A Beautiful Ghost: J.S. Bach’s Violin Concerto in G Minor, BWV 1056R
The program lists a Violin Concerto in G minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, but this designation comes with a fascinating historical detective story. Unlike Bach’s famous violin concertos in A minor and E major, no complete, original manuscript for a G-minor violin concerto has survived. What we are hearing tonight is a brilliant and beloved reconstruction—a "beautiful ghost" of a lost work, brought back to life through clever musicological scholarship. The story of its rediscovery tells us much about Bach’s practical, resourceful, and relentlessly creative mind.
Our primary source for this concerto is a work that, on the surface, is entirely different: Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in F minor, BWV 1056. In the 1730s and 40s, Bach was the director of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig, a university-based musical society that gave weekly public concerts, often in a local coffee house. To supply the demand for new repertoire, particularly for the up-and-coming harpsichord, Bach frequently turned to his own back catalog. He took concertos he had written years earlier for instruments like the violin or oboe and skillfully rearranged them, transcribing the solo part into virtuosic keyboard writing. This practice, known as "parody" (a term that simply meant adaptation, not mockery), was a common and practical part of a Baroque composer's job.
For centuries, scholars suspected that the F-minor Harpsichord Concerto was one such arrangement. The solo writing, with its singing melodic lines and string-like figures, felt intrinsically vocal and violinistic. By carefully working backward, musicologists were able to "reverse-engineer" the harpsichord part, transcribing it for the violin and transposing the key to the more violin-friendly G minor. The result is the concerto on tonight’s program, a work widely believed to be a faithful recreation of a lost violin concerto from Bach's famously productive period in Cöthen (1717-1723).
The concerto is a compact and deeply satisfying three-movement work. The opening movement, marked with a brisk tempo, is quintessential Bach: a vigorous, rhythmically driving conversation between the soloist and the orchestra. The violin part is brilliant and assertive, full of intricate passagework that weaves in and out of the orchestral texture with perfect contrapuntal logic.
At the heart of the concerto lies one of Bach's most sublime and famous creations: the central Largo. This movement is a stunning arioso—a pure, uninterrupted song for the soloist over a simple, plucked string accompaniment. The melody is one of breathtaking beauty and profound, gentle melancholy. This music was clearly precious to Bach, as he repurposed it again for the opening Sinfonia of his Cantata No. 156, Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe ("I stand with one foot in the grave"). Whether the cantata borrowed from the concerto or vice-versa is unknown, but the association lends this already poignant music an extra layer of spiritual depth.
The concerto concludes with a fleet-footed and energetic Presto. This finale is a whirlwind of perpetual motion, a joyful and virtuosic dance that brings the work to a brilliant and satisfying close. Listening to it, one can almost imagine Bach himself leading the performance from the violin or harpsichord in Zimmerman’s Coffee House in Leipzig, a practical master craftsman sharing his latest, brilliant creation with the world.
