Interpreting Bach in the Baroque – How Johann Sebastian Bach’s music was played in the 17th century
- Théo Amon
- Apr 28
- 7 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
What did Johann Sebastian Bach's music sound like in his own time? It certainly wasn't as we hear it today in recordings and concerts. And why?
This is the starting point for a fascinating story that explores how the interpretation of Baroque music has changed continuously over the centuries, from the Romantic period of the 19th century through the 20th century to the present day.
This is the first text in our series "Interpreting Bach" dedicated to the 'historically informed performance' of Bach's music. The series was written by Théo Amon, a translator and literary critic passionate about classical music, at the request of the Bach Society Brazil.
Summary
To understand the music of Johann Sebastian Bach it is essential to delve into the context in which it was created . The Baroque period, which spanned the 17th to 18th centuries, was a time of social, religious and technological transformations that profoundly impacted musical production. Instruments were handcrafted, musicians were inserted into rigid patronage structures and music had very specific functions, varying according to the environment in which it was performed. In this post, we will explore how these characteristics defined the sound and interpretative practices of the time, and how Bach fits into this universe.
The importance of “context” in music
For a finer appreciation of any musical phenomenon, an understanding of who is doing what, how, where, when, and why is necessary.
Music is an art that is intensely dependent on the materiality that is its medium of propagation — sound, periodic waves of air produced by vibrating bodies and received by our eardrum — and on the specific techniques for mastering this materiality (from the construction of instruments to the physical dexterity — manual, respiratory, phonic — that allows us to handle them). On the other hand, music is intimately linked to the social practices and conventions in which it is inserted as a human activity.
In this post, I intend to historically contextualize the great difference between how music was practiced and understood in the 17th and early 18th centuries — the so-called Baroque period — and today. After this comparison, the reader will become clearer about the validity and even the need to adapt musical practices when performing and listening to music from that period — including that of our beloved Bach.
This adaptation, which in the 20th century was called “historically informed performance” and is often simply called “period performance,” is fundamental to understanding the interpretive research work of the Bach Society Brazil. All of our concerts, videos, and activities are anchored in this purpose of rescuing, as far as possible, not only Bach’s notes, but also the way his music was played in the period in which he created it.
Baroque society
The European social structure at this time was still in its long and complicated transition from the medieval world to the modern era . By this I want to point out that many of the notions that are now indisputable in the public and private spheres—equality between citizens and the sexes, universal right to education and culture, freedom of religion and expression, etc.—were still in incubation or were undergoing a far from smooth process of transformation. The sphere in which Johann Sebastian Bach lived and created offers an essential example of these phenomena applied to his time and region.
At that time, what is now Germany was fragmented into hundreds of kingdoms, principalities, archduchies, duchies and so on. It was still a medieval situation, inherited from the old Holy Roman Empire, in which power was decentralized among many sovereigns who owed a somewhat diffuse obedience to the emperor.
In Bach's time, after the Protestant Reformation, the sovereign's personal religion dictated much of what could happen artistically in his domains. As a result, the type of music played and sung in palaces and religious temples could vary radically according to the prince's specific confession, favoring vocal or instrumental music, allowing or not the worship of saints and the Virgin Mary, allowing or not the participation of women in musical performances, and so on.
Other important factors were the different social classes , such as the court and high aristocracy, rural nobility, high and low clergy, great merchants, petty bourgeoisie, workers and artisans, servants and farmers. There was almost no mobility between these categories and an extremely rigid and unequal distribution of rights and prerogatives prevailed, which strictly conditioned individual destinies in terms of opportunities for remuneration, education, work, housing and health. Even everyday clothing and forms of address (such as our modern “tu”, “você” and “o senhor”) were rigidly marked according to the fixed social status of each speaker and each interlocutor.
Bach: a man of his time
Why did we go through all this trouble in a text that was supposed to be about music? To understand, for example, why Bach's work is so compartmentalized.
In the following paragraphs, click on the links and explore Bach's work with examples played in period performances by the Bach Society Brazil.)
Anyone who follows a chronology of Bach's musical production according to the phases of his life will see that at certain times he composed more works for organ .
another, cantatas and other sacred vocal works (such as the “ Magnificat ”), at a dizzying pace; in yet another, pieces for harpsichord and other solo instruments such as the lute , violin or cello , as well as chamber music involving the flute .
At other times, he explored the Italian form of the concerto grosso (such as the famous “ Brandenburg Concertos ”), after having studied this style extensively by adapting Italian concertos .
At the end of his life, he even composed some works that, along with the traditional technical inventiveness and overwhelming expressiveness of everything Bach did, have an enormous theoretical interest, regardless of whether one is listening to them or just examining the score, and which are difficult to classify in the fixed genres of the time (“ The Art of Fugue ” and “ Musical Offering ”).
All of this was due to a very concrete and even banal factor: Bach's employment, place of residence and life situation at each stage , in a social structure that was still very different from our mental habits of professional freedom, possibility of social advancement, individual self-determination and so on. Bach was, in every aspect, a man deeply of his time. And that time was very different from ours, especially in the representations we have about music today, inherited from the influential 19th century, which consecrated recurring concepts such as “genius”, “inspiration”, “posterity” and “music of the future”. The criticism and aesthetics of late Romanticism permeated these concepts in musical discourse with such force that we need to make a conscious effort to see the history of music with more objective eyes.
Baroque instruments
But let us return from these historical considerations to the concrete aspects that we first discussed in this text: the technique, the physical and material aspects of making music. The construction of instruments at that time, even before the great industrial revolutions, was all done by hand . It was a very patient and meticulous art, almost always passed down from father to son in long lines of craftsmen, with great variations from region to region or from decade to decade.
The history of the lute , for example, would fill several volumes of an encyclopedia, and a large one at that, as the differences in shape, function and, of course, sound of each example were truly enormous — and today's performers need to be researchers at the same time in order to be able to play baroque music satisfactorily.
In general, however, one thing can be said: the musical instruments of the Baroque period were all more delicate, with a sweeter and more nuanced sound, and a much less powerful volume of sound than those of today . The strings of stringed instruments, for example, were almost all made of animal gut, which can withstand a much lower stretching tension than today's steel or nylon strings, or else they break. The stock to which the many strings of keyboard instruments are attached were not the massive steel structures of a modern piano, but blocks of wood. Examples could be piled up, but the crucial point has been made: the technological limitations of the materials and production processes of that period, which still lacked powerful steam engines, electrical energy or sophisticated alloys and polymers, define much of the musical sonority characteristic of the Baroque.
Conclusion: Towards the 19th century
The musical universe of the Baroque period was full of nuances that seem distant to us today, but that defined the work of Bach and his contemporaries. His instruments, his tuning, his musical rhetoric and his social functions were very different from those we have today. Understanding this context allows us to appreciate his work from a new perspective, without the modernizing lenses that posterity has imposed. In the next post , we will see how the 19th century rediscovered Bach, reinterpreting him according to its own aesthetic ideals.
Théo Amon Translator , researcher and literary critic. PhD in Literature from UFRGS
Contact the author here .
Read the other posts in the "Interpreting Bach" series:
Interpreting Bach in Romanticism (premiere in May 3rd)
Interpreting Bach Today (premieres May 10)
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