Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1 gen 1710 anni – 1 gen 1784 anni)

Descrizione:

WF was the eldest of Bach's sons. Lutheran organist and cantor like his father, although less successful in finding a steady job. His church cantatas resemble his father's, but his music otherwise does not. Harpsichord sonata in F occupies different stylistic universe. In the sonata, all three movemetns are binary form, texture is two-part or else makes free use of harmonic figuration;. The biggest difference, however, lies in the interpenetrating dimensions of melodic design and harmonic rhythm.

WF's melodic design is based on the dual principle of short-range contrast and balance. This is far removed from his father's powerful contrapuntally spinning engine. The contrast comes in the continual appearance of new motives with surface variety and decorative dazzle set against a deliberate and structurally symmetrical tonal plan.

While some pieces rush headlong from one harmonic area to another, this one takes its time to smell the daiseis (and, given the unpredictably varied motives, there are a lot of flowers to smell). This is all part of what it meant to be galant, with its connotations of lightweight, courtly, and "Frenchy." A stroll around the flower garden, then, reveals a very meticulous layout... Harmonic and melodic symmetries hold ture at every level: 16 = 8 + 8 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 and so on, making for periodic phrasing.

Balance and symmetry are key to this movement. The second half, a complementary sixteen measures, beginning in the dominant but then becoming unstable harmonically, leads to the far-out point and then back to the dominant before restoring the stable opening tonality and reprising the opening melodic material. This is the double return that we just encountered in Scarlatti's Sonata in F Minor, composed around the same time. In the music of WFB and his contemporaries, the double return--the large-scale melodic return simultaneous with the harmonic one--became standard.

The distinctive features of WF's style--its melodic extravagance, its reliance on the contrast and balance of short ideas, its frequent cadences, its self-dramatizing form, its linking of melodic and harmonic events, even its characteristic melodic and harmonic rhythms--were antithetical to his father's style and to HAndel's as well. The music of JSB was nothing if not musicaly unified. In each movement, there was usually one main musical idea that projected a single dominant affect or feeling state. A piece might be considered sad or joyous, angry or relaxed, but whatever "affection" it conveyed tended to be consistent. The surface of WF's sonata presents not a unified but a highly nuanced, variegated, even fragmented exterior. In contrast to the inexorable consistency of JS's "spinning-out," the only predictable aspect of WF's melodic unfolding is its unpredictability. In place of a single affect, there is consciousness of subjective caprice, of impressionability, of quick, spontaneous responsiveness or changeability of mood--in a word, of "sensibility," as the term was used by 18th century writers, such as Jane Austen.

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