A lecture-recital is a near impossible feat. Many authors have written in the abstract about the tangled relationship between verbal and musical communication. For performers, this impossibility is not abstraction, but practice: lecture-recitals are a mainstay of performance within the academy. Outside the academy, too, musicians spice up their programmes with spoken remarks. How can a practice so common be so difficult? The difficulty of the lecture-recital is that, except in the most skilful hands, its two modes — the “informative” and the “performative” — do not always complement each other. The delivery of information from primary sources, for example, is sometimes at odds with preparing the audience for an engrossing listening experience. The performer runs the risk of giving an overly wordy recital, or a redundantly illustrated lecture. It takes a rare combination of intellect, virtuosity, and charm to make the lecture-recital format shine.

On the afternoon of November 8, 2014, the connection between scholarship and performance was surely of interest to the audience members of Dr. David Schulenberg’s lecture-recital, titled “C. P. E. Bach and the Changing Idiom of Keyboard Music”. The recital took place at the joint conference of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, held this year in Milwaukee. There was not an empty seat in the conference centre ballroom, which served as the recital venue. Schulenberg performed on two very different instruments: a Keith Hill double manual Flemish harpsichord and a Stein fortepiano copy. The fortepiano’s delicately shaded tone under Schulenberg’s fingers matched its gracefully curved profile. The harpsichord, in contrast, had a stentorian sound supported by a broad soundboard and eight pillar-like legs. The pieces Schulenberg chose to play on these instruments stood in equal contrast, even though they were all by a single composer. The programme began on the harpsichord with an early and rarely performed work by Emanuel Bach, his Sonata per il cembalo solo in G major, c. 1730. The second item, also on the harpsichord, was the Sonata in F-sharp minor W. 52/4 (c. 1744). Four later works followed on the fortepiano: the Sonata in E minor W. 52/6 (1758), the Sonata in C major W. 65/47 (1775), the Rondo in A minor W. 56/5 (1778), and the Sonata in A major W. 56/6 (1780). As Schulenberg explained, the effect of instrument choice on Bach’s keyboard writing is a complex and often subjective matter, not fully within the scope of the afternoon’s lecture. The audience was, regardless, delighted and appreciative to hear such a well-considered programme on two handsome instruments. Schulenberg delivered a brief lecture (paraphrased in part below), and then began his recital.

The G major sonata that opened the programme was written while Emanuel Bach was still under the tutelage of his father, J.S. Bach. It might be more apt to call this sonata a suite: its four movements are Allemande, Courante, Polonaise, and Menuet. On the whole this sonata remains within the idiom of the composer’s father. Schulenberg demonstrated the similarity between this sonata’s Menuet and the Menuet from J. S. Bach’s Partita for keyboard BWV 829, also in G major: both use the same sort of arpeggiating hand-alternation as their main material. Schulenberg did not prepare his listeners for the glint of Emanuel Bach’s personal voice audible in the G minor Polonaise movement, which steps far outside the style of his father’s suites. This polonaise begins with a bold statement of an opening theme in both hands, doubled in octaves, and after each statement the melody is largely doubled in thirds. A few soft chuckles rippled through the hall upon the first notes, as some audience members recognized the polonaise from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. Schulenberg made several technical missteps in his performance of the G major sonata, which one suspects is a fresh addition to his repertoire.

The F-sharp minor sonata of 1744 shows how much Bach’s style had changed in the couple of decades after Anna Magdalena’s notebook. Schulenberg noted the new dynamic flexibility and specificity of articulation in this sonata’s first and third movements, which call for rapid alternation between fast passagework and light, lilting melody. This sonata still owes much to Johann Sebastian, especially in the baroque rhetorical flourishes of its concerto-like second movement. Faced with more demanding technical material, the performer seemed to recover composure.

In the Sonata in E minor, Schulenberg used the fortepiano’s dynamic flexibility to great effect, especially in left-hand accompaniment patterns. Schulenberg noted the sonata’s “symphonic” style, likely influenced by the symphonic music surrounding Bach at the Berlin court at this time, but such a note barely begins to capture the range of the new sound-palette Schulenberg presented to his audience. After hearing earlier works on the harpsichord, the sense of “light and shade” accessible through small crescendi and decrescendi came as a revelation. The dynamic ebb and flow of the first movement’s “drum bass” patterns, for example, projected a sense of structure within a dimension inaccessible on the harpsichord. Schulenberg touched on the drum bass idea in his introductory lecture, but it was worth a thousand words to hear it “in action”. This performance was not without some inaccuracies, but the performer maintained a sense of bravura, especially in the first movement’s rapid thirty-second note passages.

Schulenberg’s technical ability was best displayed in the final three pieces on the programme, all from late in Bach’s career. The Sonata in C major of 1775 is, according to Schulenberg, “C. P. E. Bach’s craziest sonata”. This is almost an understatement: the sonata’s first movement is dizzyingly discursive, barely held together by a repeated rhythmic motive. Its shifting textures have much in common with the alternating effects of the earlier E minor sonata, but with an added element of unpredictability, characterizing what the composer called his “comic” style. Emanuel Bach’s humour is hard to characterise: it comes from the incongruity of placing two incompatible but seemingly genuine emotions side by side which introduces a note of sarcasm unlike Haydn’s good-natured humour. (One sees this note echoed in some of Beethoven’s more playful works, like the finale to his Sonata in C minor Op. 10 No. 1.) The final two items on the programme, the Rondo in A minor and Sonata in A major, were played attacca to great theatrical effect. Schulenberg confidently navigated through two of the programme’s most challenging pieces with a flair that must come from a long and loving relationship with the music. The resources of the fortepiano — especially tapered dynamics and the knee lever — reinforced the feeling of emotional indulgence in these pieces, so unlike the music at the start of the recital. In both the Rondo in A minor and the Sonata in A major, Bach’s transitional material became an event in itself rather than a functional path from one key area to another. Bach’s A minor Rondo included a lavish progression along the circle of fifths played forte, reminiscent of a passage from Mozart’s K. 332, and Bach’s A major Sonata included a seemingly-endless modulatory passage just before its coda. It is easy to see how and why this music had such an influence on Mozart and Beethoven.

This music is brilliant and occupies an important but overlooked place in history — a place worth the attention it receives on Emanuel Bach’s tercentenary. It takes great sensitivity to deliver a lecture about these gems in a way that enhances their performance. (It is still more difficult for the lecturer if he is the one performing!) To tell an audience about differences in articulation and dynamics can, paradoxically, make it harder for them to feel these differences for themselves, with all the expressive power the differences contain. One wants to let these pieces, with their strange but potent personalities, speak for themselves. Schulenberg’s performance may not have been a victory for the lecture-recital format, but it was a minor triumph: a meeting of brilliant pieces, a competent performer, and an appreciative audience.