The Musical Offering

With the sovereign contrapuntal complexity of the “Ricercar” in six parts, and the tenderly amorous sighs of the “Andante” from the Sonata sopr’il Soggetto Reale (Sonata on the Royal Theme), the Musikalisches Opfer (Musical Offering) is a work planting a foot in camps old and new. The genesis was a visit in 1747 to the Potsdam Court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia. Eager to show off his keyboard collection, Frederick prevailed on Bach to improvise a fugue on a theme supposedly devised by himself. Bach obliged with a three-part offering, but back home in Leipzig he decided to embark on a project to rival two other late contrapuntal odysseys—the Art of Fugue and the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her. To the three-part fugue he now added a six-part “Ricercar” plus 10 canons of rigorous ingenuity, all based on the “Thema Regium” (“Royal Theme”). Nor was he done. The work also includes Bach’s last and greatest essay in the art of the “Trio Sonata,” its four-movement Sonata da Chiesa (Church Sonata) model perhaps intended as a subversive dig at a King famous for his antipathy to anything ecclesiastical. In any event, trenchantly presented in the bass of the opening “Allegro” and reinvented as a gigue in the finale, the “Royal Theme” imbues the sonata with compelling cohesion and purposefulness.