Some 21st-century Comments

on Erwin Bodky’s The Interpretation of Bach’s Keyboard Works 1

by Mark Lindley and Tamar Hestrin Grader

Erwin Bodky in writing The Interpretation of Bach’s Keyboard Works made extensive use

of the most recent scholarship available to him in 1958, 2 and of period sources, to address the

difficulties faced by musicians who wish to play Bach’s keyboard works “as Bach expected them

to be rendered.” 3 It should be noted that by “keyboard works” Bodky meant only those works

which he regarded as having been composed for harpsichord or clavichord. Within that scope

the book is quite thorough. Its more than 400 pages include an introductory historical review,

massive chapters on tempo and on “the instrument question” (see below), and substantial chap-

ters on a variety of other topics: dynamics; ornaments; “conventional alterations of rhythm”

(specifically notes inégales and the sharpening of dotted rhythms); articulation (including an

account of words used in the Baroque period to describe a piece’s character, but nothing about

fingerings4); and symbolism

5 and key-character (with no mention, however, of historical unequal

temperament,6 as Bodky took Equal Temperament for granted). A brief chapter of “final re-

marks” is followed by two very substantial appendices. One of them provides suggestions for

tempo for each keyboard piece “of major importance” (nearly 300 in all), registration (for the

pieces which he regarded as having been composed for harpsichord), qualities of articulation

(in some detail but mostly not note-for-note) and occasional remarks in regard to ornaments etc.

The other appendix classifies all the pieces according to Bodky’s suggested tempi (giving for

each piece an incipit, and showing the specific suggestions of some widely esteemed editors of

Bach’s music; see below) and provides a dozen supplementary tables about Bach’s uses of trills,

appoggiaturas and articulation signs.

Bodky may be regarded as an intermediate figure between two waves of 20th-century

revivalists of Baroque keyboard music, some of whom are remembered today more than he is.

He was, on the one hand, younger than Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska.7 (He was

influenced by them in some interesting ways. His arguments in favor of the clavichord were

given an extra edge by a desire to counter Landowska’s exclusively pro-harpsichord stance, and

his book includes an account of the French notes-inégales convention because Dolmetsch had

felt – mistakenly, in his opinion – that their use was well suited to some of Bach’s French-style

pieces.8) But on the other hand, his work predates the wave, which began to swell in the 1960s,

of modern-style (from a 21st-century perspective) “authentic” performances of 18th-century

music. He removed some of the stylistically anachronistic accretions of the generations before

him, but then the next generation – including Gustav Leonhardt among the harpsichordists and

organists, and William Dowd, Frank Hubbard and Martin Skowroneck among the harpsichord-

makers – was to strip them back even further. It is notable, however, in view of the thorough,

logical and evidence-based approach on display in Bodky’s book, that Sandra Rosenblum, whom

he engaged to help him polish the text since English was not his native tongue, went on to write

Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music (1988), which is still today a standard handbook.9

It is a pity that the type of harpsichord upon which he based his detailed conclusions about

registration has been thoroughly discredited as a piece of historical evidence relevant to Bach.

The design of the harpsichord which Bodky owned and relied upon in his research was based on

that of the so-called Bach Flügel or Bach Cembalo in the Berlin Music-Instrument Museum, an

instrument venerated by 20th-century German harpsichord-makers even though there is no good

evidence that it ever belonged to anyone in the Bach family. The closest feasible link would be

that Friedemann Bach may have played on it when visiting a friend who owned it.10

The last time

that it was sold, which was in 1890, it had an 8' register on each of its two manuals, 4' on the

upper one and 16' on the lower one. Bodky took that stop-disposition for granted in his research,

but in 1955, which was several years after he had drafted a comprehensive typescript for the

book, Friedrich Ernst published a finding that the 16' register had been installed during the 19th

century. Bodky dutifully acknowledged Ernst’s article in some footnotes11

showing that he was

taken aback by the doubt which it cast on the authenticity of the design of the harpsichord which

Karl Maendler (of the Schramm piano firm in Munich) had made for him in the late 1920s and

which had been his beloved musical companion ever since. (See Figure 1.) He regarded the Bach

Flügel as “one of the most beautiful harpsichords of the entire world.”12

In his defense we may

note that whereas most harpsichordists of his day used pedals (such as were on his instrument) to

change registrations frequently while playing, he saw this for the anachronism it was. He recom-

mended that since pedal mechanisms were rare in Bach’s milieu,13

no changes of registration

should be made which cannot be done by hand, and indeed he would use a registration-change

only if it seemed to him directly illustrative of the structure of the piece. (See Figure 2, which is

on two pages.)

