Bach, Double Violin Concerto, BWV 1043

It is widely known that during his time in Cöthen, Bach composed a great deal of instrumental music such as the cello suites and the Brandenburg concertos. There is however another period when he produced a number of concertos and chamber music. This period coincided with his appointment as director of Leipzig’s collegium musicum (1729-37, 1739-41) and a lot of his works were performed at the collegium’s concerts, including the newly composed double violin concerto (1730-31).

The art of Bach’s concertos lies in manipulating the composite nature of the ritornello theme[1]. The ritornello is the recurring theme that is played by the whole ensemble and it can be split into parts – the head, the body and the cadence. These fragments of the theme can then be used to suggest and then subvert returns of the tutti section. In addition to this play of expectation, the double concerto has another dimension that is rarely exploited to such an extent by the other concertos – imitation. Imitation is everywhere in Baroque music but here it is taken to the extreme and yet executed with incredible craftsmanship; in one movement it may sound like the two violins being deeply absorbed in each other’s arguments, and in another it may be a totally different scenario with one violin effectively being the shadow of the other. All in all, this is a work that combines the outward declamatory style of the concerto with the virtuosic intellectual thoroughness that Bach was so admired and at the same time, despised for.

November 2012

[1] For a more detailed description of the ritornello the present writer would like to Bach and the Pattern of Inventions by Laurence Dreyfus.