CD // C. P. E. Bach’s Sonaten mit Veränderten Reprisen, Wq 50

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Sonatas with Varied Reprises (published in Berlin, 1760) constituted a bold experiment. Spelling out every repeat, Bach applies to each the art of variation. Starting off as a service (“play this and you’ll sound as if you’re improvising”), the opus ends up a masterclass in variation. Tom Beghin, playing his own beloved clavichord, enacts the role of the keyboardist-composer who repeats himself, while never saying the same thing twice.

Bonus track: third movement from Sonata V in B-flat Major, Tempo di minuetto, reconstructed by Tom Beghin with varied reprises.

Watch a complete video performance:

“Things please that are repeated twice.” The aphorism is ascribed to Horace and suggests that repetition serves a useful role in increasing pleasure. But when you check in his Ars poetica (lines 361–65), you find a more specific context. Comparing poetry to painting—ut pictura poesis—he states, “This [painting] pleased just once; that [painting], though ten times repeated, will always please” (haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit). If we flip Horace’s critical perspective and apply it to musical performance, we might ask a more interesting question: does repetition intrinsically make a musical work better?

Within most musical forms, repetition has remained unquestioned for a long time. Any sonata—the quintessential form that has dominated instrumental music from the second half of the eighteenth century onward—is structured around internal repeats. The expectation is that, on the one hand, you will have an “exposition” that is repeated, and that, on the other, the “development” and “recapitulation,” together forming the second half, will also be repeated. The convention of repeat signs in scores—double bars with dots on either side—seals in this expectation: whether in terms of formal symmetry or sustained pleasure, repetition was a given and went unchallenged.