Bach’s Lute Suite in G minor

I don’t get a lot of music-related correspondence on LinkedIn, so I was surprised when a stranger wrote me a very nice message there about my deep dive into the Bach Chaconne. He mentioned that he was learning the prelude to the Lute Suite in G Minor, BWV 995, and that he liked Göran Söllscher’s recording of it. He pointed out that the piece shares some DNA with the Chaconne. That made me want to learn it too.

Regardless of what this album cover art might suggest, Göran Söllscher is playing the guitar. If you want to hear the piece played on an actual lute, I recommend Stephen Stubbs‘ recording. Stubbs is using Baroque tuning, which is quite a bit lower than the standard tuning reference pitch we use today.

Here’s Thomas Dunford playing the suite on an archlute. He’s too free with his time for my taste, but it’s cool to see what he’s doing.

I like non-guitar fretted instruments, and over the years I have learned to play the mandolin, mandola, banjo, and ukulele. So I naturally got curious about learning the lute. However, I got discouraged quickly, because there are uncountably many configurations of lute strings tuned in uncountably many different ways. It seems like you would either have to pick one at random and commit to it, or be able to adapt to whatever instrument setup you happen to encounter. So I’ll stick to playing Bach on the guitar for now.

Bach adapted the G minor Lute Suite from the Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, BWV 1011. Here’s Mstislav Rostropovich playing the Prelude.

I assume that Bach moved the key from C minor to G minor for reasons of lute ergonomics, but can’t find any confirmation on that. There have been lots of lute transcriptions of Bach’s solo string instrument music, but the G minor suite is apparently the only one that Bach himself wrote. Here’s a manuscript copy.

Bach did not actually play the lute. Clive Titmuss argues that Bach worked all this out on the keyboard.

Bach made his arrangement of the fifth cello suite (BWV 1011/995) with apparent haste. There is a suggestion that the dedicatee, M. Schouster, identified recently as a book-dealer in Leipzig, may have encouraged Bach to create a saleable version of a piece which he had written about ten years earlier. The first page is neat and properly spaced, with carefully formed note-heads and stems. Looking at the end of the tres viste section of the Prelude and the Bourée, the writing is more typical of a rough copy. He wrote note-names to clarify messy bass notes. Compared to the finished copy of Anna Magdalena’s BWV 1011, BWV 995 seems like a sketch.

If he were serious about writing with the lute in mind and preparing it for subsequent adjustment or intabulation, we would expect his handwriting to reflect it. Just because he has written “pour la Luth” at the top of the page, we need not conclude that he has done it with any conviction. If Bach set out to write real lute music, and not keyboard music with annotation, he might have done better than BWV 995. This version may have been the beginning of that process. As it stands, BWV 995 is a stab at arranging an earlier work for the lute, but it is not lute music.

Harsh! Modern-day lute and guitar performers of the Prelude usually do some adapting of the piece to get it to fall under their hands more elegantly.

The Prelude’s form is a “French overture” with two sections: the slow part in 2/2 and the fast part in 3/8. The slow part is a dramatic melody with stop-and-start rhythms, and people usually play it with a lot of rubato. The fast part is a mostly continuous stream of sixteenth notes. It doesn’t quite have the perpetual motion feel of the prelude from the E major violin partita or the presto from the G minor violin sonata, but it’s close. If, like me, you have limited guitar chops, the good news is that the slow part is not too hard to play. The bad news is that the fast part is quite hard, especially if you want to get all those bass notes in there.

Here’s my analysis of the keys, chords, scales and structure using Ableton Live.

The rhythmic organization of the piece is more clear when you hear it over beats.

In his discussion of the cello version, Mstislav Rostropovich explains how the second part is an implied fugue. You hear three different “voices”, and while they don’t play simultaneously, Rostropovich still hears them implicitly interacting to produce a kind of imaginary counterpoint. I hear that too, and it’s a central fascination of the piece for me. Nobody does a better job of using single-note lines to imply counterpoint than Bach.

(In the rest of the post, I’ll be referring to the lute version in G minor, not the cello version in C minor.)

The Prelude grabbed my ears immediately with its wildly dissonant opening. It starts with G played in octaves, a walk up and down G melodic minor, and then a seriously gnarly F#°7 with G in the bass. There’s nothing remarkable about F#°7 in and of itself; it’s a dominant chord in G minor, what a jazz musician would call a rootless voicing of D7(b9). However, it is remarkable that Bach puts a G pedal underneath. In addition to the tritones within F#°7, there is also a major seventh between G and F-sharp. That is a lot of dissonance! The same thing happens in measure 11, where there’s a C#°7 with D in the bass. There is no way of knowing what Bach “meant” by using all this dissonance, beyond maybe “isn’t dissonance cool”, but it’s ear-grabbing.

The Prelude is full of diminished seventh chords that imply dominant seventh chords with flatted ninths. For example, in measure 14, there’s a D°7 with G in the bass. A jazz musician like me hears this as a G7(b9) chord. The interval between the G on the bottom and the A-flat on top is a minor ninth, which is just about the most dissonant interval that exists in Western tonality. Bach quickly resolves this dissonance, but it’s there, and it is hip! In the “fugue” section, there are several places where the melody leaps up a minor ninth, and then walks back down to outline a dominant-tonic resolution that retroactively makes sense of the leap. Check out measures 166, 170, 184, and 186 for examples. I can imagine Bach cackling gleefully to himself, “Yeah, that’s right, I just jumped up a minor ninth, but don’t worry, it’s all functional tonal harmony.” Learning any Bach pieces means constantly asking myself, is this a typo, am I missing an accidental somewhere, or is it just a weird note? It’s always a weird note.

