Musikalisches Opfer Offrande Musicale

Description

The concert given on May 7, 1747, by Johann Sebastian Bach is the best-documented event of the otherwise ungrateful career of the composer. During the evening, Frederick II of Prussia presented Bach with an extremely difficult theme from which he had to improvise a fugue. According to reports, Frederick, who usually hated written fugues and compositions with complex writing, was enthusiastic about the immediate treatment of the "royal theme" by the composer. Bach, on the other hand, was dissatisfied with his performance and announced that he intended to revisit the "exceptionally beautiful theme" of the king in the form of a "regular fugue" and engrave it on copper. The Musical Offering would be published several months later. The work is a collection of pieces adopting different genres: two ricercari (an old synonym for "fugue") for keyboard instrument, a complex trio sonata da chiesa for flute, violin, and continuo (that is, a "church sonata" built on the slow-fast-slow-fast alternation, with the fast movements being fugued), and ten canons (including one fugue). Following the Musical Offering, there are fourteen canons based on the first eight notes of the aria from the Goldberg Variations BWV 1087 discovered as recently as 1974. The album concludes with the Sonata in G major for flute, violin, and continuo, BWV 1038.