Prelude on a Partimento: Invention in the Compositional Pedagogy of the German States in the Time of J. S. Bach

Most youthful composers let their fingers run riot up and down the keyboard, snatching handfuls of notes, assaulting the instrument in wild frenzy, in hope that something may result from it. Such people are merely Finger Composers--in his riper years Bach used to call them Harpsichord Knights--that is to say, their fingers tell them what to write instead of being instructed by the brain what to play. Bach abandoned that method of composition when he observed that brilliant flourishes lead nowhere. He realised that musical ideas need to be subordinated to a plan and that the young composer's first need is a model to instruct his efforts.--Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Johann Sebastian Bach (1802, 70-71)1. Introduction: The Langloz manuscript in a New Light[1.1] The state of Thuringia where Johann Sebastian Bach spent the first part of his life yielded the most renowned corpus of eighteenth-century partimenti of Germanophone provenance: a collection of preludes and fugues commonly known as the Langloz manuscript. Named after its scribe, August Wilhelm Langloz (1745-1811), a Thuringian who spent most of his life in Erfurt as a schoolteacher associated with St. Michael's Church, the manuscript bears several intriguing connections to Bach and his musical circle. Langloz was likely a student of fellow Thuringian Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809), also an Erfurt native who studied with Bach in Leipzig from 1748 until his teacher's death in 1750 (Schulze 1980, 52). When Kittel later returned to Erfurt, following five years of employment as organist at St. Boniface Church in Langensalza from 1751-56, he had in his possession numerous manuscripts from Bach's Nachlass. The Langloz manuscript, Mus. ms. Bach P 296, which is now housed in the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, is a copy of an earlier document that was presumably among the items from Bach's Nachlass in Kittel's possession. This copy is dated 1763, when Langloz would have been a student of Kittel and a member of what Hans-Joachim Schulze (1980, 52) has identified as the "Kittel circle"--a large group of students to whom Kittel exposed much of Bach's keyboard music. Langloz's copy even bears an explicit attribution to Bach on its title page, "39. Praeludia et Fugen | Del Signor | Johann Sebastian | Bach," which led Wolfgang Schmieder (1990) to list P 296 as the twenty-second item in the preface to his catalogue of Bach's works, while noting a few thematic connections to The Art of Fugue and The Well-Tempered Clavier.(1) Beyond the unique circumstances of its transmission, the contents of the manuscript intersect a keyboard genre intimately affiliated with the late master by mid-century--the prelude and fugue. P 296 contains two sets of compositions: one consists entirely of 38 fugues; the other comprises 22 works including three preludes and four independent fugues, and 15 prelude and fugue pairs, as in The Well-Tempered Clavier.(2)[1.2] Most of the actual contents of the Langloz manuscript, however, were spuriously attributed to Bach's pen. Having surveyed the available facts and evidence, William Renwick suggests the manuscript is "possibly a hybrid of compilation and composition by Bach," in which case any Bach composition would be from 1707-1717 or earlier (Renwick 2001, 27). But one of the fugues (No. 22) was identified as a likely composition of Friedrich Erhardt Niedt, author of the reputable Musical Guide (1700-1721), because the same fugue appears at the end of its Part I.(3) This too points to a Bach connection, as Niedt studied with Bach's eldest cousin, Johann Nicolaus Bach, at the University of Jena. From this and from the apparent stylistic similarities between the contents of the manuscript and the music of J. C. F. Fischer, Georg Philipp Telemann, and especially Johann Kuhnau and Johann Pachelbel, Renwick ultimately concludes: "Until further evidence comes to light, we can only hypothesize that the origins of the work are Thuringian, in the period 1700-20, that the contents may stem directly or indirectly from J. …