page_title: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5
section_title: Italian and French characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 / History / Italian and French characteristics
caption_attribution_description: Traverso (baroque flute) by Boaz Berney, after an original by Thomas Lot, Paris ca. 1740
context_page_description: Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his fifth Brandenburg Concerto, BWV 1050.2, for harpsichord, flute and violin as soloists, and an orchestral accompaniment consisting of strings and continuo. An early version of the concerto, BWV 1050.1, originated in the late 1710s. On 24 March 1721 Bach dedicated the final form of the concerto to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg.
context_section_description: In his Weimar period Bach became involved with the concerto genre. The concertos he copied and transcribed were either by Italian composers, most of them by Vivaldi but also concertos by other Venetian composers such as Albinoni and Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello, or by German composers adopting the style of the Italian concerto, such as Telemann and Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. Most of these concertos were in three movements (in a fast–slow–fast sequence). The violin concerto was the dominant subgenre. A specific idiom for violin solo passages in such concertos, for instance a technique called bariolage, had developed. The solo passages were often in a faster tempo (shorter note values) than the accompaniment.
  The tutti passages of these concertos, that is where the whole orchestra joins in, were characterised by a ritornello theme which was often quite independent of the thematic material developed by the soloist(s). A typical concerto movement in this Italian style of solo concerto (as opposed to concerto formats not centred around one or more soloists such as the ripieno concerto) opened with a ritornello, followed by a solo passage called episode, after which a tutti brings back (a variant of) the ritornello, followed by further alternating solo and tutti passages, the movement being concluded by the ritornello. The characteristics of the ritornellos used by Bach in his concertos play an important role in the dating of his compositions: as so few of Bach's concertos survive in manuscripts from the time of composition scholars devised chronologies of his concerto output based on the development of the ritornello format throughout his career. A point of comparison for such chronologies are for instance cantata movements in concerto form, for many of which the time of origin can be established more accurately.
  The Italian violin concerto influence is strongest in the concerto's first movement. The concerto's second movement, exceptional for a slow movement in Bach's concerto output, is a pure concerto form, consisting of a regularly returning ritornello and evenly distributed episodes, without the experimentation of the concerto's outer movements. The last movement, with a da capo structure, has no clear ritornello: this is the only extant da capo concerto movement by Bach that has no ritornello structure. In this movement the concertato violin no longer doubles the ripieno violin in tutti passages according to the Italian practice, instead the ripieno violin is mostly doubled by the flute in the tuttis: it is a French practice (with the traverso at that time also being a French novelty) to have a woodwind instrument double the highest string part. This practice is for instance also found in Bach's rather French than Italian orchestral suites, e.g. in BWV 1067, but only in this movement in his concertos.
  The typical Italian violino principale (violin soloist) being combined with a typical French traversière (transverse flute) in the concertino also seems to indicate Bach's aim to unite different backgrounds in the concerto, but without making it so crude that these instruments would perform in their respective national styles. Another French element in the concerto's closing movement is the gigue theme which opens it, close to a theme used by Dieupart, and which Bach develops in a French fashion comparable to a similar passage in one of his orchestral suites, in this case the first movement of BWV 1069. The many instances of five-part writing in the concerto's final movement may be seen as another approach with a typical French connotation in the early 18th century.
caption: Traverso
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