page_title: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Young Johann Sebastian Bach. Teri Noel Towe seems to demonstrate that the portrait is not of Bach [1] (archive URL).
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 (1708–1717) Bach was involved in the concerto genre, mainly through copying and transcribing. The earliest extant sources of Bach's own concerto compositions date from his Köthen period (1717–1723), where the 1721 autograph of the six Brandenburg Concertos takes a central place. Nonetheless around half a dozen of Bach's extant concertos, including some of the Brandenburg Concertos and lost models of his later harpsichord concertos, seem to have had their roots in his Weimar period. Most of what Bach may have left with his employer in Weimar perished in a fire destroying Schloss Weimar in the 1770s.
  In 1719 a new large two-manual harpsichord arrived in the residence of Bach's then-time employer at Köthen. BWV 1050a, an extant early version of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto, may have been conceived for this instrument, but that seems unlikely as that version of the concerto was probably intended for a limited single-manual keyboard instrument. This puts the origin of the concerto's earliest version at least before Bach's third year in Köthen. Further, the presence of a traverso as one of the instruments needed for the performance of the concerto seems to indicate that it was not written for the group of performers Bach had at his disposal at Weimar or during his early years in Köthen: the traverso was a relatively new instrument at the time with probably no performers in either orchestra.
  By the time when Bach added the concerto to the set of Brandenburg Concertos in 1721 he had reworked it for a two-manual harpsichord, expanding the accompaniment with an additional cello part. Because of the limited input of the violin and flute solo parts, as compared to that of the harpsichord, the concerto can be seen as a harpsichord concerto, moreover, the first harpsichord concerto ever written. Nonetheless, the structure of the concerto and the soloist material of the harpsichordist are greatly indebted to violin concertos such as Vivaldi's Grosso mogul (which Bach had transcribed for organ, BWV 594) and Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar's G major concerto, which Bach had transcribed twice (for organ, BWV 592, and for harpsichord, BWV 592a).
caption: Putative portrait of a young Bach
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