eilt mit schnellen Pferden ("Phoebus speeds with swifty steeds") from the secular Wedding Cantata Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 dating from Bach's period in Weimar.

The new theme has the effect of an interjection —a kind of caesura—temporarily halting the flow of semiquavers, which resumes immediately afterwards with cascading scales over the fugue subject in the bass line.

In his treatise Der Vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739, Mattheson wrote that, ... es müssen hier alle drey Stimmen, jede für sich, eine feine Melodie führen; und doch dabey, soviel möglich, den Dreyklang behaupten, als obes nur zufälliger Weise geschehe: "Here each of the three voices must separately provide a fine melodic line; yet all the while together they must sustain as much as possible the three part harmony, as if by serendipity."

In 1774 Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel commented that even after fifty years his father's compositions of this kind still sounded very good and that the lyricism of several of his adagios had never been surpassed.

The family of Daniel Itzig, banker to Frederick the Great and his father, provided a cultural milieu for musical connoisseurs: four of his daughters, Sara [de], Zippora, Fanny and Bella (maternal grandmother of Felix Mendelssohn), were all keyboard players.

His interests later turned to pedagogy and singing: in Zürich he set up an institute similar to the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin of Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch.

For the edition, Moritz Hauptmann corrected errors in Nägeli's version by going back to original manuscripts; and Lipinski decided upon bowing and other performing details by playing through the sonatas with the organist August Alexander Klengel.

Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, the editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, commented that "die Angabe der Bezeichnungen von einem Manne kommt, der nicht blos volkommener Meister seines Instrumentes, sondern auch vom Geiste Bach'scher Grossartigkeit durchdrungen ist" ("the provision of annotations comes from a man who is not merely a perfect master of his instrument, but also suffused with the sublimity of Bach's spirit").

The Berlin violinist, Ferdinand David, was concertmaster at the Gewandhaus, while Felix Mendelssohn was director; their association dated back to their infancy, as they were born within a year of each other in the same house.

Later Mendelssohn had the arrangement of the Chaconne published in England in 1847; piano accompaniments were subsequently provided for all Bach's solo violin works by Schumann.

"The sonatas BWV 1014–1019 figured prominently in the "English Bach awakening" that took place at the beginning of the 19th century, largely due to the efforts of Samuel Wesley.

Obliged to return to France in 1809 because of the Napoleonic wars, during the period 1809–1813 she proceeded to mount concerts in Paris with the violinist Pierre Baillot and the cellist Jacques-Michel Hurel de Lamare.

Although Momigny enthusiastically wrote of Bach, c'est dans les trente ou quarante premières années du siècle dernier, qu'il offrit au public les fruits pleins de maturité de son génie transcendant,—"it was in the first thirty or forty years of the last century that he gave the public the fully matured fruits of his transcendent genius"—the general revival of interest in the music of Bach, particularly his choral works, was slower in France than in Germany.