Rethinking Bach’s Cello Suites

Bach’s Cello Suites have been central to the viola training repertoire for nearly a century. Yet many basic questions about them resist straightforward answers, and contradictory or misleading information appears in many published sources. This presentation reports on my research findings for my book Bach: The Cello Suites. I will emphasize four questions:

(1) What is known about when, why, and for which kind(s) of instrument(s) Bach conceived the suites?

(2) How might Bach have composed the suites, and to what extent are traces of his compositional method apparent from analysis?

(3) Why have recent studies re-evaluated the longstanding assumption that Anna Magdalena Bach’s manuscript copy (“Source A”) should be prioritized as the most authoritative? What are the implications of new scholarship prioritizing the two later manuscript copies (“Sources C and D”), which have long been undervalued by both musicologists and performers?

(4) What is known about the Cello Suites’ performance history on cello and on viola starting from the earliest documented performances (c. 1860) up through Pablo Casals’s influential tours and recordings in the first half of the twentieth century?

In this presentation, I will illustrate how many longstanding assumptions about the Cello Suites are being rethought in recent scholarship. For instance, the term “violoncello” referred to instruments of various sizes and numbers of strings, some held between the knees, but others held at the shoulder supported by a strap. For cellists in Bach’s orbit who held their instruments at the knees, they more likely adopted an “underhand” bow hold (similar to that used on viola da gamba) rather than the modern “overhand” bow hold.

In sum, this presentation emphasizes the variety of ways the Cello Suites have been approached over the past three centuries, with an aim of encouraging today’s violists to adopt a spirit of open-mindedness and experimentation in their own approaches to the Cello Suites.