Six Sonatas with Varied Reprises

In his Six Sonatas with Varied Reprises, Wq 50, C. P. E. Bach wrote out each repeat of the reprises in full, introducing subtle or surprising variations each time. An experiment in eighteenth-century music writing, these sonatas deviate from the norm in that they do not allow the performer to improvise, but on the contrary make embellished repetition an important part of the composition itself. Beghin analyses how C. P. E. Bach’s unique opus ended up reinforcing the composer's role, exposing but ultimately transforming the tension between musical freedom and the act of reading a printed text. Furthermore, Bach added extra embellishments into his personal printed copies, further demonstrating his constant drive for change and variation, even after publication.

Tom Beghin brings these works to life on his beloved clavichord, with which he has built a long and personal relationship. Some embellishments or ornaments are particularly well-suited to the instrument, such as the prallende Doppelschläge (or “trilled turns”) in the third movement of Sonata No. 3, which can only be performed properly on a good clavichord. Tom’s instrument was built by Belgian instrument maker Joris Potvlieghe in 2003, based on a Saxon design from around 1760. Using the type of keyboard championed by Bach, Beghin demonstrates how Bach deliberately blurred the boundary between composition and improvisation. The recording becomes a fusion of listening and thinking, in which the music constantly reinvents itself in its own, idiomatic ways.

The performance was guided by two objectives. 

On the one hand, there’s the interaction with the clavichord—or how the instrument reacts to what I do. More than the bouncing hammers in a piano, the tangents in this clavichord are visually present for me, just as much as I can see how the strings are massaged by the touch of my fingers. This is partly thanks to a custom of leaving my score against the opened lid in the back, rather than making use of a separate stand in the front.

On the other hand, there’s CPE Bach’s score. The aspect of reading carries more meaning still in this particular print because of Bach’s written-out variations. At first, reading these variations comes almost to the expense of my participating persona (it takes a few reprises to realize where Bach’s variations start), but then, as with every new movement or sonata I feel more and more in control again, my “reading” evolves back to a more generic “performing,” eventually merging with Bach’s free-fantasizing mindset.

Our cinematography addressed an important corollary of Bach’s new print. Normally, in the lay-out of a classical keyboard sonata, the first page turn is synchronized with the end of the first reprise. The end of the page—or more accurately, the right-hand page of a first bifolio—means “going back to the top.” Similarly, the act of turning the page signals that we’re about to embark on something new, namely the second reprise—that is, the second half of a sonata form, which itself will need to be repeated, meaning that pages will need to be turned back, as yet another expectation that we rely on, performer and listener alike.

However, in the absence of repeat signs, Bach’s score no longer allows for such rhetorical meanings of a page turn. On the contrary, page turns become a hindrance. They give away, in fact, that you’re not improvising your variations. Instead of regularly retracing one’s steps—as one visibly engages with a print—a performance becomes linear and one-directional, always “forward.” Gone is a clear distinction (for the listener to see but also for the performer to experience) between a composer’s score and a performer’s departing from it, as they normally apply their own variations to the repeat.

Asking how our film might compensate for the absence of such page-turn rhetoric, we used the camera as the equivalent of a bifolio. Four static camera positions coincide with four reprises in one movement, and we’ve applied this basic model, with ever more variation and complexity, throughout the opus.

Bach excludes slow second movements from his exercise of varying reprises: they’re short, transitional, and in non-sonata form. To those we consistently apply a multi-cam approach: within the rigidity of surrounding binary reprise structures (the Allegros), these Adagios constitute moments of relaxation.

More details may be found in my essay, forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Music.

Co-production with Evil Penguin TV.

𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵: Tom Beghin & Anastasios Zafeiropoulos
𝘊𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘢: Bo Aerts, Xin Van Damme, 
𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: Anastasios Zafeiropoulos
𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦: Ivana Jelaca 
𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨: Bo Aerts, Xin Van Damme

𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘳: Steven Maes, George Georgiev, Lowie Peeters
𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 & 𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘚𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯: Luca Montebugnoli
𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨: Tom Beghin 
𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨: Steven Maes