Rameau, the leading French composer of keyboard music and opera during the late Baroque period, published his keyboard music in three books over a period of twenty-four years. Even more than the keyboard music of his great, almost exact German contemporaries Bach and Handel, Rameau’s suffered long neglect. It wasn’t until 1895 that the first modern edition was published and only later still that the public got a chance to hear the suites when the French pianist Marcelle Meyer (1897-1958) began performing and recording them. Rameau’s keyboard music is now almost as safe to play on the piano as Bach’s. Indeed, Rameau’s English biographer Cuthbert Girdlestone has made a convincing case for Rameau played on modern instruments–arguing that the composer’s penchant for sustaining effects are an important aspect of his originality and even venturing to say that many of Rameau’s keyboard works actually sound better on a modern piano.

The Suite in A Minor opens with an Allemande, a serious and carefully wrought piece of counterpoint, which sets and sustains a tone of noble grandeur. The Courante is filled not only with rich counterpoint but also with almost modern-sounding chromatic passages, compelling and complex rhythms. The Sarabande, ravishing as well as solemn, is as richly ornamented as the opening movement and filled with swirling arpeggios that continually heighten the tension. The title Les Trois Mains (The Three Hands) suggests a level of complexity that seems to require more than ten fingers. Next come two contrasting character pieces. The first, Fanfarinette, is carefree and flirtatious; the music of the second, La triomphante, is as triumphant as its title declares. The Gavotte, a theme and six variations (or “doubles”) of increasing difficulty, builds to a tremendous conclusion. 

The fifth in G Major has always been the most popular of the six French Suites. Even back in the days when a Bach work without a hyphenated “arranged by” name was still a rarity on recital programs, it was still a fairly frequent visitor to concert halls. Rudolf Serkin, Emil Gilels, Wilhelm Backhaus, Myra Hess, Robert Casadesus, and Wilhelm Kempff were among the great pianists of the past who kept the G Major Suite as a staple in their repertoires. Part of the reason for its popularity is that it contains more singing melodies than the other five. Even in the dense opening Allemande, melody is supreme; at one point, the left-hand bass pattern even begins to resemble those in Haydn and Mozart. After a Courante so Italianate that it might be called a Corrente, comes a Sarabande that—with its ornamented melody kept well above the accompaniment—could have been called an aria. The subsequent Gavotte is one of the most danceable of all forty-one movements in the six French Suites. The following Bourree is uncharacteristically smooth—probably because of Bach’s determination to keep the music melodic. After the Loure—the only appearance of this elegant French dance movement, with its curious halting rhythm, in the entire Bach oeuvre—comes the concluding Gigue.

It is this Gigue that is probably the other reason for the G Major Suite’s continuing popularity. It is a full-blown fugal movement with a long subject. When the second voice enters, the first features a repeated note figure that keeps the piece rhythmically alert and makes listeners feel like getting-up and dancing. Hewitt has described it as “sounding slightly like a cross between Vivaldi and a country fiddling jamboree.”

Like J.S. Bach, the French harpsichordist and composer Francois Couperin, Le Grand, was the most famous representative of a family dynasty of musicians. He continues to be celebrated and performed because he created miniatures for his instrument which in their grace, poetry, color, and deep expressiveness are as much masterpieces as the painted miniatures of Couperin’s great contemporary Antoine Watteau. Wanda Landowska called Couperin—with a good deal of truth—the Chopin of the eighteenth century. Contrary to music of the German and Italian baroque, French harpsichordists represented the so-called “gallant style” of the rococo period and tended to favor programmatic and descriptive music. Their work featured portrait pieces, genre and theater scenes, and imitations of the sounds of nature. Their two most important heirs, Debussy and Ravel, continued these aesthetic traditions in the twentieth-century.

Bach’s belief in the importance of counterpoint approached the strength of religious conviction: it was what governed the connection and alteration of consonance and dissonance; and it was what made harmony possible. His preoccupation with counterpoint makes it scarcely a surprise that his final work would be a systematic study of fugal composition. Unlike his Well-Tempered Clavier, Die Kunst die Fugue (“Art of Fugue”) would be without preludes–something neither he nor anyone else had ever done before. The WTC’s double cycle of preludes and fugues in each of the twelve major and minor keys consists of tonal miniatures whose primary relationships are procedural. By contrast, each fugue of Art of Fugue shares not only the same key but also the same subject in D Minor. The sheer musical ingenuity is mind-boggling. Bach makes it interesting–indeed, fascinating–to listen to approximately twenty consecutive works in the same key and on the same theme (and many of them, too, in the same rhythm).

Art of Fugue is composed of fourteen fugues–Bach uses the Latin term contrapunctus (or “counterpoint”) instead of “fugue”–and four canons. Though the order of the fugues and the placement of the canons are a matter of endless debate, it is clear that Bach intended a progression from the simplest to most complex counterpoint. He ups the ante with each successive fugue, treating his somber elastic theme to a whole catalogue of contrapuntal appropriations – inversion, stretto, diminution, augmentation, mirroring, doubling, and so on. The fourteen fugues consist of (1) four simple fugues; (2) three stretto fugues; (3) two double and two triple fugues; (4) two sets of “mirror” fugues; (5) and, last, an unfinished quadruple fugue which was to feature the combination of the first three themes with Art of Fugue’s main theme, all of them working simultaneously. Bach became blind as he finished the third part of the fugue based on the letters of his own name–B-flat, A, C, B natural–that is, in German notation “BACH.” The manuscript breaks off just as the composer had, in effect, put his signature to the work that was the summation of
his art.

Hewitt plays the first four fugues, but even these adumbrate the giant arc that is to be bent by Bach’s ingenious mastery. The first fugue introduces Bach’s fundamental fugue subject in its simplest form, worked-out here without countersubject. The second fugue introduces a countersubject to the first in notes inégales (or “unequal notes”)–in which notes of equal duration on the page are actually lengthened or shortened by the player, often approximating dotted rhythms. The third and fourth fugues use the inverted form of the subject–with a highly chromatic treatment that darkens the sound in III and a rapid-fire stream of notes that creates brilliant sunshine in IV.

It was certainly not Bach who gave the six Suites with the BWV numbers 812-17 the title “French.” Nor is this descriptive term clearly justified by the structure of each of these six collections of dances, but there is a noticeable contrast to the so-called “English” Suites (BWV 806-11): an Allemande begins each of the French Suites yet is preceded by a Prelude in all the English Suites. These Preludes–extensive and virtuosic–create a sense of irresistible excitement. This is surely the case in the massive 164 bars of the Suite in A Minor’s Prelude, which moves with a powerful sense of forward motion. The contrast of its élan, of its sheer motor energy, to most of the other movements–the restrained, flowing Allemande, for example, or the courtly Sarabande, with its subtleties of nuance and meaning–is one of Bach’s strokes of dramaturgical genius. In order to balance the opening Prelude’s massive opening, Bach directs that the concluding Gigue should be heard yet again after it has been played with all its normal repeats. In simple two-part texture, it eschews contrapuntal ingenuity and complexity for the sheer physical relish of its lively rhythm and energy.