The legendary visit by Johann Sebastian Bach to the court of Frederick II of Prussia in the spring of 1747 gave rise to the composition of The Musical Offering as a gift and response to the King’s challenge to “old Bach.” The invitation to the palace came through the suggestion of Bach’s second-oldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the king’s chief harpsichordist. It allowed his father not only to perform for the king and court, but to meet Bach’s infant grandson and see for himself how his son was faring. Bach was 62 years old and renowned in musical circles as a virtuosic performer and improviser, having “beaten” his French rival Louis Marchand years before at a contest in Dresden. (Bach’s exact contemporary Handel pointedly avoided a potential showdown with Bach by being “unavailable.” Marchand simply ran away, leaving Dresden by a dawn coach the day of the competition.)

What Frederick received by post was an astonishing array of puzzle-canons, Ricercars (strict fugue-like compositions, one for three voices and one for six), and a four-movement Trio Sonata for flute, violin, and continuo (harpsichord plus cello, the “rhythm section” of the Baroque era). While many of the canons and other parts of the work do not specify a particular instrumentation, Bach was careful to include works that could be readily played on the flute, the King’s instrument on which he was quite accomplished.

The order of performance of these various pieces, presuming they were even intended to be played all at once, is not specified by Bach, and various performances of the full work vary to some extent in the order. In this performance, the works are presented as follows:

1. Ricercar in three voices: Usually played by the keyboardist on harpsichord or organ, or sometimes an early fortepiano, of which Frederick owned Bach’s title is “Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta” - “Royally-decreed theme and the Remainder, Resolved with Canonica Art.” The elaborate title is an acrostic for a keyboard genre in contrapuntal imitation - “RICERCAR” - the first of several of Bach’s witty comments in this score.
2. Canon in two voices, “Cancrizans”: The royal theme is traded back and forth in two voices. While this may seem straightforward enough at first hearing, it is in fact a “crab-like” (“cancrizans”) canon – one that is identical, whether played forward or backward. Additionally, the voices are inverted, so that the line one instrument plays going forward is identical to that played by the other instrument in The 36-measure canon helpfully reverses itself after the first eighteen measures to illustrate this!
3. Canon in two voices in unison: The canon is found in the two solo voices (flute and violin), in imitation “in unison,” which means that the two instruments are both playing the tune in the same key, rather than the lead voice in the main key and the second voice transposed a fifth higher, which is common in contrapuntal music. The royal theme is in the cello part, while the harpsichord fills out the harmony.
4. Canon in two voices in contrary motion: The two voices in the harpsichord play a melody and its inversion (the same melody upside-down) in counterpoint, while the flute (specified by Bach) plays Frederick’s royal theme.
5. Canon in two voices in augmentation and contrary motion: The violin plays a variation of the royal theme in “augmentation,” meaning twice as slow as the original theme. The slow, “dotted” rhythms and rapid ornamental figures heard here are Bach’s adaptation of the new French galant style in vogue at Frederick’s court—a taste that Bach did not share with the King but indulges His Royal Highness expertly. Bach includes an inscription, referring to the longer values of the violin’s royal theme: “As the notes increase, so may the fortunes of the king.”
6. Canon in two voices, [modulating] by tonality: In this performance, solo cello and harpsichord presents one of Bach’s more curious canonic The royal theme is the basis for the cello melody—a chromatic elaboration of the already very chromatic original theme. The two voices in the harpsichord imitate one another in canon. As if this new elaboration of an already elaborate theme wasn’t enough, every eight measures Bach changes the key of the piece, ascending by whole-step six times—the number of whole steps found in an octave. The keys of this short piece are, in order: C minor, D minor, E minor, F-sharp minor, G-sharp minor and A-sharp minor, and then a closing section in C minor. In this employment of the “whole-tone scale,” Bach utilizes a technique that would not become standard in Western music until some 150 years in the future, in the music of French composers such as Debussy, American composer Charles Ives, and their contemporaries! In his notable book Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter compares this canon to M.C. Escher’s Waterfall, where a water channel strangely ascends, only to conclude at its beginning. Bach includes another inscription here, a parallel to the epigram in canon no. 5: “As the tonalities ascend, so may the glory of the king.”
7. Canonic Fugue in Epidadiapente (at the fifth) in six voices: Sitting like a crown jewel in the middle of the program, this six-voiced fugue is Bach’s answer to Frederick’s challenge in Potsdam to improvise on the royal theme in a six-part fugue. Frederick’s theme is presented as the subject of this fugue, without variation or adornment. The composer doesn’t specify the instruments to be used, and various approaches are This realization allows for three voices to be played by flute, violin, and cello, with the harpsichord picking up the remaining three.

Three perpetual canons follow the Canonic Fugue. Such a canon is constructed without a fixed ending, so that it can be repeated any number of times, requiring the performers to determine the appropriate endpoint of each.

8. Perpetual Canon on the Royal Theme: While the violin plays the royal theme in parsed sections, the flute and cello are in canonic imitation with a stylized line based on a retrograde (backward) section of the opening of the royal theme.
9. Perpetual Canon: The royal theme receives additional chromatic embellishments by Bach, as in the Canonic Fugue (no. 7), and the work is expanded to 45 measures in length and is in the concerted style (with the cello and harpsichord filling out the accompaniment with chords) that was the standard of the Baroque era for musical ensembles.
10. Canon in two voices: Violin and cello pair in this performance, and flute, violin, and harpsichord in canon 11 that follows. Between each piece Bach adds another cryptic inscription, “Seek and you shall ” The verse from two of the Christian Gospels is also a pun on the term “Ricercar,” which can be translated “to diligently search out.” (A cognate word in English is “research.”). In no. 10 the cello imitates the violin’s variation on the royal theme in inversion to the original.
11. Canon in four voices: Bach composes this canon as a similar puzzle to no. 10, in quicker note- values, and in a new This is another “unison” canon, in which each voice enters in the same key, and provides a closing to the exhaustive anthology of the canonic art of the previous pieces.
12. Trio Sonata in C Minor for Flute, Violin and Basso Continuo: Tonight’s Musical Offering concludes with the Trio Sonata that forms the third part of the work (the ricercar and fugue, and the short canons being the other two parts). The trio sonata originated in Italy early in the mid- 17^th century, before Bach’s time, and became one of the most popular chamber-music genres of the Bach himself composed celebrated trio sonatas for four players (the cello and harpsichord being considered as one “instrument,” as mentioned earlier), and for solo organ.

         This sonata is naturally based on the royal theme, and is in Bach’s preferred style of four movements, in slow, fast, slow, fast tempos respectively. The two slow movements exhibit many of the stylistic qualities of the French galant style Frederick favored, while the fast movements are in the High Baroque style more typical of Bach. The galant style features include ornamentation that connotes an expression of specific emotions, and, in the third movement especially, daring shifting harmonies, a trait that became known as the “Empfindsamer Stil” “Expressive style.” While there is no evidence that the Trio Sonata was specifically intended to conclude The Musical Offering, it is a satisfying conclusion to this musical tour de force, a testament to Bach’s intellectual and creative prowess inspired by a night at the Prussian court in the Age of Enlightenment.

--Lester Seigel, Joseph Hugh Thomas Professor of Music, Birmingham-Southern College