. . . the last movement of Bach's Keyboard Partita in E Minor BVW 830.
It is marked "Gigue", but in the later version has a time signature of a full circle with a stroke. In the early version (found in the Anna Magdalena Notebook of 1725) it has a Cut-C signature. In both, the music proceeds in semiquavers (grouped in 4s) together with paired quavers, and dotted-quaver/semiquaver figures. At times there are pairs of demisemiquavers embedded in the groups, replacing straight semiquavers.
It is completely incomprehensible!
This is because it doesn't follow the "expected" Gigue rhythm and style. Even if the dotted-quaver/semiquaver pairs are performed as triplets (which one might suppose them to be in the first phrase), there is then no logical way thereafter of fitting the surrounding rhythms around this.
I can't explain it, and continue to wonder what Bach meant by it.
Those
Partitas are full of Bach's numerology at its most rampant are they not.
Here for the benefit of Members who do not know the score are two extracts from the curious
Gigue with which the
Sixth Partita B.W.V. 830 ends, so well described was it not by Madam Ena.
The time signature, consisting of a circle with a vertical line drawn through it, is described somewhere as "
The Great Alla Breve." Here it means 4/2 but in the olden days its significance we are told was something rather different - some sort of triple time and we await a specialist who might tell us more.
Now Madam is worried because she can neither see nor hear any triplets. It is true that the admirable Percy Scholes describes the jig in general as "moving along in a merry limp." But he adds that Bach not once but several times gave the name to pieces with 2 or 4 beats. We suppose do we not that Bach here had in mind not so much the limping as the leaping. It was four hops to one of his bars he wanted in this case, that is clear, and within each hop he has two or four beats instead of three. Well! That is no worse than Chaiceffscy and his waltz in quintuple time.
Even to-day if one ventures into one or two nondescript little bars in the back streets of Antwerp or Brussels one may all of a sudden come upon a scrum of twenty or thirty usually fat Flemings ardently bouncing up and down together in a kind of block or pack. This sort of dancing (which we have not encountered elsewhere) is the essence of one kind of jig is it not? They do not mind, as we said, whether there are three or four beats to the hop.
We have listened to Leonhardt's performance of this movement, but he does not play the repeats, and he is rather too slow. He does not conform with our vision of those strenuously bouncing Flemings.
Besides Leonhardt's we have listened to the work played on the piano in four different recordings. The best version is very much faster, but rather regrettably we did not make a note of the player's name.
Does not this
Gigue somehow put us be it ever so slightly in mind of Beethoven's
Grosse Fugue?
Incidentally we do hope that Madam Ena will soon see her way clear to a return; Mrs. Bucket for instance might might she not offer an appropriate new persona . . . ?