Bodky tended to feel that each piece of keyboard music (in his sense of the term) by Bach

was written either for harpsichord or else for clavichord.14

And, only if the piece appeared to him

to call for structurally significant register-changes would he gladly assign it to the harpsichord.

He thus felt that a quite a number of the pieces, including the Inventions and Sinfonias, the

French Suites, and more than half of the “48,” were intended for clavichord.15

With a slight

mental reservation (replacing “this was probably intended solely for...” with “this is most idio-

matic on...”) one can reap from his observations in this regard a harvest of interesting insights.

Bodky’s remarks about articulation are likewise notable, though now superseded musico-

logically by the even more thorough studies of John Butt and Julia Severus.16

The relevant his-

torical evidence tends, as Bodky pointed out, to be enigmatic and unsystematic, and modern

performers tend to differ in their preferences. Bodky illustrated this latter fact with examples

from various Bach experts including Carl Czerny,17

Albert Schweitzer and Hermann Keller as

well as Ferruccio Busoni, who had been one of his own teachers. His treatment of the subject

includes various ingenious juxtapositions. (Please see Figures 3-6.)

In a series of “tempo tables” (sampled here in Figures 7-9) Bodky set out an impressively

systematic classification, listing in each table various movements with certain “inherent rela-

tions” between them. He had five distinct levels of suggested tempi, tagged metronomically as

ca.40, ca.60, ca.80, ca.100 and ca.120; we miss here the possibility of some intermediate tempi.

(For instance: In Part I of Das wohl temperirte Clavier, must the first 27 bars of the C-minor pre-

lude be played 50% faster than the C-major one even though they both have the same time sig-

nature, the same predominance of 16th-notes and the same rate of chord-changes? And must

the normal rate of heartbeat in a healthy adult be taken as ca.80 per second? Could not ca.72

be equally healthy?18

) We may note also that he overlooked the material on Bach tempi in

Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik : aus sicheren Grund-

sätzen hergeleitet und mit deutlichen Beyspielen erläutert (1774-1779). Systematic research on

Bach’s tempi has in recent decades been carried further by Robert Marshall and Don Franklin.19

In examining this book, we have found it quite interesting for what it says about Bach as

well as for what it shows about a certain moment in the history of performance practices. It

seems to us that Erwin Bodky the musicologist would have loved to find one readily identifiable

solution to each problem, but that the musician in him knew that whenever a problem of per-

formance is interesting, there is more than one good solution.

ADDENDUM

Harpsichords with 16' stops existed in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the stop-disposition of the

alleged Bach Flügel – upper manual: 8' + 4', lower manual: 8' + 16' – has been, as far as we know, found

on no instrument extant from Bach’s day, although it is mentioned in a reference of 1775 to a harpsichord

made by Zacharias Hildebrandt,20

an associate of Bach’s who died in 1759 (or perhaps that instrument

was really made by his son and successor, Johann Gottfried Hildebrandt, who died in 1775). Ulrich Däh-

nert’s Der Orgel- und Instrumentenbauer Zacharias Hildebrandt (Leipzig 1962) is a comprehensive

account of Hildebrandt as a maker of organs and other kinds of keyboard instruments. Subtitled Sein

Verhältnis zu Gottfried Silbermann und Johann Sebastian Bach (i.e. “His Relation to Gottfried Silber-

mann and J. S. Bach”), it describes numerous payments to Hildebrandt for services – including making

harpsichords and clavichords – rendered to Bach and/or his former pupils and other acquaintances. It

discusses in some detail21

the Lautencembalo, a kind of harpsichord with gut strings, intended to sound

like a lute; there is unequivocal evidence (which Bodky ignored) that Hildebrandt in the late 1730s made

one for Bach. A broad sense of what the stringed keyboard instruments used in Bach’s circle were like

can be gained (though Hildebrandt was of course not the only instrument-maker active there) from the

following details extracted from information given by Dähnert on the basis of an extant legal document

regarding the years 1744-45. For various clavichords, Hildebrandt was paid 10, 14 and 15 talers. A former

student of Bach’s at the St. Thomas School (who had in the late 1730s directed the Collegium Musicum

in Leipzig) got a clavichord from Hildebrandt for 10 talers and a spinet for 24. The two least expensive –

