Lute Suite No. 2 in C Minor

The sober-hued C Minor Suite doesn’t just boast an unusual design by omitting the “Allemande” and “Courante” that traditionally launch the genre’s dance sequence. It’s designated variously as a “Suite”, “Partita”, or, by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, Prelude, Fugue, Sarabande, and Gigue for keyboard—the latter implying that it was composed with the lute-harpsichord in mind. In any event a copy was made by Johann Friedrich Agricola who studied with Bach between 1738 and 1741, and likely the version in lute notation was made later, perhaps around the time Bach’s friend the great Dresden-based lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss paid an extended visit to Leipzig in 1739. Hitched to a somewhat austere “Prelude” is a substantial, flowing “Fugue”, gnawing away at an anguished theme. Similarly expansive, the “Sarabande” opens with a gesture seeming to remember the final chorus of the St Matthew Passion; while the feistily purposeful “Gigue” is expanded exuberantly to engineer a virtuosic close. About J.S. Bach’s Lute Suites A few sundry pieces such as the magnificent Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, BWV 998 and the more intimate C Minor Prelude, BWV 999 aside, Bach’s music for solo lute is corralled into four stand-alone suites spanning some quarter of a century; and unlike those for keyboard or cello, they were never intended as a set. Indeed, idiomatically reimagined, two of them revisit earlier works for solo cello and violin. Despite their intimate and beguiling appeal, the Suites are not without controversy. Were they conceived for the lute, or rather for the lautenwerck, a gut-stringed harpsichord producing a lute-like timbre. Bach latterly owned fine examples of both instruments—though his proficiency on the lute is open to speculation.