by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Today at 12 Noon, Piano Cleveland Live presents Cleveland International Piano Competition medalist Jiayan Sun & Friends in the Ames Family Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and on the Tuesday Organ Plus Series, organist Walker Whitehouse plays music by Herbert Howells, J.S. Bach & César Franck at the Church of the Covenant, University Circle.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
On this date in 1721, J.S. Bach dedicated his Six Concerts à plusieurs instruments to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. That set of concerti grossi has since become known as the Brandenburg Concertos, hailed as some of the greatest works of the Baroque era.
Bach had impressed the music-loving Christian Ludwig with a performance in 1719, who then commissioned several works. But when the margrave received the Brandenburgs in 1721, he was looking at music that had not all been composed in the prior two years — some of these concertos may have dated as far back as a decade or more, selected and revised for the occasion.
Did the margrave know this? We can’t be sure. But we do know that the compensation was not lucrative: Bach went unpaid.
Royal dedications from centuries gone by can be hilarious, obsequious to the max. In this case, it’s fun to imagine that Bach may have been compensating for delivering leftovers, even really good ones. Either way, here’s the first sentence alone from the composer’s March 24 dedication, translated from the French:
As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness’s commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness’s most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigour of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.
You can watch Apollo’s Fire in a live performance of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Mvt. 1 at Tanglewood Music Festival in 2015 here, with Jeannette Sorrell at the harpsichord, violinist Olivier Brault, and traverso flutist Kathie Stewart.
Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra has collected all the Brandenburgs — plus Bach’s harpsichord and violin concertos — in an album from 2010.
