Bach à la Leonhardt

Personal memories instead of a review: In the mid-1970s, Gustav Leonhardt (1928-2012) played some of his own arrangements of Bach's works for string instrument in Basel. In the summer of 1977, I asked him for a copy of his arrangement of the Lute Suite in C minor for harpsichord, whereupon he instructed me to make one myself. That wasn't so easy, because Leonhardt's apparently perfect solutions were always in my ear and had also appeared on record in the meantime.

Now Siebe Henstra has not only published Leonhardt's collected harpsichord versions, but has even facsimiled some pages of Leonhardt's almost Bach-like manuscript. The true-to-style adaptations after the violin solos and cello suites as well as the A minor flute allemande are - even from a critical distance - instructive all round, in terms of movement and fingering, and sometimes also of stupendous simplicity. In all of this, however, I have the feeling that I am voyeuristically intruding into the master's harpsichordistic privacy and encroaching on his very own musicality and genius while playing. It would be more authentic to follow his advice at the time and try out independently what Bach himself had already practiced in the case of the violin solos: "Their author played them himself [...] and added as much harmony as he thought necessary." (Johann Friedrich Agricola)

Johann Sebastian Bach: Suites, Partitas, Sonatas for harpsichord arranged by Gustav Leonhardt, edited by Siebe Henstra, BA 11820, € 39.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel 2017