Composed c.1730, arranged c.1942; 10 minutes

This three-movement trio sonata by Bach comes from a set of six, “elaborated to enable his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to become the great organist he later became,” as Bach’s first biographer, Johann Forkel, wrote. Bach originally described the set as Six Organ Trios for Two Manuals with Pedal Obbligato, designed to help the young Wilhelm Friedemann (1710–84) develop coordination between two upper musical lines—one hand on each of the organ’s keyboards—while the feet handled the bass pedal line. Bach’s mastery in adapting the Italianate trio sonata (traditionally two violins with string bass and harpsichord) for the organ stemmed from an earlier enthusiasm for transcribing Italian string concertos for solo organ and harpsichord. The tradition was renewed in the 1940s when Victor Babin arranged all six trio sonatas for the celebrated husband-and-wife piano duo Vronsky & Babin.

Bach himself extended this tradition in the opposite direction, repurposing the sonorous first movement of BWV 528 from a Sinfonia originally scored for oboe d’amore, viola da gamba, and continuo found in one of his earliest Leipzig cantatas. Stylistically, the short, motif-driven lines of the Andante suggest that Bach revised (or, as Forkel put it, “elaborated”) a manuscript from his early years as an organist. The finale is cheerful, bristling with contrapuntal exchanges between the instruments.