Thoughts on my relationship with the first four Preludes from Bach’s Solo Cello Suites

It’s a familiar trope: an interview with a cellist about the Bach Suites, where they talk about how influential they have been to their approach to the instrument and other music, and how their relationship with and interpretation of the suites has changed over the course of their lives. And it’s all absolutely true. I feel like I peel back a new layer of the suites each time I study them, and find myself thinking how cumbersome many of the bowings, fingerings, and phrasings are that I used years ago. What I never anticipated, as a young person learning the suites for the first time, was how the suites would one day inform my teaching, and how teaching them to my students would influence my approach as a performer.

Most students encounter many of the techniques that they will use in solo Bach when they tackle the battery of etudes and repertoire leading up to their first Suite, like hearing “horizontally and vertically” in order to differentiate between two or more voices going on at the same time, and building the illusion of voices interrupting and overlapping each other while being played by a single instrument; using fingerings and bowings to create the sound of multiple musical lines, or consolidate a single one; deciphering sequences and patterns of notes; and inferring what the composer wants when there is very little information in the score.

I chose to highlight the Preludes because of how unique they are from each other, and from the rest of the movements in the suites, which are based on Renaissance dance forms. The preludes are how most folks characterize each of the Bach Suites, and are the favorite movements of students, audiences, and audition committees alike.

Suite No. 1 in G Major

One of the things that students always ask in lessons is “how long until I can play the Prelude from the G Major Bach Suite?”. The G Major Prelude is so popular that it is a common experience for cellists to be asked “can you play the song from that show/movie/commercial?”, and usually the person means the G Major Prelude (The Swan by Camille St. Saens comes in a distant second).

The G Major Prelude has been thoroughly analyzed by lots of folks; my favorite is Vox’s video of Alisa Weilerstein on Youtube. A mix of arpeggios and scales, the first half requires the performer to emphasize the bass line drone of “cello 1” while zipping through the 16ths of “cello 2”. A lot of cellists like using all separate bows on the fast notes, and I will concede that it is probably closer to what Bach intended 300 years ago, but I prefer to slur them, which creates a smoother and more resonant sound (and helps you play with a bigger sound for outdoor gigs!). It also presents a big challenge for the student, who must use their wrist to cross the strings in the upper half of the bow, but their shoulder to cross in the lower half, in order for the notes to speak evenly.

The second half starts with a series of rapid scales and sequences, or restatements of musical fragments at a higher or lower pitch. Bach uses this technique a lot, and it would be hard to find a composer that does it better. This passage often vexes students until they break it down piece by piece, and my own understanding of how the fragments link together has changed after deconstructing it over the years.

Suite No. 2 in D Minor

The Prelude to the D Minor suite is the most lyrical of the suites, and for me one of the most challenging to make sound like more than one player. It is typically played with long, flowing lines and slurs, and it is easy to fall into creating four and eight bar phrases without playing it polyphonically. Over the years, my approach to differentiating voices in this movement has evolved quite a bit. I have to admit that when I first studied it in my teens and twenties, I pretty much went by feel, emphasizing what popped out of the music instinctually (Bach is unmatched in his ability to imply what he wants in the music, and does it so well that it’s easy for the player to think it was all their idea!). But when it comes to teaching, gut feelings won’t cut it, and in order to be able to explain it in the lesson, I found myself doing much a deeper analysis.

In most pieces the bowings are laid out to help you, grouping the notes of one voice together, then changing bow or bow stroke to bring out the different character of the other voice. While there is some of that in my bowings, the overlapping voices are more ambiguous than in any of the other Preludes, and this movement challenges the performer to phrase against the bowing to bring out more than one line, while maintaining consistency of sound.

Suite No. 3 in C Major

The Prelude to the C Major Suite was one of the movements of Bach that I played for my undergraduate auditions years ago, and looking back I can see why my teacher steered me toward it: the piece is all swirling sixteenth notes, and the choice of C Major makes for a big, open sound on the cello. The nature of the arpeggiation of the sixteenth notes across three strings makes it relatively easy to make sound like it is being played by two or even three different cellists - another example of Bach’s brilliant ability to imply what he wants in the music through his compositional techniques.

The trickiness in the C Major Prelude is weighting with the bow; if all the swirling notes are played the same, then no musical line emerges. Like an oil painting, backing up and “unfocusing your eyes” a little reveals the big picture, and in the C Major Prelude the picture can span many lines, or even half a page of music.

Suite No. 4 in Eb Major

After years of generally avoiding playing or teaching it, the Eb Major Prelude is now my favorite. The challenge lies in how to make the first half sound like anything other than a seemingly endless wall of notes. Add to that the key of Eb Major - the only suite not written in a key where you can utilize the resonance of the open strings, and the fourth suite can be downright uncomfortable to play.

In deciphering it, the cadences spaced throughout the first half of the piece, and scales and musical fragments scattered across both the high and low notes of the arpeggios, hidden as in a word jumble, pull you toward them. For the second half, Bach switches back and forth between the established pattern and a series of unique cadenzas (the only time he does this in the six suites), and I think it sounds more vibrant and fun to whip through the cadenza passages. The quick character changes of the cadenzas differentiate the personalities of the multiple cellos that Bach aims to represent.

The key of Eb Major really makes the performer work to create resonance, and the churning pattern of the arpeggios in an uncomfortable key evokes a feeling of struggle and fury more than any other movement in the suites. It can be really cathartic to play when you are having a tough day!

Resources

There are at least two resources that have enriched my appreciation of the Bach Suites, and that I always share with my students as they start learning solo Bach. The first is “The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece” by Eric Siblin. Tracing the life and times of Bach and the great 20th Century cellist Pablo Casals, Siblin convincingly lays out why Bach’s music remains vibrant 300 years later, and peppers the book with impressive Bach Trivia. For instance, did you know that Bach got in a fist fight with a bassoon player? Or that he wrote the Well Tempered Clavier, Volume 1 from jail? The Cello Suites is the one thing I lend to students that makes me glad when it is never returned; I have bought at least four copies, and need to buy a fifth.

The second is Documentary Filmmaker Michael Lawrence’s Bach and Friends, an amazing compilation of many of the most famous performers in classical music (and beyond) playing and discussing solo Bach. Lawrence’s series of interviews demonstrate how Bach’s music is both timeless and infinitely adaptable, and is some of the best material on YouTube (Robert Tiso’s glass harp rendition of the Organ Toccata in D Minor still blows me away).