page_title: Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014–1019
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014–1019 / Reception and legacy / France
caption_attribution_description: Depicted person&#58; &#32;Pierre Baillot
context_page_description: The six sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord BWV 1014–1019 by Johann Sebastian Bach are works in trio sonata form, with the two upper parts in the harpsichord and violin over a bass line supplied by the harpsichord and an optional viola da gamba. Unlike baroque sonatas for solo instrument and continuo, where the realisation of the figured bass was left to the discretion of the performer, the keyboard part in the sonatas was almost entirely specified by Bach. They were probably mostly composed during Bach's final years in Cöthen between 1720 and 1723, before he moved to Leipzig. The extant sources for the collection span the whole of Bach's period in Leipzig, during which time he continued to make changes to the score.
context_section_description: At the turn of the nineteenth century, the chamber music of Bach became known in Paris thanks to the intermediary Marie Bigot. Born in Colmar in 1786, she was a highly accomplished keyboard player. In 1804, she moved to Vienna, where her performances attracted the admiration of Haydn, Salieri and Beethoven; her husband served as librarian to Beethoven's patron Count Razumovsky. In Vienna she became familiar with the keyboard and chamber music of Bach through the musical circles of Baron van Swieten, who had died a year before her arrival. Obliged to return to France in 1809 because of the Napoleonic wars, during the period 1809–1813 she proceeded to mount concerts in Paris with the violinist Pierre Baillot and the cellist Jacques-Michel Hurel de Lamare. After 1813, as a result of political events, she restricted herself to teaching, taking Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny as pupils in 1816–1817.
  Bach's sonatas for violin and keyboard featured in the repertoire of the Paris concerts and prompted the musicologist François-Joseph Fétis to comment that, "Anybody who has not heard Bach's beautiful compositions played by Mme Bigot, Lamare and Baillot will not know how far the perfection of instrumental music can go." Later around 1820 Fétis himself attempted unsuccessfully to advance the musique d'autre-fois of Bach: his invitation for subscriptions to a proposed publication of organ works by Bach elicited only three responses.
  Another musicologist who had attended many of the recitals of Bigot was the musicologist Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny. Of their performance of BWV 1014 in 1810 he wrote:
  This piece could be cold, monotonous and old-fashioned if poorly played; but felt and played as Mme Bigot and M Baillot can feel it and play it, it leaves nothing to be desired; its only aspects from the past are some cadences that are not so easy to notice and are part of its period charm; but above all under the bow of Baillot these are brought to life in a delicious way and with a feeling imbued with devotion.
  The writings of Momigny can be considered as marking the reawakening of an interest in Bach in France. Already in 1803, barely a year after the publication of Forkel's biography of Bach, he had started his study of polyphony with the fugues and sonatas of Bach. One of Momigny's main contributions was an article in the music section of the Encyclopédie méthodique ou par ordre de matière (1818) analysing the sonatas BWV 1014 and BWV 1015/1. The article discusses the development of the sonata in the eighteenth century, divided into halves, with the sonatas of Bach, in Nägeli's edition, taken as representatives for 1700–1750 and the piano sonatas of Haydn for 1750–1800. Although Momigny enthusiastically wrote of Bach, c'est dans les trente ou quarante premières années du siècle dernier, qu'il offrit au public les fruits pleins de maturité de son génie transcendant,—"it was in the first thirty or forty years of the last century that he gave the public the fully matured fruits of his transcendent genius"—the general revival of interest in the music of Bach, particularly his choral works, was slower in France than in Germany. While referring to the timelessness and influence of Bach's music, Momigny lamented that the sonatas were so rarely performed; he wrote that the time was not ripe because of changes in musical taste, but also observed that "there are very few people capable of playing them and understanding them".
  At the beginning of the twentieth century there was an increased interest in classical chamber music in France. The onset of the First World War and resulting issues of nationalism prompted French music publishers to bring out their own editions of classic German works to replace German editions. Claude Debussy was the editor for Durand's version of BWV 1014–1019.
caption: Pierre Baillot, violinist
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