presumably single-manual – long harpsichords made by Hildebrandt in 1744-45 cost 100 talers each. One

of them was purchased by another former student of Bach’s (who since 1742 had been the organist at a

major church in Dresden). A harpsichord costing 120 talers – probably also one-manual – was purchased

by the owner of a coffee-house in Leipzig who financed there a Collegium Musicum of students led

by Bach. The two most expensive harpsichords (at 185 talers each) “were surely two-manual and were

equipped with three registers, two of which, one at 8' and one at 4' pitch, belonged, in the customary

way,22

to the lower manual, plus an 8' register on the upper manual.” One of these was purchased by a

former Bach student who in August of 1744 became the Cantor in Freiburg.23

We should mention, however, that Maendler-Schramm harpsichords may have been among the best-

sounding modern ones available in the 1930s and ’40s. An expert 21st-century repairer of 20th-century

harpsichords who has worked on Pleyels, Neuperts and Maendler-Schramms has told us that the latter

have a relatively big sound unlike the “rather thin sound, without much personality” of the Neuperts and

the “tremendously disappointing” sound of the Pleyels.24

NOTES:

1. This essay is appended to the internet version, accessible via www.sim.spk-berlin.de/forschung_4.html, of Mark

Lindley’s article, “Erwin Bodky (1896-1958), a Prussian in Boston,” in the 2011 Jahrbuch of the German Staat-

liches Institut für Musikforschung.

2. First edition, Harvard University Press, 1960 (two years after the author’s death); facsimile edition, Westport (CT),

1976; German translation, Der Vortrag derKlavierwerke von J. S. Bach, Tutzing, 1970; Japanese translation,

Tokyo, 1976; shown here is a sideways view of

the spine of the box in which the latter is tucked.

3. “Introduction,” p. 1.

4. On relevant fingerings see Quentin Faulkner, J. S. Bach’s Keyboard Technique : A Historical Introduction (St.

Louis 1984). (For some corrections see Mark Lindley, “Early Fingering: Some Editing Problems and Some New

Readings for J. S. Bach and John Bull,” in the journal Early Music, XVII/1 (February 1989), especially pp. 63-65

and 67-68.)

5. While praising Albert Schweitzer for having “swept away the dryness of Bach interpretation that was customary

at that time” (i.e. ca.1900), Bodky appreciated also Arnold Schering’s Das Symbol in der Musik (Leipzig 1941),

Arnold Schmitz’s Die Bildlichkeit der wortgebundenen Musik J. S. Bachs (Mainz 1950), etc.

6. See apropos www.sim.spk-berlin.de/wtc.

7. There were some direct and indirect exchanges between Bodky and Landowska. See apropos Appendix 1 and

pp. 234 and 241 in the main article cited above in Note 1.

8. Dolmetsch, The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII and XVIII Centuries (London 1916 and later editions),

the last few pages of Chapter 3.

9. A warm acknowledgement by Sandra Rosenblum is in Appendix 7 of the material in regard to Bodky that is

accessible via www.sim.spk-berlin.de/forschung_4.html.

10. The footnotes referring to Ernst’s article are on pp. 7 and 31.

11. See Sabine Hoffmann, “Das Berliner ,Bach Cembalo‘ aus der Perspektive seiner Restauringen und Nachbauten,”

in Michael Latcham, ed., Music ancienne – instruments et imagination. Acts des Rencontres Internationales har-

moniques, Lausanne 2004 (Berne 2006).

12. Bodky, p. 7, last sentence.

13. Pedal actions and the like are to be found on many late 18th-century English harpsichords, but those instruments

cannot have been used by players in Germany in the first half of century.

14. Bodky would thus perform Das wohl temperirte Clavier (Part I) on two instruments – he did so, for instance, in a

recital in 1943 at Harvard University – whereas there is an authentic 18th-century report, in Ernst Ludwig Gerber’s

Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (Leipzig 1790-92), vol. I, col. 492, that Bach in the mid-1720s

would perform the same entire set of pieces while seated “at one of his excellent instruments” (“an eines seiner vor-

treflichen [sic] Instrumente”).

15. Bodky’s recommendations about this are not quite the same as in his Der Vortrag alter Musik [“The Performance of

Early Music”] (Berlin 1932). Two differences in regard for instance to Part I of the “48” are that (1) for the F-minor

prelude and fugue, he had in 1932 admitted the harpsichord as a possibility, but in the 1950s no longer, and yet (2)

for the B-minor prelude and fugue he had in 1932 recommended: “Clavichord (Pedalclavichord !)” or organ, but

in the 1950s: “Organ, harpsichord,” with the following harpsichord-registration for the prelude: “4', 16' or 8', 16'

throughout (full work [i.e. all four registers] for the end after the fermata possible)” and with an elaborate scheme

of registrations for the fugue.

