Bach Cello Suites I

Alisa Weilerstein, cello

Immersive Experiences

Monday, July 13, 2026 at 7pm Donovan Pavilion

One of the foremost cellists of our time, Alisa Weilerstein performs Bach’s Cello Suites, six solo works for cello that are among the most recognizable and beloved works in classical music. She performs Suites 1, 2, and 3 in this program.

Parking is free for this event at the Donovan Pavilion, as a special permitted event. Disregard the pay to parking signage for this evening.

Alisa Weilerstein, cello

BACH
Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007
Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008
Suite No. 3 in C major, BWV 1009

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Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1007-1012 (1717-23?) J O H A N N S E BAST I A N BAC H ( 1 6 8 5-175 0)

We know little about
the origins of Johann
Sebastian Bach’s six
Suites for Unaccompanied
Cello, which occupy a hallowed spot
at the summit of the cello’s literature.
Because the composer’s autograph
score apparently has not survived,
the early sources for these works are
limited to four copies in other hands.
The first of these seems to get closest
to the composer; it was written out
in Leipzig by his second wife, Anna
Magdalena, sometime in the span of
about 1727-31, probably at the request
of a former pupil of Bach’s who had
moved from Leipzig to Wolfenbüttel.
Another is by Johann Peter Kellner, an
organist-composer who was certainly
a friend and possibly a pupil of Bach’s
who copied out various of the master’s
works. Comparison of the four early
sources yields many textural variants,
even to the point of suggesting that
Bach went on developing some of these
pieces after completing them in their
provisional state.

Musicological speculation both
reputable and disreputable swirls
around the suites. Among the former
is that Bach may have written the first
three as a group, adding the others
later—an idea that would account for
the fact that the first three are relatively
idiomatic to the instrument while
the Fourth requires unusually knotty
left-hand work, the Fifth calls for a
“mistuning” (scordatura) of the top string
to make certain chords possible, and
the Sixth isn’t even written for standard
cello, but rather for a five-stringed
instrument.

In this sense, the Sixth Suite is an
outlier. Bach’s early biographer Johann
Nikolaus Forkel wrote in 1782 that Bach
had alighted on the idea of a five
stringed instrument to solve a problem
of range and balance that existed
when a violin soloist was accompanied
on the bass line by a cello, which,
Forkel argued unpersuasively, “left
too much room between to make the
accompaniment advantageous for
the violinist, or sufficiently harmonious
for the connoisseur of harmony.” To
address this problem, Forkel said,
Bach “invented an instrument that he
called viola pomposa. It is tuned like
a violoncello but has one string more
at the top, is somewhat larger than a
viola, and is so attached with a ribbon
that it can be held on the arm in front of
the chest.” Musicologists have debated
whether or not this was the same
instrument that is elsewhere referred to
as the violoncello piccolo. Neither term
is mentioned on the period manuscripts
of his Sixth Suite, which merely state
“À cinq cordes” (“with five strings”), to
which Anna Magdalena Bach’s copy
adds the tuning of each string from low
to high: C–G–D–A–E. One occasionally
encounters performances of this piece
on five-stringed instruments within
the historical performance movement,
but most cellists negotiate it on a
normal four-stringed cello, rising to the
challenge of accommodating the higher
reaches by using upper positions on
their A string.

Although the surviving sources
date from Bach’s time in Leipzig,
where he moved in 1723, the general
consensus is that at least portions
were composed earlier, perhaps (at
least in part) when he was working at
the Court of Weimar (1708-17) or, more
likely, when he was Kapellmeister to the
music-loving Prince Leopold of Anhalt Cöthen (1717-23).
Bach produced many
of his important instrumental pieces
in Cöthen, among them (again, this is
speculative) his group of six Sonatas
and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin,
which stand as a sort of sister set to
the Unaccompanied Cello Suites.
Assigning the Cello Suites to that period
invites the possibility that they were
composed for either of two cellists who
were among Bach’s colleagues there,
Christian Ferdinand Abel or Christian
Bernard Lienicke (a.k.a. Lünecke).

Each of the Suites follows a similar
plan: a freely composed Prelude
followed by a solid Allemande,
a sprightly Courante, a pensive
Sarabande, a paired set of another
dance movement (either Minuets,
Bourrées, or Gavottes, in every case
with the first dance of the pair repeated
after the second to yield an A-B-A
structure), and finally a high-spirited
Gigue. Although the cello is principally
encountered as a “melody instrument,”
the Suites abound in polyphonic writing,
sometimes through multi-stopping. The
same could be said of the Sonatas and
Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, but
due to its larger size and the physical
peculiarities of its construction, the cello
enjoys less native facility than the violin
does when it comes to negotiating
multiple stops and sustaining tones on
several strings at once. The Cello Suites
accordingly depend to an exceptional
degree on the art of illusion, with the
cellist relying on subtleties of rhythm,
dynamics, and inflection to clarify the
independent lines that are suggested
through the voicing of Bach’s highly
deconstructed music.