Bach: Concerto for Two Violins
What makes a piece of music great? Musicians, theorists, and philosophers from Plato (in The Republic) to Barry Manilow (In “I Write the Songs”) have offered their ideas on the subject, but we have yet to arrive at an answer.
Or, more to the point, we have yet to agree on an answer. Is it, as Plato proposed, the music’s value as an agent of moral uplift? Is it a piece’s originality of conception? Is it a piece’s power of its listeners’ emotions? Is it a product of something a little more nebulous, like the music’s seemingly inherent, organic unity? Or is it ultimately undefinable – something we simply know when we see it, to paraphrase Potter Stewart’s definition of another subject entirely? Whatever the definition and whatever the standard, though, it’s almost impossible not to apply the term to the finest work of J. S. Bach.
And this concerto is surely among his finest work. Written around 1730, it would have received its first performance in – remarkably – a coffee house. Bach was at that time Music Director in the prosperous German city of Leipzig, and while the duties of his post would have stunned a lesser person (among other things, he was responsible for creating and seeing to the performance of a new cantata each Sunday at the city’s main church), he managed to find time to lead the city’s Collegium Musicum as well. The Collegium Musicum was a group of proficient instrumentalists who gathered to perform secular music on a more or less weekly basis. In 1730 public concert halls were still a thing of the future, and the group chose the next best thing: the city’s biggest coffee house.
But notwithstanding the decidedly secular setting of its first performance, there can be little doubt that Bach – sincere Lutheran church musician that he was – intended the piece to be morally educative as well as engaging. Bach repeatedly endorsed Johann Mattheson’s suggestion that even instrumental music must “represent virtue and evil… to arouse in the listener love for the former and hatred for the latter. For it is the true purpose of music to be, above all else, a moral lesson.” These moral lessons were taught through the combination of key area, rhythm, and form. Each of those musical elements had extramusical associations, usually with emotional states: the key of D minor, for instance, was closely associated with religious devotion, while ritornello form invoked constancy.
So it’s likely no coincidence that Bach chooses D Minor as the concerto’s home key, nor that its first movement is a perfect example of ritornello form (wherein sections where the full orchestra states the main theme recur, like a refrain, alternating with contrasting sections where the soloists explore new melodic ground). In the concerto’s second movement the two violins unite in a soaring love duet in the key of F (one associated with pure love and the calm of heaven), and we can imagine that here Bach is telling a story of two faithful lovers – or perhaps a soul constant in loving faith – experiencing the bliss of heaven. In the exuberant closing movement, the soloists dance together in close imitation, and we can be sure that we’ve found a work on whose greatness even Plato and Barry Manilow would agree.
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Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.