Stuck in the Middle with Bach
On the Brandenburg Concertos
The Brandenburg Concertos began as a job application.
In 1721, after five and a half years serving as Kapellmeister (music director) at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, Johann Sebastian Bach needed a new boss.
To be sure, Leopold’s court had been a blessing. The prince was a Calvinist and his church services shunned elaborate music. The complex Lutheran chorales that Bach had been obliged to write for the last twenty years at his previous appointments in Weimar, Arnstadt, and Mühlhausen weren’t sanctioned here. Bach was freed up (and obliged) to focus on instrumental works. The first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, the cello suites, and the Brandenburg Concertos were all composed during this secular stint. Things were looking up for the thirty-year-old workhorse.
Then one day, in the summer of 1720, Bach walked through the door of his home only to learn that his wife, Maria Barbara, was dead. Bach had been away with the prince in the spa town of Karlsbad leading what was probably the first ever summer arts festival. She was healthy when he left. She was already buried when he returned. A combination of factors led to his seeking a change of scenery. His bereavement was one. The prince’s new marriage to Princess Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg, who had little interest in music (Bach called her an amusa—a dolt), was another. Leopold’s subsequent duty to give more money to the Prussian military, leaving less funding for music, still another. A year later, Bach, resilient and practical as always, remarried to Anna Magdalena Wilcke, a singer. He would eventually, in 1723, move with Anna and his children to Leipzig, where he would take up the crucial position of cantor at St. Thomas Church and compose a different cantata for every Sunday for the rest of the decade—an almost transhuman triumph.
But first, he had to shop around his portfolio.
One of the potential employers Bach tried to woo was Christian Ludwig, margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. The two had met in Berlin in 1719 when Bach played for him, likely on the harpsichord. Impressed, the margrave requested that Bach send him some of his compositions. Bach was lucky that he met a Prussian noble who was still interested in music. In 1713, Friedrich Wilhelm I had become king of Prussia and immediately dismissed all court musicians, favoring the military over the arts. Mercifully, he allowed Christian Ludwig, his uncle, to retain his Kapelle—his band of musicians. It was with these musicians in mind that Bach sent “Six concerts for several instruments” to the margrave, who was also its dedicatee (hence the posthumous monicker “Brandenburg”). He didn’t compose them for the occasion but rustled them up from his time in Köthen and Weimar, where they were probably first performed.
“I desire nothing more than to be employed on occasions more worthy of you and your service,” Bach wrote in his dedication on March 24, 1721. Try putting that in your next cover letter.
The margrave received the concertos, but we don’t know whether he ever rewarded Bach for his work or if his court ever played them. As Bach scholar Malcolm Boyd cautions in his book, Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the manuscripts gathered dust in the margrave’s library, as the usual story goes; the records that said otherwise could just be lost. Either way, Bach didn’t get hired.
If the margrave had cracked open the volume of compositions, he would have been struck, first, by Bach’s unbelievably legible handwriting, and, second, by how the “several instruments” in the title does little justice to how unusually varied the orchestration is. The Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt was in awe over 250 years later when he wrote, in The Musical Dialogue, that the concertos “have less in common with each other than the individual parts of any other collection of instrumental works with which I am acquainted.” “Experimental” isn’t a word the average person would use to describe Bach’s music, but the concertos are indeed experiments in instrumentation, even if Bach’s contemporaries didn’t consider him, and he didn’t think of himself, as avant-garde or an outsider. As with his other radical works, the ear hears beauty before it hears subversion.
Each concerto is written for a different ensemble. The third, in G major, for example, is scored for three violins, three violas, three cellos, and basso continuo (harpsichord accompaniment). Unlike a typical concerto grosso (“big concerto”) of, say, Georg Philipp Telemann, there is no distinction between soloist and backing ensemble. Bach seems to give equal importance to all instruments.
Even more unusually, the sixth concerto, in B-flat major, does away with violins completely and instead pits two violas and cello against two viols (tiny cellos) and one violone (early version of the double bass). Violas were cheap and easy to play, not virtuosic instruments. Viols were more expensive and better equipped for virtuosity. But here, Bach has the violas show off while the viols are left to play repeated eighth notes. Music historian Michael Marissen, in his book Bach Against Modernity, sees this reversal of hierarchy as a social and religious statement along the lines of the Christian doctrine “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” Despite Bach’s respite from writing religious works in the Lutheran tradition, a musical work without a text can still carry a sacred message. That the devout Bach would compose any work that was totally secular is in fact unthinkable.
The most famous concerto might be the fifth, in D major. Known for its demanding harpsichord solos, it can just as well be called a keyboard concerto, in which case it would be the first one ever written. Toward the end of the first movement, for example, the harpsichord is left completely to itself to perform a cadenza—a section right before the end of a concerto movement when the ensemble falls away and the soloist indulges in improvisatory bravado—replete with roving scales, toccata-like jumpiness, and a fantastical, chromatic finish that spans the whole keyboard. The harpsichordist’s fun continues: One third of the second movement is taken up by another keyboard cadenza, this one in the melancholy key of B minor. Bach likely wrote the keyboard part after purchasing a new harpsichord in Berlin, during the same trip he met the margrave. One can imagine Bach wishing to play it for Christian Ludwig and saying, “You liked what I played you in Berlin? Well check this out.”
Bach’s innovation with the instrumentation of the Brandenburg Concertos was unprecedented. But the pieces aren’t well-loved because of their musical radicalism; they’re loved for how good they sound and how good they make us feel. A 2022 study published in the Tohoku Journal of Experimental Science even found that listening to the fourth concerto lowered blood pressure and heart rate in participants (Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major did not). Their buoyancy, joy, and melodic infectiousness make them magnetic both to the casual listener and to the connoisseur. It’s why they are, in Marissen’s words, “today’s holiday-season standbys.”
The best part is that this elation, this aural ecstasy, lasts through every second of every movement. Iconoclastic Bach pianist Glenn Gould once said that when Bach “adopts the instrumental principles of the Italian concerto style, he brings to them a certain stability, a certain Germanness.” This Germanness, manifest in Bach’s mastery of wandering counterpoint—we never quite know which twist or turn the music will take next—is what keeps us engaged at every moment. Bach’s sons, Gould reminds us, were fond of endings. For them, the goal of music, exemplified in the Italian style of a composer like Arcangelo Corelli, is how you get to the end. The Brandenburg Concertos relish the middle.