![]() In the six or so years of his professional career, Pergolesi wrote quantities of music for both church and stage, and managed what most composers (including Bach) do not in a life three times as long: real, huge, blockbuster success, in not one but two works, each in a different genre. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi had died at the age of 26 in 1736, about a decade before Bach made his arrangement of the Stabat Mater, which was probably Pergolesi’s last work. For the much older master to have extended himself in the direction of a work by a young Italian, a Catholic at that, and one whose first fame had come with a work whose every impulse ran directly counter to Bach’s aesthetics, morals, and musical training-the famous La Serva Padrona-well, this is odd. The effect is one of heightening the work’s already lively textures sometimes to the point of a kind of cheerful freneticism, like a quadruple continuo gone mad, as in the middle section of the slow movement, or the appealing cross-rhythms of the last.īach’s adaptation of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is one of the more interesting appropriations in musical history, largely by virtue of its sheer unlikelihood. Bach leaves Vivaldi alone as far as structure and material, confining his alterations to a key change (from B minor to A minor) and some redistribution and thickening of the solo parts. The four-harpsichord concerto uses not himself but Vivaldi as a model, namely the Concerto for Four Violins, op. “Produced” is a safer word than “written” in the case of this music, for all but one of the harpsichord concerti are Bach’s adaptations or re-workings of concerti for other instruments. The soloists were Bach and (depending on the number of harpsichordists required) his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emmanuel in the solitary case of the concerto for four harpsichords, the remaining seat may have been filled by Bach’s pupil Johann Ludwig Krebs. Bach’s concerti for various numbers of harpsichords were produced around 1730 for this venue. This group, which could be adapted to the performance of anything secular from chamber music to small-orchestral/choral works, had been founded in 1702 by the redoubtable Telemann, and was a fixture of the lively middle-class musical life in Leipzig, frequently hiring out to city and Court functions, and maintaining a schedule of weekly meetings, open to the public, at Zimmermann’s coffee house. In the spring of 1729 Bach was offered, and took, the directorship of one of Leipzig’s two collegia-semi-professional musical performance societies-thus beginning an association that was to last until 1741. Concerto in A Minor for Four Harpsichords, BWV 1065
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