An unfortunate idea retained from the earlier book was that a good way for pianists to perform Bach’s harpsi-

chord works would be with four hands and two instruments in order to provide in appropriate passages an equivalent

to octave-doublings resulting from the harpsichord’s 4' register. Better than this would have been to revert to his ini-

tial practice (ca.1920), as a pianist, of using Busoni-type transcriptions.

16. John Butt, Bach Interpretation : Articulation Marks in Primary Sources of J. S. Bach (Cambridge [UK] and New

York 1990). Julia Severus, Die Artikulationspraxis J. S. Bachs und Möglichkeiten ihrer Anwendung in den Klavier-

werken (Berlin 2002).

17. See apropos Johann Sonnleiter, “Czernys rätselhafte Bach-Tempi[,] oder: Versuch über die variable Art das Metro-

nom zu gebrauchen,” in H.-J. Hinrichsen and D. Sackmann, ed., Bach-Interpretationen. Eine Zürcher Ringvorlesung

zum Bach-Jahr 2000 (Bern 2003).

18. Most American medical texts on physical examination (e.g. Mosby’s Guide to Physical Examination and Bates’

Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking) mention only the wide normal range of 60 to 100, but according

to Joseph K. Perloff’s Physical Examination of the Heart and Circulation (Shelton, CT 2009), p. 64, “The average

pulse in the adult male is 72 beats per minute,” yet “in the adult female ... 80.” Perloff is an authority on congenital

heart disease in adults. (See for instance www.phaonlineuniv.org/Journal/Vol6No3Autumn07/Profiles-in-PH.)

19. Robert Marshall, “Bach's tempo ordinario : A Plaine and Easie Introduction to the System,” in John Knowles, ed.,

Critica Musica. Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard (Australia 1996). Don O. Franklin, “Composing in Time: Bach’s

Temporal Design for the Goldberg Variations,” in Anne Leahy & Yo Tamita, ed., Bach Studies from Dublin (2000).

Bodky’s work on tempi was in the 1960s a good corrective to Fritz Rothschild’s The Lost Tradition in Music (1953).

20. Konstantin Restle, “Versuch einer historischen Einordnung des ,Bach-Cembalos‘,” in K. Restle, ed., Das Berliner

„Bach-Cembalo“: Ein Mythos und seine Folgen (Berlin 1995).

21. Dähnert, pp. 83-85. An account in English is readily available at www.baroquemusic.org/barluthp.html – and a

beautiful recording at www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=H75Dkl0r0Tw.

22. We agree that it was customary in the 18th century for the 4' register to be played directly from the principal, lower

manual, unlike on the alleged Bach Flűgel.

23. Dähnert, p. 107.

24. Dale Munschy, personal communication (according to which, however, the Maendler-Schramm jack design was

“quite poor and subsequently problematic”).

CAPTIONS TO THE FIGURES:

Figure 1. Bodky and his Maendler-Schramm harpsichord.

Figure 2. Two pages from “Appendix A” (here in regard to some pieces from Part I of the “48”).

Figure 3. (From the Japanese edition.)

Figures 4-6. Some of the other examples in regard to articulation.

Figures 7-8. The beginnings of two of the five tempo tables for pieces in common time. The abbreviations

(of the names of editors who had suggested specific tempi) are as follows: “L” for Landshoff; “Cz” for Czerny;

“Ke” for Keller; “Bi” for Bischoff; “Ki” for Kirkpatrick.

Figure 9. The “tempo tables” for pieces in 9/8-time.

Figure 1. Bodky and his Maendler-Schramm harpsichord.

Figure 2. Two pages from “Appendix A” (here in regard to some pieces from Part I of the “48”).

Figure 3. (From the Japanese edition)

Figures 4-6. Some of the other examples in regard to articulation.

Figures 7-8. The beginnings of two of the five tempo tables for pieces in common time. Abbreviations (of the

names of editors who had suggested specific tempi): “L” for Landshoff; “Cz” for Czerny; “Ke” for

Keller; “Bi” for Bischoff; “Ki” for Kirkpatrick.

Figure 9. The “tempo tables” for pieces in 9/8-time.