Another ear-grabbing feature of the piece for me is the smooth and creamy Gm7 chord in measure 22. This is not what Bach would have called it; he would have just thought of it as a G minor triad with an F on top of it. Nevertheless, he must have liked this particular vertical sonority, because he uses it several times in the Chaconne. You can think of Gm7 as being a Bb major triad with G in the root, and your ear can easily detect this intriguing ambiguity.
The “fugue” begins with a simple little theme: a short walkup that spells out a cadence to the relative major key, F7 to Bb. Then there’s a transposed version of the same walkup that spells out a cadence in the relative minor, D7 to Gm. This theme will recur all through the “fugue”, transposed and inverted and otherwise abstracted.

• Measures 36-39: The theme appears transposed up a fifth, as is customary in a fugue (though this is not technically a fugue).
• Measures 48-51: Wistful version of the theme.
• Measures 56-59: Theme with sixteenth-note ornaments that ends with a nifty fakeout; I discuss it below.
• Measure 72: First half of the theme.
• Measures 79-81: Reharmonized version of the theme using two minor-key cadences.
• Measures 102-105: Original version of the theme, but transposed up a fifth. It’s nice to hear something familiar.
• Measures 150-153: Cool harmonized version of the theme.
• Measures 176-179: A more densely harmonized version of the theme, ending on another excellent harmonic fakeout.
• Measures 197-202: There’s an extended version of the theme that leads up to the grand finale of the piece.

Bach loves a good sequence, a short melody that moves through different transpositions and transformations in a clearly audible pattern. There’s a nice sequence in measures 64-72, a series of scale runs that moves around the circle of fifths. Check out an even cooler sequence in measures 117-124. Bach takes a little five-note turn and moves it through a series of cadences in G minor and C minor. I don’t have anything profound to say about these sections; I just think they sound good, and they are super fun to play.

Bach’s music is all about the orderly logic of functional tonal harmony, but within that constricting framework, he finds ways to surprise you. He loves to set up obvious cadences and then not resolve them immediately, or ever.

• In measure 58, the melody walks up D melodic minor through implied G and A7 chords. You expect it to resolve to Dm in measure 59, but instead, it lands on Gm/Bb instead. This is so cool! The C-sharp in A7 steps up to the D in Gm, and the A in A7 steps up to the Bb. The expected Dm doesn’t appear until three measures later.
• In measure 87, the melody spells out an obvious D chord that wants to resolve to Gm, but it doesn’t. instead, it lands on a very surprising F7 with E-flat in the bass. This chord then resolves promptly to Bb, but it’s still pretty wild in the moment.
• In measure 94, there’s a Gm/Bb arpeggio followed by a partial D7/C arpeggio. You would think that it would resolve back to Gm/D in measure 95, but nope, it lands C/E instead. This then resolves to F/A at the beginning of measure 96.
• In measure 179, rather than having D7 resolve to Gm, it resolves to a very spicy Ebmaj7 chord.

The end of the Prelude is loaded with exciting chromaticism. Check out measure 203; in jazz, you would call this chromatic enclosure, preceding some “normal” chord or scale tone with the pitches chromatically above and below it. This is a great way to bring dissonance into a melodic line without throwing the underlying harmony out the window. The biggest harmonic surprise comes in measure 215, as the bassline moves up the chromatic scale: D7/A, Bb, G7/B, Cm, A7/C#, Dm. This is tense! Chromaticism is always attention-grabbing, especially in music of this era. Descending chromaticism isn’t such a big deal in tonal harmony, because as you resolve cadences counterclockwise around the circle of fifths, the voice leading naturally spells out a descending chromatic scale. In the little chord progression I wrote below, there are two descending chromatic scales, one in the green notes, and one in the blue:

However, an ascending chromatic scale is profoundly unnatural in tonal harmony, and it takes some ingenuity to do it while still having your chords function. For another of Bach’s awesome rising chromatic basslines, check out measures 122-124 in Contrapunctus XI from the Art of Fugue.

Anyway, the Prelude ends on a wonderful broken descent through D7 with a whole series of chromatic enclosures, including some very spicy E-flats and C-sharps. This is still within the conventions of tonal harmony, but just barely.

So why did Bach write this, anyway? Most of his music was functional, meant to be sung or played during church services, weddings, funerals and the like. The solo instrument works are outliers because they don’t have any explicit religious purpose. Bach probably wrote the Lute Suite shortly after the Cello Suites while working as the Kapellmeister for Prince Leopold of Cöthen. Rather than having to bang out endless church cantatas as he usually did, Bach got to lead a small and highly skilled court ensemble, write music for Leopold’s soirées, and do some light teaching. It doesn’t seem likely that Bach meant the Cello Suites to be concert repertoire, though maybe they were performed at Leopold’s parties? It seems more likely that they were meant to be pedagogical. We’ll never know why exactly he wrote the Lute Suite, but music education does seem to be a good guess.

And what am I doing trying to play this thing? I will never be good enough at it to want to do it in public, but I get plenty of enjoyment out of stumbling through it alone, and my family enjoys hearing it. Learning this music has the quality of religious devotion for me. To be clear, I do not think Bach is God, or that he had any kind of mystical powers; he was just really good at his job. Bach is a tough music teacher, but it’s a privilege to get to learn from him.