Johann Sebastian Bach

Partita in A minor for solo flute by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1013) is a partita in 4 movements, probably composed around 1718. The title, however, is the work of 20th-century editors. The title in the only surviving 18th-century manuscript is "Solo pour une flûte traversière par J. S. Bach". The movements are marked: Allemande, Corrente, Sarabande and Bourrée angloise.

As is the case with so many of J.S. Bach's chamber works, we know virtually nothing about the circumstances in which the Partita in A minor for unaccompanied flute, BWV 1013 was composed. It was probably written sometime during the early 1720s, during the last few years of Bach's tenure as kapellmeister at Cöthen (a job that gave him ample freedom to explore secular chamber music), and at any rate could not have been composed before leaving Weimar in 1717.

Bach's other works for unaccompanied instruments (other than keyboard and lute) -- the Suites for solo cello, BWV 1007-1012 and the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, BWV 1001-1006 -- were all informed to one degree or another by his own skill as a string instrument performer (this is not to say that he was necessarily accomplished enough to perform them adequately; indeed, evidence indicates that he was not, and perhaps never tried). With the flute Partita, however, Bach was left almost entirely to his own ingenuity, as neither tradition nor personal familiarity could come into much play during the creation of so unlikely a work.

It is a dance-suite proper in which each of the four most common species of the day -- allemande, courante, sarabande, and bourrée -- makes an appearance, and in which the same remarkable blend of actual tones and implied counterpoint that fuels the violin and cello works is found to be the driving force; it is music of uncommon charm and high Baroque grace.

Lengthiest of the Partita's four movements is the opening allemande, whose running sixteenth-notes outline a broad binary design. As with those movements from the solo violin and cello works that are exclusively melodic (meaning only that no multiple-stopping of the strings is called for) -- such as the "Allemanda" from the D minor violin Partita, very similar in plan to this flute allemande -- there are frequent leaps from one register to another as Bach engages to make melodically plain the implied harmonic voices (bass, treble, etc.) around which the music is written. In each half, the approach to the cadence is made via some juicy, chromatically descending miniature arpeggios.
The courante movement (or, to follow Bach's title more exactly, Corrente), following the Allemande as tradition demands, is of the livelier Italian-derived variety, relatively quick-tempoed and in simple triple meter. Also true to tradition are the assymetrical dimensions of the movement's two "halves": twenty-two bars, forty-one bars. Truly striking is the unexpected high D sharp that the flute hollers out near the end of the first half, by leap no less, and then leaves without ever resolving in the same register, forcing us to be content with an E natural an octave lower.

After an aristocratic sarabande of ingenious rhythmic flexibility, Bach concludes the Partita with a Bourrée Anglais -- then in vogue throughout Europe, to judge from the many appearances of this particular subspecies of the bourrée that pop up in the music of Bach, Handel, and others. Probably the most immediately arresting of the four movements (the others are slower to give up their treasures, not less rich), it is built around the bourrée's typical "backwards" short-short-long rhythm, set up in this case as the counterbalance for more florid running sixteenth-note passages and, as we approach the final cadence to A, some remarkably staid chromatic eighth notes.

This piece was written entirely for Solo (Transverse) Flute.