Completion of Bach’s O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid
J.S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein [Little Organ Book] is a compendium of organ chorale preludes organized by liturgical calendar. The 46 pieces in the collection were written largely during Bach’s time as the organist at the Ducal court in Weimar (1708-1717). One unique aspect of the manuscript is that Bach labelled all the pages of the book with chorale titles in advance, before writing the preludes themselves. As evidenced by the many blank pages, Bach seems to have envisioned a set of 164 preludes, filling out the entirety of the book, but in the end only a third of that number were written.
On one page however, corresponding to the passion chorale O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid, Bach included a tantalizing one-and-a-half measure incipit:
The completion attempted here uses this incipit, in combination with Bach’s other extant preludes as models. The setting is predicated on several principles that seem to be operative in the Orgelbüchlein:
1. Each prelude is modest in scope, length and material. Bach seems to have been particularly concerned to keep each setting to a singe page, despite the fact that his manuscript book is exceedingly small (ca. 8”x7”). He goes to great lengths to accomplish this: writing notes names for the pedal part to avoid an extra staff; resorting to a compact tablature notation; or using “paste-ins” and facing pages to insert extra measures. (Besides the pragmatic performance considerations, the single-page limit may stem from Bach not wanting to intrude on subsequent pages, since they were already “reserved” for other preludes.)
2. Most of chorale preludes of the Orgelbüchlein fall fairly distinctly into three basic types:
a) preludes using contrapuntal artifice (canons of various sorts) in which the chorale tune is heard quite plainly;
b) preludes in which the chorale melody is floridly embellished, typically at a slow tempo; and
c) “pattern” preludes, such as described in 3. below, in which a consistent rhythmic-motivic texture is maintained from beginning to end, again with the chorale appearing fairly plainly in one voice.
3. The preludes use extreme economy in their motivic material. In most cases, each piece uses one or two distinct musical ideas, either derived from the chorale melody or inspired by its textual meaning. And each of those ideas is used in a consistent, well-defined textural/metric/rhythmic pattern or design. Thus, in many cases, the basic “blueprint” of a prelude is revealed within its first few phrases. This is most clearly exemplified in the chorale Alle Menschen müssen sterben.
Here, the basic musical strictures might be summarized:
a) the chorale appears as quarter notes in the upper manual
b) the second manual and pedals consist almost entirely of a single motive, divided rhythmically into two segments: three off-the-beat 16ths (x) presented in a lower neighbor-note figuration, followed by two leaping eighth-notes (y)
c) the alto and tenor move in tandem in sixths or thirds
d) the alto/tenor and the pedals alternate (interlock) x+y motives
e) cadences occasion a relaxation of the above strictures
also:
x almost always moves to y by downward leap
x may occasionally follow another x
y may move to a subsequent x after a tie
Maintaining the principles above, here is a hypothetical setting of a different chorale, Mach’s mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt.
Using this method, it’s possible to “re-construct” a setting using musical material and principles extracted from a single phrase, as is given in the incipit forO Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid.
4. The incipit for O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid seems to suggest a hybrid of 2b) and 2c) types (above).
The chorale melody is embellished: several written ornaments confirm this, as does Bach’s indicated slow tempo “Molto adagio.” There are only three other preludes that specify tempo: all of them are slow; all of them ornament the chorale melody; and two of the three are settings of “lament” texts for the Easter Season. (And, in fact, two also feature the exclamative “O” in their titles!)
The motives presented in Bach’s incipit are derived from the chorale tune, in particular from the descending f-minor triad of its first three notes. The sixteenth-note motive in the alto and the eighth-note motive in the tenor/pedal are also both chordal and, in combination with the chorale tune, present an f-minor triad in three different rotations and at three different speeds. The repeated notes of the tenor voice are derived from the chorale’s second phrase.
5. Two characteristics of O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid make its completion particularly challenging.
a) The leaping quality of the motives makes accommodating the harmonic changes difficult (stepwise motion is more flexible with regard to dissonance treatment) and;
b) the many long and repeated notes of the chorale tune pose constraints on embellishment
An Interesting Measure in the Goldbergs
- On May 12, 2015
- By alzand@rice.edu
- In Musical Miscellanea
0
In Bach’s Goldberg Variations there’s a brief passage in variation 13 that presents some curious counterpoint. At the start of that variation’s second half (m. 17) there is what appears to be a parallel octave between the bass and the upper voice. It’s the result of an appoggiatura in the soprano—a decoration which is one of the characteristic melodic motives of the variation. Bach embellishes a repeated B (the last sixteenth of the second beat and the first sixteenth of the third beat) with an appoggiatura C. At this same moment, the bass also moves from B to C. 
It doesn’t look like much on the page, but the parallelism is pretty striking and obvious in performance—nothing else is going on at that moment. I’m not sure if this measure makes it into Brahms’s Oktaven und Quinten catalogue, but it’s definitely a good candidate. It’s also an interesting example of a melodic practice Leopold Mozart rails against in Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule. The B on the third beat is already a non-chord tone: it’s an accented upper neighbor, which resolves to the A that follows (a sixth over C in the bass). So Bach’s decorative melodic C is essentially embellishing an embellishment—decorating a non-chord-tone with a chord tone…!? Leopold Mozart tells us “this can surely never sound natural but only exaggerated and confused.”
But I think this interesting contrapuntal detail reveals even more. It makes an argument for performance practice here: that this appoggiatura (and presumably all the others in this variation) must correctly be played “short.” That is, rather than being coupled to the following B to form a thirty-second-note pair, the C should be played swiftly and clipped. These two possible realizations exemplify the distinction between the long appoggiatura, which “takes its value” from the note it precedes, and the short appoggiatura, which “has no value.” The former are played on the beat, the latter before the beat. Understanding and performing this appoggiatura as short, and thus occurring before the beat, means there is no parallel here after all!
In my limited survey of Goldberg recordings, performances of variation 13—as one might expect—usually break neatly into “period performance specialists” who play the appoggiatura short (Pinnock, Leonhardt, Staier), and pianists who play it long (Gould, Sokolov, Schiff). But not always: Perahia gets it right (perhaps not surprising, given his noted musical intellect) and so does Kempff, but Landowska doesn’t.
