Charles Rosen plays Bach 2 Ricercars from The Musical Offering BWV 1079

Charles Rosen, piano
LP, Odyssey, 1969

00:00 Ricercar a 6
07:46 Ricercar a 3

Best Piano Composition; Six Parts Genius
By Charles Rosen
Published: April 18, 1999 in The New York Times Magazine

The keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach cannot be called piano music, but there is one magnificent exception. Many musicians consider the six-voice ricercare from ''The Musical Offering'' to be his greatest fugue, and I would choose this as the most significant piano work of the millennium, as it is perhaps the first piece composed for the recently invented piano -- at least, the first piece that a composer knew would certainly be played on a piano.

It was on May 7, 1747, that Bach visited Frederick the Great at Potsdam. The Prussian king preferred the pianoforte -- then called ''forte and piano'' -- to the less nuanced harpsichord or the organ; so much so that he had 15 of the instruments built for him. During this visit the king led Bach from room to room to try them out. (Bach had encountered pianos before the royal visit; he had complained that their action was too heavy, their treble too weak.) Frederick played for Bach a theme of his own and then asked Bach to improvise a fugue on it. After Bach obliged with a three-voice fugue, the king demanded a more spectacular six-voice fugue. Bach improvised a six-voice fugue on a theme of his own, but on his return to Leipzig wrote out a six-voice fugue on the royal theme. He had it printed with a number of other works all based on the same theme, and sent it to Frederick as ''a musical offering.''

Along with that other great keyboard work of Bach's last years, ''The Art of Fugue,'' the six-voice ricercare is among the greatest achievements of Western European civilization, and like ''The Art of Fugue'' and ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'' (or Keyboard), it was intended for performance on any of the keyboard instruments that one could find at home -- harpsichord, clavichord, small portable organ or early piano. It goes well on all of them. But if Frederick the Great finally listened to it, he would have heard it on one of his Silbermann pianofortes.

The theme is noble, and Bach's development has a richness and a depth of expression that he never surpassed. Like ''The Art of Fugue,'' the ricercare has been arranged for other instruments, but it is essentially a work that has to be played on a keyboard. It can be appreciated above all by the performer: listening is only a poor second for the musical experience of immersing oneself actively in the polyphony, which here has an emotional and physically expressive impact rarely found in a work of music. It is a piece for meditation. The large-scale form is easy to grasp, and the texture is full and complex, moving from one to six voices and back with wonderful contrast. The composition does not emphasize contrapuntal virtuosity, but rather richness of harmony. The imaginative invention is dazzling. The 20th century rediscovered ''The Musical Offering,'' but pianists have yet to claim this greatest of fugues as their own.

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