Vol. 3: This is not a Legend

Arthur pulls the sword from the stone.
(An Island Story; A Child's History of England, 1906)

We all like a good origin story. When there’s some kind of cultural object that we cherish, who wants the origin to have been something ordinary?

Do we want the hero to just have a sword, or should they seize it from a magical stone in front of an astonished audience?

Do we want to hear that something was a natural product of its time and passed down through rational processes, or would it be juicier if it was a work of unparalleled divine genius that nearly disappeared forever?

But maybe there’s something more marvellous about a quotidian origin story.

Bach’s handwritten title page

In 1720, J.S. Bach wrote Sei Solo, a collection of three sonatas and three partitas for unaccompanied violin. The title can be translated as “Six Solos,” but a grammatical ambiguity in Bach’s Italian means it could also be read more poetically, as “You are alone.”

Today Sei Solo is among the most famous of all violin works, and an oft-cited symbol of Bach’s achievement. Generations of aspiring violinists have grappled to climb the steep walls of its technical and musical demands; seasoned professionals return to Sei Solo as a lifelong meditation on the mysterious arts of violin playing.

Maybe such a scenario makes legend-building inevitable. Countless scholars and listeners have poked and prodded Sei Solo to tease out religious, numerological, or other secret coded messages. Perhaps, some say, the monumental Ciaccona was Bach’s outpouring of emotion after the unexpected death of his wife. We, of course, will never really know.

Some of the most persistent rumours revolve around what people did with Sei Solo once it was out in the world. Concert life in the 18th century wasn’t what it is now. Public concerts were less common, and the ephemeral nature of concert programs or diary entries hasn’t helped either.

Today I want to address two rumours which are both persistent and inaccurate. I am not the scholar that uncovered these inaccuracies, but they intersect with my research and I want to do my small part to highlight the history of Sei Solo as not a mythical object, but a practical, beloved piece of music which passed on through generations of hardworking musicians and scribes.

Rumour #1: Sei Solo was very nearly lost to history; the autograph manuscript was only found in 1814, rescued from a stack of papers for wrapping butter in a shop in St. Petersburg.

This rumour undoubtedly continues to get spread (all pun intended) because it’s in Paul Affelder’s preface to the 1971 International Edition of Sei Solo edited by Ivan Galamian; this is one of just two or three editions that are most widely used in conservatory or university training, and it’s still in print with this story intact.

Unfortunately, the story was already known to be false decades before 1971. The “butter shop” manuscript does exist but it’s not in Bach’s hand. The real autograph manuscript was already in the (now) Berlin Staatsbibliothek collection by 1917. I doubt Affelder meant to mislead, but he clearly fell prey to a rumour himself. I’ve found (less rigorous) scholarly sources as recent as 2016 that present this “narrow-miss” story as factual.

The actual lesson from the “butter shop” manuscript is that there were boatloads of hand-made copies of Sei Solo from the 18th and early 19th centuries. We know of over 20 surviving manuscript copies from the period, artfully catalogued at Bach Digital; from some of these copies, publishers also made the first printed copies in 1798 (Cartier’s L’art du Violon) and 1802 (Simrock). If that many manuscripts survived to the present day, it is only fair to presume that many more have been made and lost in the intervening centuries.

Rumour #2: Sei Solo was neglected during the 18th century, and was “rediscovered” in the 1840s by Ferdinand David and Mendelssohn, who have it its first public performance in a version accompanied by piano. In turn, it wasn’t until the 1890s that David’s student Joseph Joachim finally dared to play the pieces in public without piano accompaniment.

I can’t speak for David and Mendelssohn; I imagine they must have been enthusiastic, as so many have been, to discover this music for themselves. They undoubtedly played a role in popularizing the works to a much wider audience, especially through Joachim, but they were hardly the first to play the works publicly.

Scholars as far back as 1920 have indicated credible evidence of early Sei Solo performances, and recent scholars have done an increasingly thorough job of mentioning these early performances. However, the “David discovery” rumour remains persistent in some recent sources, including those which are more readily available to the English-speaking public than in-depth scholarly works.

As Sei Solo lacks a dedication, the first performances on violin are speculated to have been given by Bach himself, Johann Georg Pisendel, Franz Benda, or Joseph Spiess, Bach’s concertmaster in Cöthen (Ledbetter 2009, 17–18).

The first unambiguous records of Sei Solo’s performance relate to a student of Franz Benda: Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815), who encountered Sei Solo through Benda and/or Bach’s son, C.P.E. Bach (Unverricht 2001). J.F. Reichardt, in turn, wrote that Salomon had introduced him to Sei Solo in 1774 (in Unverricht 1980, 177). Salomon may have performed the works in Paris in 1780/81, before arriving in London in 1781, where he would reside for the rest of his life (Unverricht 1980, 179; Unverricht 2001). In 1810 and 1811 he performed selections from Sei Solo for public concerts the acclaimed violinist George Bridgetower is also noted to have performed the Chaconne from BWV 1004 and the C-major Fugue BWV 1005 at a concert in London in 1814 (Olleson 2004, 300-305).

There is much more historical data to unpack here, but I’ll leave the more detailed work to my dissertation!

Given the above evidence, it is not only possible but likely that that Sei Solo never really stopped being performed between Bach’s lifetime and the present day. In short, it’s not a legend; there is no moment where it nearly fell into oblivion, and no moment where it was exhumed from a forgotten tomb like some Egyptian mummy shimmering in gold.

While Sei Solo is timeless, glorious, and inspiring music, I’m also increasingly inspired by the lineage of performance: generation after generation of violinist spending hours alone with their fiddle exploring the endless possibilities between the page and their imagination. How many have now made copies, learned it, relearned it, taught it, applied the aesthetics of their time to it and then stripped them away, rearranged it for other instruments, remixed it, wrote about it, and more? What a joy to be continuing this work today!

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Quick Biblio:

Ledbetter, David. 2009. Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Olleson, Philip. 2004. “Samuel Wesley and the English Bach Awakening.” In The English Bach Awakening: Knowledge of J.S. Bach and his Music in England, 1750 – 1830, edited by Michael Kassler, 251–313. London: Routledge.  

Unverricht, Hubert. 2001. “Salomon, Johann Peter.” Grove Music Online.

———. 1980.  “Spieltraditionen von Joh. Seb. Bachs unbegleiteten Sonaten und Partiten fur Violine allein.” In Johann Sebastian Bach und seine Ausstrahlung auf die nachfolgenden Jahrhunderte: 55. Bachfest der Neuen Bachgesellschaft in Mainz, 22. bis 27. Oktober 1980; künstlerische Leitung: Diethard Hellmann, 176–184. Mainz: Neue Bachgesellschaft.

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My time as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with additional research funding from the Mitacs Globalink Research Award. The upcoming European component of my research is supported by the American Bach Society's William H. Scheide Research Grant.