J.S. Bach - Three-Part Invention No. 5 in E-flat major BWV 791

J.S. Bach - Three-Part Invention No. 5 in E-flat major BWV 791 (string trio transcription) Violin - Alex Fortes Viola - Kaya Katarzyna Bryla - Weiss Cello: Thapelo Masita “During the years of his early adulthood, Bach devoted much attention to the education of his growing brood, an entire tribe of Bachian off- spring who were inevitably trained in the musical art that had provided the principal livelihood of the family for at least five generations. Bach made the household curriculum for Wilhelm Friedemann, the eldest son, born in Weimar in 1710, the model for his other children, rigorously drilling the youngster in theory, composition and performance. On January 22, 1720, while he was music director at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach began a little music notebook for keyboard instruction, a Clavier- Büchlein, to collect his lesson materials for the nine-year-old Friedemann, the age at which Bach himself had begun formal studies. First he put in a table of the eight clefs used at that time for notating the various voice and instrumental parts, and then an explanation of the most common ornaments found in keyboard pieces and some finger exercises. There follow several short numbers (not all by Bach), some of Friedemann’s attempts at copying scores (four of the Preludes that Bach was then working on for The Well - Tempered Clavier were left incomplete when the boy’s large, unpracticed hand caused him to run out of room on a page) and 15 works in strict two-part style titled Praeambula. Following a few little dance numbers by Telemann and Stoelzel, Bach created 15 three-part sequels to the Praeambula that he called Fantasie. In 1723, shortly before taking up his new duties as Cantor for Leipzig’s churches, Bach extracted the Praeambula and Fantasie from Friedemann’s Clavier-Büchlein, revised them according to the efficacy they had shown as pedagogical items, and inscribed them into a new manuscript under the titles Inventio and Sinfonia—they are commonly known today as the Two- and Three-Part Inventions. Sinfonia was then a generic term for a short, instrumental composition, but Invention was unusual. Bach seems to have borrowed it from a set of Invenzioni for Violin and Keyboard published in 1712 by the Italian priest and composer Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1672–1748), which Bach had copied out for his own study. (Four of them were mistakenly included in the first collected edition of Bach’s works.) The general concept of musical “invention” dates to the Italian Renaissance, when it indicated the creation of a new piece through the processes of composition. Bach indicated the intent of the Inventions and Sinfonias in a preface to the 1723 manuscript: “Straightforward instruction, whereby lovers of the keyboard, and especially those eager to learn, are shown a clear method, not only (1) of learning to play cleanly in two parts, but also, after further progress, (2) of managing three obbligato parts correctly and satisfacto- rily; and in addition not only of arriving at good original ideas [Inventiones] but also of developing them satisfactorily; and most of all of acquiring a cantabile style of playing while at the same time receiving a strong foretaste of composition.” The intensive training in the joined disciplines of keyboard technique, performance style and composition provided by Bach’s teaching methods had its desired effect on Friedemann, who was appointed organist at the Sophiekirche in Dresden in 1733 and 13 years later became music director of the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle. In his authoritative 1966 study of Bach, the eminent Austrian-American musicologist Karl Geiringer wrote of the Inventions, “Using all the devices of the contrapuntal vocabulary, he evolved characteristic compositions out of a single idea stated at the beginning. No other composer had hitherto imbued clavier works of such small dimensions with a content of such significance. These are studies in independent part writing using all the devices of fugue, canon and double counterpoint, but without strict adherence to any of them. Bach freely blends all known techniques, and creates forms which are held together by the logic, and the iron consistency, of his musical thoughts.” Sinfonia No. 5 (E-flat major) is in the nature of a duet in close harmonies balanced upon a persistently repeated figure in the bass.” Dr. Richard E. Rodda Video courtesy of Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York, NY