Bach’s Cello Suites before Pablo Casals
Three Case Studies
Abstract
J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites were popularized by the Catalonian cellist Pablo Casals through his extensive international tours (c. 1901–1938) and especially his world-premiere recording of the complete cycle (1936–1939). However, the widespread myth of Casals as “discoverer” of the Cello Suites overshadows an earlier stage in the history of their transmission, performance, and reception. The Cello Suites appeared in about a dozen performance editions between the 1820s and 1920s. While the earliest editions presented the set as pedagogical material, later editions were oriented toward concert performances, enhancing the Cello Suites’ appeal to contemporaneous audiences through editorial expressive markings and/or added piano accompaniment. Starting after around 1860, several dozen performances of individual movements or (rarely) complete suites are documented, including performances both with and without accompaniment, with a geographical reach centering in Leipzig but including much of western Europe and extending to Adelaide (Australia) and San Francisco (USA). This article speculates as to what these performances may have sounded like and how their audiences might have heard them, drawing on evidence from performance editions, concert reviews, and two recordings (with piano accompaniment) dating from the 1920s that preserve an older performance style predating the modernizing influence of Casals. I focus on three case studies: (1) the first trio of editions (published 1824–1826), which reflect a conception of the Cello Suites as student études, (2) the two editions by Friedrich Grützmacher (1866-1867), one presenting a “faithful” text of the suites and the other a free transcription that substantially recomposes them into virtuoso display pieces to suite Grützmacher’s playing style, and (3) an influential version with piano accompaniment, published by Friedrich Wilhelm Stade (1864), which remained in use as late as the 1920s.
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