Last night, the violinist in a chamber music trio I coach was a no-show at rehearsal. The cellist, pianist, and I gamely worked on their assigned music for most of the time with me sometimes singing the violin part (eek!) or playing it up high on the piano. But there was a point when I thought it might be fun to try something different. I asked each student what solo music they were working on. The cellist (about 12 or 13, I think) said she was learning the [very famous] Prelude from Bach's first cello suite. This reminded me that last year, in a very similar situation, I'd mentioned to a very young Bach-playing cellist that Robert Schumann had written piano accompaniments for all the Bach suites. So, on the spur of the moment then, I pulled up the music from IMSLP and we played a little of it together, but she was only ready to play about 10-12 bars.
Last night, the cellist and I played through the whole thing - and I found it thoroughly delightful, with a few particular surprises along the way. Of course, it does go against the basic idea of this music which is that the cello can create a fully satisfying texture all alone. Or....well, I'd say it's not always fully satisfying as a texture, but the tension of working towards that goal is part of the satisfaction of this music. I'd say this is even more true for the six big unaccompanied works for solo violin by Bach where the music often feels like it's not so far from a breaking point.
Anyway, the point is not that Bach's music needs an accompaniment. The point is that the brilliant and endlessly creative Robert Schumann created something new by turning this into a more full-textured duet, with many harmonies implied by Bach...and some not so much. To be honest, Schumann could easily have gone much, much further, so within the context of his era, his companion piece is quite respectful and tasteful. And it's important to note that these cello suites were not well-known or often performed at the time, at least not as concert music, so Schumann likely thought of this as a way to make these work better in performance, and it also seems he simply enjoyed this way of interacting with Bach's music. [There's some nice background here from the cellist Stephen Isserlis.] Interacting with music by arranging, distorting, and otherwise creating alongside it IS the defining feature of this blog.
Although I have two fine family cellists, I knew my best chance to get to a nice piano/recording space was early on Saturday mornings while alone. So, this morning, I slipped into a recital hall, put on some nice Bose headphones hooked up to my phone playing Yo-Yo Ma's 1983 recording, fiddled around with balance (not a good time for noise reduction since I needed to hear myself), set the audio recorder running, and spent about forty minutes simply playing over and over through the prelude. I found it to be incredibly satisfying. I never even stopped to mark places where Ma took time - too lazy! - I just tried my best to anticipate, but I would have been happy playing for hours or more if I'd time. There's something really joyful about the way this piano part unfolds, although it's quite modest in many ways.
There are three standout moments, each with their own peculiarity. The first and most notable is Schumann's very unusual approach to the half cadence at 1:12. Although this method creates a nice stepwise descent in the bass, the diminished seventh chord leading to a second inversion dominant (D Major with A in the bass) is quite strange and doesn't really fit the logic of the cello part. But it grew on me - in part because it's so strange. Then, at around 1:35, we get a nice little circle progression (a sequence of harmonies with roots ascending by fourths) in the piano - just...because! [One of my favorite passages I've ever played is from the 7th movement of Kreisleriana {24:10 here} where Schumann whips through a dizzying series of roots ascending by 4ths, but one finds this often in his music, so it's maybe not surprising that he slipped it in here.]
Finally, the harmony at 2:12, three bars from the end, is just exhilarating to play. It's just a ii7 chord over a V pedal and could even be inferred from what Bach wrote, but somehow it really ramps up the excitement leading to the final cadence. In general, the other thing I enjoy about this piano part is how it takes turn with the cello, sometimes coming to the fore and treating the cello part like accompaniment and other times sitting in the background. And as much as the sound of a solo cello reverberating alone can be wonderful, Schumann's support takes all the stress out of the sonority. I understand that many will say that's a negative, but as a change of pace, I find it really gratifying.
I'm not interested in making any sort of defense of the arrangement (other than to enthuse about it), even though I understand it goes against a lot of purist or even just traditional aesthetic perspectives. Most importantly, there is absolutely no shortage of recordings and performances of the original version, so this does nothing to tarnish the original. This simply stands to the side as a new creation. In this way, it is similar to Gounod's inspired melodic addition to another piece by Bach. It is also related to Grieg's accompaniments to Mozart's piano sonatas, about which I've raved many times. All that said, I'm not intending to continue this experiment with ALL the other movements from Bach's six suites - OR with Schumann's accompaniments to all of Bach's solo violin works.
Mostly, I wanted to document how enjoyable it was to play this (alongside a rather talented cellist) and to harness a little technology to make the recording. That said, although I have more than a dozen complete takes, I decided not to worry about editing together some "perfect" combination of my takes. I just chose one, paired it with Ma's recording, and here you have it.
I should have mentioned that there is at least one existing recording of all of Schumann's Bach accompaniments, But this and the YouTube performances I've found foreground the cello part too much. I intentionally allowed the piano part to be a fully equal partner in my mix. And, if you'd like to hear just the piano part alone (not sure why), here is the take I ended up using. Oh, and here are MANY more reimaginings of Bach's music.
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