by Daniel Hathaway
One of the few documented face-to-face encounters with Johann Sebastian Bach produced one of his most intriguing works. The Musical Offering is the subject of the opening concerts of Les Délice’s new season, which will be performed on Thursday, October 1 at 7:30 pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Akron, on Saturday, October 3 at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, and on Sunday, October 4 at 3:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
As artistic director Debra Nagy writes in her program notes, “The story goes like this: On May 7, 1747, J.S. Bach was visiting his son Carl Philipp in Potsdam, where he was invited to an audience with the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. A devoted musical amateur, the King hoped to impress — and perhaps intimidate — the great Bach. To begin, the King showed off his recently-acquired Silbermann fortepianos. He then proposed that Bach improvise a three-voice ricercar on a theme of the King’s own invention.”
Among the issues that were bubbling just below the surface of this meeting, Papa Bach (the “learned musician”) represented an older generation of composers whose more intellectual works were based on counterpoint, while Frederic and Carl Philipp Emanuel had adopted the new “galant” style — lighter in texture, more melody-driven, and better suited to the newly-invented fortepiano.
After hearing the elder Bach’s skill in crafting a 3-voice ricercar on the spot, the King challenged him to improvise a larger piece based on the “royal theme.’ JSB wisely declined to perform such a parlor trick, but two weeks later sent Frederic the score of a six-voice Ricercar. He bundled that with a collection of “puzzle” canons and a trio sonata for flute, violin, and continuo which melded the time-honored format of the church sonata with more up-to-date musical styles.
I sat down with harpsichordist Mark Edwards in his faculty studio at the Oberlin Conservatory to learn more about the upcoming concert.
Daniel Hathaway: That meeting in Potsdam between Papa Bach, his son Karl Philipp, and the King of Prussia spawns a number of topics. How did you put this program together?
Mark Edwards: The program is the brainchild of Debra Nagy, the artistic director of Les Délices. But we had a conversation a couple of years ago about what kinds of things I would really enjoy performing with Les Délices in the future. I said, wouldn’t it be fun to do some quote-unquote, ‘standard rep,’ particularly Bach, since Bach is what I probably enjoy most of all. And Deborah came up with the idea of The Musical Offering.
Have you performed this collection of pieces before?
I’ve done the ricercars and the trio sonata several times, but never the canons.
You’ve got a lot to figure out there, or has that been done for you?
That has happily been done for me. One of the nice side benefits of living now is that we have ready access to what other scholars have come up with as solutions to these things. As you know, the canons were published initially as enigmatic puzzles. Sometimes there is more than one correct or workable solution to a particular canon.
Stylistically, we’ve got a collision here between two generations of Bach. How does that show itself in their music?
Without rehashing too much of the familiar story of the genesis of this piece, Bach represents, at this point in history, everything old, and the court of Frederick the Great represents everything much newer.
When Bach visits his son in Potsdam, he gets confronted with something relatively new in the form of this Silbermann fortepiano, in the court of a king who loves galant music. And what does the king ask him to do, but improvise a fugue or ricercar, not the most up-to-date musical style to be sure, on a theme of his own invention.
And so Bach takes this theme and runs with it in many different ways, both in the form of older styles like the six-voice ricercar with its severe stile antico counterpoint, but also in much more up-to-date styles.
Like the three-part ricercar.
The three-part ricercar certainly, and also I think in the third movement of the trio sonata, which absolutely sounds like something that C.P.E. Bach could have written.
Bach was not immune to the cultural currents around him. I think he knew what was modern and fashionable and he was certainly capable of writing really well in the up-to-date style. It’s just that most of the time he chooses not to.
I wonder what Frederick really thought of the elder Bach?
Interesting question. Of course, we can’t really know, right? I suppose he was genuinely curious to test this famous composer, improviser, and performer in all of his powers. The other possibility is that he thought that Bach’s reputation was overinflated, and that’s why he presented him with a ridiculously difficult task, like improvising a six-voice fugue on an extremely chromatic subject. So I don’t know, although I would expect — based on the kinds of people working in Frederick’s court — that most of Bach’s music probably wouldn’t have been to his taste.
How is this program being organized?
The Musical Offering is not intended to be performed in a fixed sequence or necessarily, as far as we know, to be performed at all. It was published in three individual collections. The first one includes the two ricercars and a canon, a second the trio sonata, and then the third contains all the rest of the canons. And because there are so many questions about instrumentation and the order in which these pieces can be played, there’s not a fixed sequence. I imagine it was interesting and fun for Debra to figure out which pieces to select and what order to play them in. The program also mixes in an oboe sonata by C.P.E. Bach to give some variety, otherwise the whole concert would be based on a single theme.
Exactly. What instrument will you use for the ricercars?
We don’t have a Silbermann fortepiano, although I’d love to get my hands on one someday. So the three-part piece will be played on the harpsichord. Even if we imagine with an enormous amount of generosity that the three-voice ricerar, as published by Bach, represents exactly what he improvised — and I dont believe that for a second — he was much more familiar with the harpsichord than with the fortepiano. I think it’s absolutely conceivable that a piece like that in that style can be played on the harpsichord and sound really good.
It’s kind of an awkward piece for the performer
It is awkward, yes. I remember the very first time that I played it, I was quite surprised at how difficult it was. In some ways, it’s much harder to play than the six-voice ricercar.
Not that the six-part is easy.
The six-voice ricercar is definitely not easy. It’s interesting that for this concert we’re not presenting it as a keyboard piece. Personally, I think that it probably is a keyboard piece. There’s a long history of presenting keyboard pieces in open score, going back to Frescobaldi and before. Bach did the same thing in “The Art of Fugue.” So it works as a keyboard piece, but I think that hearing it with a larger ensemble with different instrumental colors for each of the voices is going to mean that I personally don’t have to deal with the problem of making all six of those voices perfectly intelligible. It will also just make it much more colorful, interesting and transparent for audiences.
And now — the trio sonata.
We know what that’s scored for: continuo and violin and flute. And of course, it’s not an accident that it features the flute. That was a generous nod to Frederick, who as we know was an accomplished traverso player. It’s touching in a way that there’s this trio sonata that Frederick could have played if he wanted to.
It has long passages of trills that just go on and on and segue one into the next, so it’s quite a workout for the flutist. Frederick must have been good. Or at least his subjects would never admit that he wasn’t.
Where did that third movement come from?
I think that the third movement is the most galant part of the whole piece. Textures are always extremely clear and transparent, and a lot of the time the flute and the violin are moving in parallel thirds or parallel sixths. So it has this love duet feeling to it. Of course, Bach being Bach, it’s not quite as simple and straightforward as Italian galant music from the same time period. There’s lots of chromaticism in the piece, but it’s so full of character and little musical figures that paint affect so colorfully. All of the little sobbing side gestures that recur throughout also feel very galant to me.
What would you tell a potential audience member who may feel intimidated by all this talk about canons and ricercars?
Bracketing all of the intellectual fascination with the puzzles of the canons and the deep contrapuntal complexity of the ricercars, everything that Bach writes always speaks to the spirit. Always. I don’t think there’s a single piece that Bach wrote that makes me think, ‘Oh, well, that’s just a horribly dry intellectual exercise.’ I think you’ll hear that the six-voice ricercar, especially — this monumental edifice of grand counterpoint — is deeply moving because of what it does harmonically, and the way the voices interact. When people first listen to this piece, they can choose to latch onto whatever they find most compelling. For some people, that’ll be the big intellectual edifice of the piece. For other people, it will just be listening to some really gorgeous music that moves them deeply.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com September 24, 2026
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