Suite in A major, BWV 1025

This sheet music edition is suitable for guitar with octave guitar or mandolin or violin. It is intended to enable unique music and a unique collaboration between two important composers for our modern instruments. This work places very high demands on the musicians, and since they usually prefer their own fingerings, no specifications have been given here.

There are two manuscripts of the Suite in A major, BWV 1025, from the Bach family. In the first, the first system is in the handwriting of Johann Sebastian Bach, and in the second, the handwriting of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach can be found. He chose the title “Trio for obbligato piano and violin by JS Bach” as the outer title for the work.

Johann Sebastian Bach's authorship of the work was already questioned in the complete edition BGA IX by Wilhelm Rust (1860). This "Bach work" is
designed for two instruments, harpsichord and violin. The harpsichord part, however, does not correspond very much to Bach's usual style, so that there were legitimate doubts as to whether it was an original work. A few years ago the secret was
revealed when this very harpsichord part was found among Weiss' lute suites as a solo work ("Suonata del Sigre. SL Weiss") and it was discovered that only the violin part had been composed by Bach. Bach had transferred Weiss' lute part to the harpsichord with only minimal changes that were necessary for the instrument. He also added a violin as a second instrument, which lays itself over Weiss's original with an incredible enthusiasm for improvisation. This part imitates, anticipates, imitates, picks out motifs and breaks away to play completely freely over the harmonic framework.

Bach added a Fantasia to the suite, which is placed at the beginning because of its prelude-like character. This movement is therefore the only one composed by Bach alone. This suite, with seven movements, thus acquired a size and length that is unique even for comparable works. In Bach's manuscripts, the Courante is the second movement and the Entrée the third movement, which may also be due to the page layout at the time or the time change sequence. In Weiss, the Entrée is the first movement. In terms of musical progression, the Entrée in second place seemed more logical to us today.

In 1739, Weiss, who was working in Dresden at the time, came to Johann Sebastian Bach's house with his lute colleague Kropfgans and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Bach's secretary and tutor, his nephew Johann Elias Bach, wrote of this: "Something extra fine happened in music, in that my cousin from Dresden [WF Bach], who had been here for over four weeks, along with the two famous lutenists Mr. Weisen and Mr. Kropfgans, came to play several times."
Weiss and Bach had probably known each other for a long time, however, as they were both sponsored by Count Hermann von Keyserlingk (dedicatee of the "Goldberg Variations") and
Bach's son Wilhelm Friedemann had been working as an organist at the Sophienkirche in Dresden from 1717 onwards. There were certainly various points of contact, so that it is even possible that Bach's lute works were composed for Weiss.
In 1805, JF Reichardt wrote about one of the meetings between Weiss and Bach: "Anyone who knows the difficulties of the lute for harmonic deviations and well-executed movements must be astonished and can hardly believe it when eyewitnesses and earwitnesses assure that the great Dresden lutenist Weisse fantasized and performed fugue movements in a competition with Sebastian Bach, who was also a great piano and organ player."

Volker Niehusmann