Bach’s deference to those who birth had placed above him contrasts strongly with his dislike of employers who inhibited his music-making. We cannot tell what was the real nature of the ‘command’ to which he refers: certainly the Margrave knew Bach’s employer Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, and he visited the court at Carlsbad in 1718. The following year, 1719, Bach paid a visit to Berlin to acquire a new harpsichord, and this might also have been the moment for an encounter.

Perhaps the command was no more than a friendly, or patronising, encouragement for Bach to send him some music. Maybe it was a polite ‘Do send me some of your work sometime’, along the lines of our ‘Do let’s have lunch sometime’…. In either case, Bach was not one to miss a chance, and evidently went to some trouble to assemble this set of concertos. Whether he was consciously seeking employment at the Margrave’s court, or making a pitch for work, we cannot be sure. We know that while Prince Leopold loved music, his bride Princess Frederica did not, and we find that after their marriage in December 1721 a greater share of the prince’s budget was diverted away from music to the castle guard. Plus ça change…

In his remark at the end of the dedication that he has ‘adapted’ the concertos for several instruments, he is surely making clear that these were not work newly written for the Margrave, but had been specially tailored from existing material. The concertos may therefore reflect a lengthy period of gestation during the period when Bach’s attention was focussed on instrumental music during his time at the courts of Weimar and especially Cöthen, a period which also saw the composition of such masterpieces as the Six Solos (sonatas and partitas) for unaccompanied violin, whose equally beautiful autograph score is dated 1720. Some may go even further back in their origins.

What point was Bach making in this compilation? It does not seem to be a deeply symbolic assembly of works such as would come to dominate his collections of music in the following decades. The sequence of keys is not formal like those in the ‘48’ Preludes and Fugues for keyboard, nor is it weighted with symbolism like the organ works of Clavierübung part 3, with its Trinitarian 27 (3x3x3) pieces framed by a prelude and fugue in the three-flats key of E flat. The six ‘Brandenburg’ concertos in F, F, G, G, D and B flat do not form a pattern. Some have tried to argue that there is a deeper logic to this set, and even an aspect of social criticism in the scoring (as in the emancipation of the lower instruments in No 6); one leading director of the Brandenburgs, Reinhard Goebel, has commented on the symbolic nature of the scoring; but these ideas have not taken root.

They do however help point to the essential quality of this set, which is exactly the one Bach referred to in his preface: the instrumental variety. The significance of this has been well captured by leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff: ‘Every one of the six concertos set a precedent in its scoring, and every one was to remain without parallel’.

So another thought is that, far from trying to provide something simple for the Margrave’s court, Bach was consciously trying to demonstrate the superiority of his own resources and his players’ skills. It was a form of cultural one-upmanship, saying to the Margrave’s court: ‘Look what we can do that you can’t!’.

This might help to explain one aspect of the concertos’ reception –that there is no evidence that the Margrave’s court musicians ever performed them. This is debatable, since in order to perform them, parts would be copied from the score, and not necessarily preserved with it; we certainly know that the score was kept in the library and not discarded. But who is to say how highly it was regarded?

The variety of the scoring also mirrors the individuality and continuing enigmas within the six concertos. Among the immediate puzzles are:

• No 1: why is there a violin piccolo – what is this instrument?
• No 2: did Bach agree that the high trumpet part could be replaced by a horn?
• No 3: what is the meaning of the two chords in place of a central movement?
• No 4: why has Bach described the two solo wind instruments as ‘fiauti d’echo’?
• No 5: who could have played the unprecedented keyboard solo part?
• No 6: why are there no violins or upper-pitch instruments?

Read the rest of Nicholas’ article in our Brandenburg programme to dive deeper into each concerto.