A suite, its Enta-bulation and the Baroque Lute Poetics: Considerations on the Suite in G minor, BWV 995, by Johann Sebastian Bach

Abstract

This paper deals with the contraposition between the Suite in G minor for baroque lute, BWV 995, by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the period manuscript written by an anonymous intabulator, as documented in the so-called Leipzig Manuscript (Becker Collection III. 11. 3). It starts with the idea that there is a disparity between the work conceived by the composer and the instrumental tradition in which it would be executed. Through a comparative procedure of primary sources, this difference will be analyzed in three topics: text alteration for playing purposes (note suppression, octave transposition, rhythmic displacement); ornamentation (lute unisons, substantial addition of ornaments, ornamentation of the subject of the fugue) articulation (technical, textural and phraseological slurs, overlegato, asymmetric articulation). Given the quality of the tablature adaptation, it is a conjecture among musicologists that the author of this intabulations had to be a high-level professional lutenist, at the level such as Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687 - 1750) or Adam Falkenhagen (1697 - 1761), which put this primary source as a qualitative landmark of the performance practice of the late baroque. The reflection undertaken seeks to value the interpretative poetics of the baroque lute tradition, considering its creative particularity of conceiving musical practice. It is argued that primary sources such as this are of great importance to understand more of an instrument tradition, outcome of the social life of such musicians, and that is should have a privileged status in historically oriented approach to performance.